If you're looking for a deeper explanation that goes beyond the "they're all pussies now" kind, read Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. (Or read the D. C. Somervell abridgement...it's a lot shorter.) Toynbee was amazingly prescient, and if you adjust for a few factors, his cyclical view of history is rolling along as predicted for the U.S. and the West in general.
Where his view needs some adjustment is in two areas: Today, the largest nations can project their militaries anywhere on the globe at the push of a button. This alters how cultures behave at their boundaries. Now that our world is fully divvied up, borders don't shift like the tides. Secondly, with the internet and global media, ideas spread at light speed around the planet. So good ideas and bad alike spread very quickly. But America and the West are a visionless bunch to whom the rest of the world no longer looks for leadership. And we're clearly in decline.
Sounds like you're saying that as our medical futures become more transparent, each of us is going to have to bear the burden individually for our own health. That sounds a lot like the rugged individualism and personal responsibility angle that everyone here has been bashing...
After all, the demand for health care is potentially infinite, whereas the amount of wealth we have is finite.
Really? You'd think that if you read Pinker's book on the decline of violence, but not if you re-examine his statistics. By examining only the worst events in a particular period, he provides a skewed view of the risk of death by violence. Much better to consider the probability of dying by all violent causes in a particular year/century. Given that some major atrocities in centuries past were exaggerated, it's likely that the 20th century is at least the second and possibly the most violent in the last 2K years. (And killing only gets more efficient with time and technology...)
You've missed it. Things get re-invented every generation because doing so is where the fun is. Simply tying together primitives written by somebody else sucks all the fun out of the whole process. No matter that they'd be done 10x as soon. Programming is supposed to be fun, and nothing, not even common sense, is going to remove that fun.
I've known so many programmers that had working components at their fingertips that could do everything they needed, but wanted to do it themselves so the code would be *theirs*, and not somebody else's.
Slavery works. Human experimentation works. Spying on every citizen in the country works.
This. If your only guide is simple expediency, then we are all in a heap of trouble because you can justify absolutely anything with enough selfishness. There's a very thin layer of civility separating us from the rest of the animals. It took us a long time to develop it. Some of us think it's a good thing that we've risen above the rest of animals. Let's not intentionally scrape that layer off.
Or to approach this from a less abstract angle: psychological studies show no correlation between how assertive someone is and how correct they are about what they think. Being able to win a verbal argument says nothing about one's technical abilities. No correlation at all. So for all of you out there with a strong resemblance to the north end of a southbound horse, you got nothing on the rest of us but your ability to be abusive.
Oh not again. When will we let that language die??!!??
I programmed in it for 6 years right out of college because the employer was desperate for anyone who didn't value their career too highly. I was only saved from it because I had C experience in school. It might have been a good scripting language if only people thought in RPN, but alas, we don't. One of the worst languages I've ever used, right down there with T-SQL and 4-D.
It's not an accident that "computer science" looks forward. It's because people like to program, and a significant part of the enjoyment of programming is doing everything from scratch. I've met people who will turn their noses up at existing code in favor of writing everything from scratch, because "that's where the fun is".
So yes, we too hate studying the history of old applications because then we'd be forced to admit that it has been done before, and probably better than we could have done it. And then where would the fun be?
NIH ("not invented here") is a huge part of why software engineering is still stuck in the cottage industry stage...
Kuhn's focus is pretty outdated now. Until someone comes along and really exposes the effects of grants and funding, industry versus gov't research, publish-or-perish, groupthink, tenure, hard versus soft sciences, science foundations, career/income pressures on scientists, and so on, they won't fully understand science in postmodern times.
Just read/. comments from scientists over the years. They confirm the huge effect these things have on the progress of science.
Been around long enough to know that the "best" code is what your superiors expect you to produce at that particular moment. It may need to be one or more of the following: {fast (in running speed), quick to produce, high quality in terms of having few bugs, easy to understand, easy to extend, compliant with a particular standard or standards (coding, security, etc.)}, and probably a dozen more such factors. You cannot optimize very many of these at the same time.
What really stinks is that if your boss or co-workers are out to get you, software is so subjective that they can always fault you for one of the above factors that you didn't optimize for.
Oh, and you'll never get people to understand the above, to be able to use it in your own defense...
Studies (don't have time to look up the Scientific American article at the moment; it was entitled "Violent Pride") show that bullies are most often narcissists. In other words, they bully because their self-esteem is actually pathologically high. They believe themselves to be above the rules, and so can abuse whoever they choose. It's not an inferiority complex that they suffer from.
The traditional story of bullies being low self-esteem sufferers is a myth, and needs to be dispelled as quickly as possible, because it results in all the wrong sorts of solutions.
This is different from the magnetic stimulation, and supposedly more effective. It involves putting direct current (up to 2 mA) across the scalp. No holes required! Research is on-going, and you can google for research and surveys of research that has been done.
In fact, I'm just starting to experiment with it myself, as it appears quite safe, as long as you monitor the current level closely. (I have it set up so that if anything goes awry, the current is immediately disconnected.)
Supposedly it is able to affect depression, insomnia, and boost learning. I'd be happy if it helped any of the three...
...and if it's been stripped like the one I saw, don't bother going. It isn't worth walking up the ramp to see it. Just an empty shell. They didn't even leave more than a few wires dangling around. And you couldn't walk into any of the crew areas. Nothing.
Hard liquor consumption shot up during prohibition
Not so fast there. I've heard that thrown out before without any justification. Please tell me how consumption of an illegal beverage was accurately measured _during_ Prohibition? I don't think any government statisticians were walking into speakeasies and measuring things. (Gallons seized/destroyed would not be a reliable proxy, I wouldn't think.)
(And I'm sure the government had no incentive to fudge the numbers after it ended Prohibition, in order to justify its decision. Nah, they wouldn't do a thing like that! Nor would any academic researchers have bias here...)
Because they live in a colder environment, their brains contain a higher percentage of glial cells, to generate warmth. We have fewer, as a percentage, but more of the neurons that actually process information. So bald comparisons of their brain size with ours are meaningless.
Seems like there would be a _minimum_ shaking velocity of the fur itself, just to dislodge the water. Anything faster than that would also work, but expend more energy.
You also have to take into account the fact that with each oscillation, the dog's trunk reaches some maximum stretch limit, at which time muscles in the reverse direction kick in and make them go the other way. But the maximum velocity would be reached somewhere near the middle of an oscillation.
Wouldn't you model this more like a spring or pendulum, where maximum velocity occurs near the middle of the cycle?
That's why important passwords should never be directly memorized. Always put some cognitive distance
+ time distance + physical distance between you and the password. (Except when you're actually entering it of course.)
You can do this by making a puzzle of some sort using memories that only you would possess (childhood, etc.) Solving the puzzle might take the form of arranging the memories in chronological (if they're events) or physical order (if they're places or objects). Once correctly arranged, the password is then extracted from that, as a hash of some sort (in order to guarantee enough entropy). (Of course there would have to be enough entropy available in the original puzzle so that a computer could not try every possible ordering.) Salt to taste.
This involves creating a puzzle, and that would be time-consuming, but software could help there. But once created, it's not something you could reconstruct in a few seconds, nor solely from memory. You would have to have the written puzzle clues in front of you, plus some time to concentrate. This doesn't mean you couldn't be compelled to reveal it, but it would raise the cost to an adversary in getting you to reveal it.
Because we're human, that's why. Any country/society, no matter how "good" it is at the moment--is only a generation or so away from being capable of this sort of behavior.
It's all about the quality of your people and the financial state of the organization maintaining it. I have seen small applications (~30KSLOC) that a team of people with 10+ years of experience each could not keep running beyond 7-8 years. It collapsed under its own weight. Nobody had the skills/wisdom to refactor the code periodically, nor did the organization have the money to be able to afford it. (In fact, their poor financial state meant that they never hired the best developers. They had to take what they could afford.)
I have also worked at a different company that kept a system (3 million SLOC) going for over a decade with only periodic refactorings of portions of the system. They had good the financial status to be able to afford it, plus the skill levels to know when/how to do it. (And their good financial state meant they could --and did, hire better developers.)
The quality of one's engineers and the prosperity (or lack thereof) of the organization determines how long you can hold off "software entropy" and keep software evolving forwards.
Bollocks. When a tax, by definition, only affects the top 2%, it ONLY AFFECTS THE TOP 2%!
Are you saying that when a tax by definition only has to be paid by the top 2% of wage earners (let's say), that it has no other effect on the economy as a whole? Econ 101 factoid: when the structure of taxation changes, people's investing and purchasing behavior changes. Plus, the rich have the greatest flexibility in switching their investments and altering their purchasing behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're looking for a deeper explanation that goes beyond the "they're all pussies now" kind, read Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. (Or read the D. C. Somervell abridgement...it's a lot shorter.) Toynbee was amazingly prescient, and if you adjust for a few factors, his cyclical view of history is rolling along as predicted for the U.S. and the West in general.
Where his view needs some adjustment is in two areas: Today, the largest nations can project their militaries anywhere on the globe at the push of a button. This alters how cultures behave at their boundaries. Now that our world is fully divvied up, borders don't shift like the tides. Secondly, with the internet and global media, ideas spread at light speed around the planet. So good ideas and bad alike spread very quickly. But America and the West are a visionless bunch to whom the rest of the world no longer looks for leadership. And we're clearly in decline.
Sounds like you're saying that as our medical futures become more transparent, each of us is going to have to bear the burden individually for our own health. That sounds a lot like the rugged individualism and personal responsibility angle that everyone here has been bashing...
After all, the demand for health care is potentially infinite, whereas the amount of wealth we have is finite.
Really? You'd think that if you read Pinker's book on the decline of violence, but not if you re-examine his statistics. By examining only the worst events in a particular period, he provides a skewed view of the risk of death by violence. Much better to consider the probability of dying by all violent causes in a particular year/century. Given that some major atrocities in centuries past were exaggerated, it's likely that the 20th century is at least the second and possibly the most violent in the last 2K years. (And killing only gets more efficient with time and technology...)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/MC11slides/sp-Slide039a.JPEG
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html?ref=sunday
You've missed it. Things get re-invented every generation because doing so is where the fun is. Simply tying together primitives written by somebody else sucks all the fun out of the whole process. No matter that they'd be done 10x as soon. Programming is supposed to be fun, and nothing, not even common sense, is going to remove that fun.
I've known so many programmers that had working components at their fingertips that could do everything they needed, but wanted to do it themselves so the code would be *theirs*, and not somebody else's.
This. If your only guide is simple expediency, then we are all in a heap of trouble because you can justify absolutely anything with enough selfishness. There's a very thin layer of civility separating us from the rest of the animals. It took us a long time to develop it. Some of us think it's a good thing that we've risen above the rest of animals. Let's not intentionally scrape that layer off.
Or to approach this from a less abstract angle: psychological studies show no correlation between how assertive someone is and how correct they are about what they think. Being able to win a verbal argument says nothing about one's technical abilities. No correlation at all. So for all of you out there with a strong resemblance to the north end of a southbound horse, you got nothing on the rest of us but your ability to be abusive.
"It's not the known things that get you, or the known unknowns, it's the unknown unknowns." -- heavily paraphrased from Donald Rumsfeld
Just a little wisdom from a related field...although many days it feels like they're the same thing...
Oh not again. When will we let that language die??!!??
I programmed in it for 6 years right out of college because the employer was desperate for anyone who didn't value their career too highly. I was only saved from it because I had C experience in school. It might have been a good scripting language if only people thought in RPN, but alas, we don't. One of the worst languages I've ever used, right down there with T-SQL and 4-D.
It's not an accident that "computer science" looks forward. It's because people like to program, and a significant part of the enjoyment of programming is doing everything from scratch. I've met people who will turn their noses up at existing code in favor of writing everything from scratch, because "that's where the fun is".
So yes, we too hate studying the history of old applications because then we'd be forced to admit that it has been done before, and probably better than we could have done it. And then where would the fun be?
NIH ("not invented here") is a huge part of why software engineering is still stuck in the cottage industry stage...
And you expected something else from a state run by "progressives"? They never have enough of other people's money!
Kuhn's focus is pretty outdated now. Until someone comes along and really exposes the effects of grants and funding, industry versus gov't research, publish-or-perish, groupthink, tenure, hard versus soft sciences, science foundations, career/income pressures on scientists, and so on, they won't fully understand science in postmodern times.
Just read /. comments from scientists over the years. They confirm the huge effect these things have on the progress of science.
Been around long enough to know that the "best" code is what your superiors expect you to produce at that particular moment. It may need to be one or more of the following: {fast (in running speed), quick to produce, high quality in terms of having few bugs, easy to understand, easy to extend, compliant with a particular standard or standards (coding, security, etc.)}, and probably a dozen more such factors. You cannot optimize very many of these at the same time.
What really stinks is that if your boss or co-workers are out to get you, software is so subjective that they can always fault you for one of the above factors that you didn't optimize for.
Oh, and you'll never get people to understand the above, to be able to use it in your own defense...
Studies (don't have time to look up the Scientific American article at the moment; it was entitled "Violent Pride") show that bullies are most often narcissists. In other words, they bully because their self-esteem is actually pathologically high. They believe themselves to be above the rules, and so can abuse whoever they choose. It's not an inferiority complex that they suffer from.
The traditional story of bullies being low self-esteem sufferers is a myth, and needs to be dispelled as quickly as possible, because it results in all the wrong sorts of solutions.
I've always wanted to stroll down Main Street, Atlantis!
This is different from the magnetic stimulation, and supposedly more effective. It involves putting direct current (up to 2 mA) across the scalp. No holes required! Research is on-going, and you can google for research and surveys of research that has been done.
In fact, I'm just starting to experiment with it myself, as it appears quite safe, as long as you monitor the current level closely. (I have it set up so that if anything goes awry, the current is immediately disconnected.)
Supposedly it is able to affect depression, insomnia, and boost learning. I'd be happy if it helped any of the three...
...and if it's been stripped like the one I saw, don't bother going. It isn't worth walking up the ramp to see it. Just an empty shell. They didn't even leave more than a few wires dangling around. And you couldn't walk into any of the crew areas. Nothing.
"Won" in war means "the other guy has surrendered". That had not yet happened when the atom bombs were dropped.
Done.
Not so fast there. I've heard that thrown out before without any justification. Please tell me how consumption of an illegal beverage was accurately measured _during_ Prohibition? I don't think any government statisticians were walking into speakeasies and measuring things. (Gallons seized/destroyed would not be a reliable proxy, I wouldn't think.)
(And I'm sure the government had no incentive to fudge the numbers after it ended Prohibition, in order to justify its decision. Nah, they wouldn't do a thing like that! Nor would any academic researchers have bias here...)
Because they live in a colder environment, their brains contain a higher percentage of glial cells, to generate warmth. We have fewer, as a percentage, but more of the neurons that actually process information. So bald comparisons of their brain size with ours are meaningless.
I take around 23 placebos a day, and I feel great!!!!!!!!!
You also have to take into account the fact that with each oscillation, the dog's trunk reaches some maximum stretch limit, at which time muscles in the reverse direction kick in and make them go the other way. But the maximum velocity would be reached somewhere near the middle of an oscillation.
Wouldn't you model this more like a spring or pendulum, where maximum velocity occurs near the middle of the cycle?
Wait...I'm taking this way too seriously.
You can do this by making a puzzle of some sort using memories that only you would possess (childhood, etc.) Solving the puzzle might take the form of arranging the memories in chronological (if they're events) or physical order (if they're places or objects). Once correctly arranged, the password is then extracted from that, as a hash of some sort (in order to guarantee enough entropy). (Of course there would have to be enough entropy available in the original puzzle so that a computer could not try every possible ordering.) Salt to taste.
This involves creating a puzzle, and that would be time-consuming, but software could help there. But once created, it's not something you could reconstruct in a few seconds, nor solely from memory. You would have to have the written puzzle clues in front of you, plus some time to concentrate. This doesn't mean you couldn't be compelled to reveal it, but it would raise the cost to an adversary in getting you to reveal it.
Why are we repeating the same mistake in 2010?
Because we're human, that's why. Any country/society, no matter how "good" it is at the moment--is only a generation or so away from being capable of this sort of behavior.
I have also worked at a different company that kept a system (3 million SLOC) going for over a decade with only periodic refactorings of portions of the system. They had good the financial status to be able to afford it, plus the skill levels to know when/how to do it. (And their good financial state meant they could --and did, hire better developers.)
The quality of one's engineers and the prosperity (or lack thereof) of the organization determines how long you can hold off "software entropy" and keep software evolving forwards.
It's got that laser that can burn through steel and trigger detonators and stuff. Maps??? How boring.
Bollocks. When a tax, by definition, only affects the top 2%, it ONLY AFFECTS THE TOP 2%!
Are you saying that when a tax by definition only has to be paid by the top 2% of wage earners (let's say), that it has no other effect on the economy as a whole? Econ 101 factoid: when the structure of taxation changes, people's investing and purchasing behavior changes. Plus, the rich have the greatest flexibility in switching their investments and altering their purchasing behavior.