Well, he is schizophrenic and unfortunately all the new supercomputer does is eat, mate and scratch, which is more or less what its creators do on the weekends, but still, you have to start somewhere.
Teach them *anything* but a "concept" language. They don't need it. Teach real code in a language that's in daily use, and they'll learn the rest. Knowledge is a hard won asset and time and cognitive effort are limited. Giving kids (or adults) a knowledge asset whose particulars they will have to throw away and relearn is a waste of everyone's time (I'm lookin' at YOU, Microsoft).
We're not going to replace all our generating capacity with wind. Or solar. Or wave. Or hydro. Or biofuels. None of them are even close to the scale of hydrocarbon energy as we use it now, nor will they ever be.
If we manage to build about 2500 nuclear plants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil ) over the next 50 years, and get batteries worth a shit, we might be able to replace hydrocarbon energy in a useful way, particularly if new nuke plants run on relatively safe, common, thorium, however, at the moment, we're still depleting industrial-scale energy much faster than we're building new sources, so I'm doubtful that this reasonably plausible scenario will play out. It would take the kind of foresight, political will and money that most of the world no longer has.
The likely reality is that we need wind, hydro, solar and geothermal so that there will be *some* sort of local, maintainable, electrical power left after hydrocarbons, particularly oil, stop being useful as an industrial-scale energy source (i.e. having enought net energy to run a civilization and at a price that's affordable).
When hyrocarbons cease to be useful, and the international, interdependent web of "just-in-time" supply chains starts breaking down, and we can no longer affordably transport the materials necessary to find, extract, refine and distribute the natural gas, oil or coal to the power plant, what we'll have left is nuclear (which we won't be able to maintain), hydro, wind and solar.
So, if you have grandchildren, or children, you want this. It won't be much. It won't be nearly enough, but by 2050 through 2100, a few less people will be shivering in the dark.
It's all in the point of view. An idiot could gather up this waste and use it as a weapon, or sneak a real nuke onto the site and threaten to detonate, spewing all this lovely stuff into the atmosphere. Nuclear power can theoretically become a nuclear weapon. Sadly, the reverse is not true.
Currently American taxpayers fund the defense of Europe and Asia. This is like you providing for, and paying for, electrical service to your neighbor. Were we a wee bit smarter, we would withdraw all military personnel and equipment worldwide and only return on condition that the country in question pay *us* with a reasonable profit thrown in, of course.
Interesting question. When.net was all the rage, I used to get annoyed because Microsoft seemed uninterested in anything that *wasn't* a business, preferably one that we in the office termed "www" (i.e. selling widgets to wankers on the web).
Since then, Microsoft has seemed actively anti-business. They switch programming language platforms willy-nilly, with virtually no discernable advantage from any perspective except their own (e.g. WPF, the latest pointless iteration of ASP, and the "de-emphasis" of Silverlight). Server licensing models are an incomprehensible, ever-changing mess. Platforms and products randomly appear and disappear (Remember Windows Live?). And Windows 8? Need I say more? All of this is Microsoft continuing to "solve" problems my business never had, and that no other business I knew of had either. Microsoft seems to have run out of useful things to do and is now going for "change for changes sake" as a marketing strategy, which is failing (e.g. the surface and Windows 8's "metro" interface).
At this point, I would welcome a little pro-business activity from Microsoft. Not screwing your current developer and user base by making their hard won knowledge of your product obsolete might be nice. That courtesy, however, only seems extended to C++ programmers. I'd like changes and additions to software to be vetted by whether they'd actually be useful to paying end users, instead of "the 20-something whiz kid down the hall had a brainwave - let's do it!" strategy. OK, perhaps I'm exaggerating that last bit, but it sure doesn't feel like it. I'd like to think that Microsoft's culture has grown up from the late 80s, early 90s, sneery, arrogant, adolescent nerd culture, but that culture shows every sign of still being the dominant one at Microsoft.
I've noticed this too, and always suspected that the world's routers are somehow working with seemingly innocent sites acting as a kind of mesh botnet for foreign entities (mostly Chinese). Can you tell us what you do to keep them out?
And to some degree, amenable to reason. As he got older, my late father was a right-wingnut, Limbaugh listening crazy. While some of this was the dementia, even as a younger person, he had always been right-ish, and/or libertarian leaning. Both my sister and I, in contrast, are moderate, conservative on some issues, liberal on others, and open to changes based on facts, despite the best efforts of my father to have us join in on his fanaticism fun.
The difference is that we grew up reading a lot, went to college, and didn't grow up poor and feeling constantly under threat. Moreover, we weren't forced to go to a church (Despite this, my sister now attends regularly), or engage in team sports - the major sources of educational propaganda in the USA. It makes a difference.
Seriously, FOSS is a self limiting activity. For example, since I lack the patronage of a mother and a basement, and I'm not still at university, I have to make actual money to support my luxurious lifestyle, which includes eating every day and shoes. Being single is a big plus for FOSS, but against all odds, a few of us have managed to engage in actual reproductive activity with a single partner for a sustained period (We even got a license for it!). To really give a boost to FOSS, this sort of thing should be abolished.
No, it's just shows the brakes in our education system, after the breaks were put on in the eighties and we started to loose what we had at our peek. No doubt due to the hoards of new students. Whew, well gotta go. I'm beet.
I have to admit my bias for the former, but teaching rote calculation in one's head has some value, if only as mental calisthenics. That said, I applaud the Estonian school system for getting more reality based, unlike so many school systems here in the USA.
Full disclosure: I'm half Estonian, do some math in my head, and I still write in cursive, occasionally. Keeps the kids from understanding it.:)
Interesting question. I notice that I tend to optimize my daily experiences and then minimize deviation from those experiences, so that when I find my favorite dish in a restaurant, I rarely order anything else. For example, I get Sunday dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant where I've gone for 16 years or so. I'm in there at 4:30 almost every Sunday. I always get Pho Ga. The time works for me because that's when I get back from the lakehouse and I get back at 4:30 to beat traffic, yet extend my stay. The soup works for me because it's delicious and doesn't upset my stomach.
It's not that I exclude new experiences, exactly, but I route myself into habits that I know suit my tastes a lot. Age may be a factor. When I was in my 20s, I experimented a lot more, but now I know I like Vietnamese food better than Chinese or Thai food. I know that I prefer a weekend alone in my cabin to a party. I prefer sobriety to intoxication. Rock climbing is more fun than caving and simple hiking is more fun than either. At 55, I know what I like and how much I like it. Experimentation becomes less important than experience.
DON'T go through with HR. My biggest problem has been avoiding the trained monkeys in HR who seem to bias towards genial, friendly, sociable expensive fuck-ups. What I like is 5+ years *working* experience, some working code I can look at, and a one-on-one conversation where I can ask difficult questions. This will tell me more of what I need to know than any degree. Write something useful. Make it work. Show me your work. Look presentable and sane. Speak English well enough to communicate with the other English speakers in the office. After that, I don't care if you know the specifics of our application or setups. If you've got all of the aforementioned, you'll figure out the rest.
I pretty much do the same things every day at more or less the same time. I have Sunday dinner at the same restaurant and order the same thing. Give her a calendar an time of day and she could predict my movements precisely.
Well, much of Catholicism is free and open source, but still suffers binary compatibility problems with Protestantism and barely runs in Middle Eastern environments.
Slashdot Mirror
But what is Bieber's interest in Uranus?
Politicians that don't talk through their ass and can pull their heads completely out of their rectums.
Well, he is schizophrenic and unfortunately all the new supercomputer does is eat, mate and scratch, which is more or less what its creators do on the weekends, but still, you have to start somewhere.
Lower your shields and surrender your chips!
Sounds like a bumper sticker to me.
Teach them *anything* but a "concept" language. They don't need it. Teach real code in a language that's in daily use, and they'll learn the rest. Knowledge is a hard won asset and time and cognitive effort are limited. Giving kids (or adults) a knowledge asset whose particulars they will have to throw away and relearn is a waste of everyone's time (I'm lookin' at YOU, Microsoft).
We're not going to replace all our generating capacity with wind. Or solar. Or wave. Or hydro. Or biofuels. None of them are even close to the scale of hydrocarbon energy as we use it now, nor will they ever be.
If we manage to build about 2500 nuclear plants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil ) over the next 50 years, and get batteries worth a shit, we might be able to replace hydrocarbon energy in a useful way, particularly if new nuke plants run on relatively safe, common, thorium, however, at the moment, we're still depleting industrial-scale energy much faster than we're building new sources, so I'm doubtful that this reasonably plausible scenario will play out. It would take the kind of foresight, political will and money that most of the world no longer has.
The likely reality is that we need wind, hydro, solar and geothermal so that there will be *some* sort of local, maintainable, electrical power left after hydrocarbons, particularly oil, stop being useful as an industrial-scale energy source (i.e. having enought net energy to run a civilization and at a price that's affordable).
When hyrocarbons cease to be useful, and the international, interdependent web of "just-in-time" supply chains starts breaking down, and we can no longer affordably transport the materials necessary to find, extract, refine and distribute the natural gas, oil or coal to the power plant, what we'll have left is nuclear (which we won't be able to maintain), hydro, wind and solar.
So, if you have grandchildren, or children, you want this. It won't be much. It won't be nearly enough, but by 2050 through 2100, a few less people will be shivering in the dark.
It's all in the point of view. An idiot could gather up this waste and use it as a weapon, or sneak a real nuke onto the site and threaten to detonate, spewing all this lovely stuff into the atmosphere. Nuclear power can theoretically become a nuclear weapon. Sadly, the reverse is not true.
It's just that we don't like the results much.
Currently American taxpayers fund the defense of Europe and Asia. This is like you providing for, and paying for, electrical service to your neighbor. Were we a wee bit smarter, we would withdraw all military personnel and equipment worldwide and only return on condition that the country in question pay *us* with a reasonable profit thrown in, of course.
You sort of wonder what they have to be afraid of. Mayhapsthe good Senator Ira Silverstein has more than a thin skin to worry about.
Interesting question. When .net was all the rage, I used to get annoyed because Microsoft seemed uninterested in anything that *wasn't* a business, preferably one that we in the office termed "www" (i.e. selling widgets to wankers on the web).
Since then, Microsoft has seemed actively anti-business. They switch programming language platforms willy-nilly, with virtually no discernable advantage from any perspective except their own (e.g. WPF, the latest pointless iteration of ASP, and the "de-emphasis" of Silverlight). Server licensing models are an incomprehensible, ever-changing mess. Platforms and products randomly appear and disappear (Remember Windows Live?). And Windows 8? Need I say more? All of this is Microsoft continuing to "solve" problems my business never had, and that no other business I knew of had either. Microsoft seems to have run out of useful things to do and is now going for "change for changes sake" as a marketing strategy, which is failing (e.g. the surface and Windows 8's "metro" interface).
At this point, I would welcome a little pro-business activity from Microsoft. Not screwing your current developer and user base by making their hard won knowledge of your product obsolete might be nice. That courtesy, however, only seems extended to C++ programmers. I'd like changes and additions to software to be vetted by whether they'd actually be useful to paying end users, instead of "the 20-something whiz kid down the hall had a brainwave - let's do it!" strategy. OK, perhaps I'm exaggerating that last bit, but it sure doesn't feel like it. I'd like to think that Microsoft's culture has grown up from the late 80s, early 90s, sneery, arrogant, adolescent nerd culture, but that culture shows every sign of still being the dominant one at Microsoft.
At least, from your point of view.
I've noticed this too, and always suspected that the world's routers are somehow working with seemingly innocent sites acting as a kind of mesh botnet for foreign entities (mostly Chinese). Can you tell us what you do to keep them out?
Mine is coded for reverse polish notation. I'm great fun at parties.
And to some degree, amenable to reason. As he got older, my late father was a right-wingnut, Limbaugh listening crazy. While some of this was the dementia, even as a younger person, he had always been right-ish, and/or libertarian leaning. Both my sister and I, in contrast, are moderate, conservative on some issues, liberal on others, and open to changes based on facts, despite the best efforts of my father to have us join in on his fanaticism fun.
The difference is that we grew up reading a lot, went to college, and didn't grow up poor and feeling constantly under threat. Moreover, we weren't forced to go to a church (Despite this, my sister now attends regularly), or engage in team sports - the major sources of educational propaganda in the USA. It makes a difference.
Seriously, FOSS is a self limiting activity. For example, since I lack the patronage of a mother and a basement, and I'm not still at university, I have to make actual money to support my luxurious lifestyle, which includes eating every day and shoes. Being single is a big plus for FOSS, but against all odds, a few of us have managed to engage in actual reproductive activity with a single partner for a sustained period (We even got a license for it!). To really give a boost to FOSS, this sort of thing should be abolished.
No, it's just shows the brakes in our education system, after the breaks were put on in the eighties and we started to loose what we had at our peek. No doubt due to the hoards of new students. Whew, well gotta go. I'm beet.
But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
I have to admit my bias for the former, but teaching rote calculation in one's head has some value, if only as mental calisthenics. That said, I applaud the Estonian school system for getting more reality based, unlike so many school systems here in the USA.
Full disclosure: I'm half Estonian, do some math in my head, and I still write in cursive, occasionally. Keeps the kids from understanding it. :)
Interesting question. I notice that I tend to optimize my daily experiences and then minimize deviation from those experiences, so that when I find my favorite dish in a restaurant, I rarely order anything else. For example, I get Sunday dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant where I've gone for 16 years or so. I'm in there at 4:30 almost every Sunday. I always get Pho Ga. The time works for me because that's when I get back from the lakehouse and I get back at 4:30 to beat traffic, yet extend my stay. The soup works for me because it's delicious and doesn't upset my stomach.
It's not that I exclude new experiences, exactly, but I route myself into habits that I know suit my tastes a lot. Age may be a factor. When I was in my 20s, I experimented a lot more, but now I know I like Vietnamese food better than Chinese or Thai food. I know that I prefer a weekend alone in my cabin to a party. I prefer sobriety to intoxication. Rock climbing is more fun than caving and simple hiking is more fun than either. At 55, I know what I like and how much I like it. Experimentation becomes less important than experience.
DON'T go through with HR. My biggest problem has been avoiding the trained monkeys in HR who seem to bias towards genial, friendly, sociable expensive fuck-ups. What I like is 5+ years *working* experience, some working code I can look at, and a one-on-one conversation where I can ask difficult questions. This will tell me more of what I need to know than any degree. Write something useful. Make it work. Show me your work. Look presentable and sane. Speak English well enough to communicate with the other English speakers in the office. After that, I don't care if you know the specifics of our application or setups. If you've got all of the aforementioned, you'll figure out the rest.
I pretty much do the same things every day at more or less the same time. I have Sunday dinner at the same restaurant and order the same thing. Give her a calendar an time of day and she could predict my movements precisely.
The Mars metal thing ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/09/mysterious_metal_mars_object ) will turn out to be an intelligent Buddhist plant. Would you really want to be the guy sifting through the theological implications of that?
Well, much of Catholicism is free and open source, but still suffers binary compatibility problems with Protestantism and barely runs in Middle Eastern environments.