Oh, my no. 6 companies at least since then. That being said, however, I've worked in my current software position since 2001. Whether I've been in the same job is debatable. We've had three different owners and what I do has changed markedly in that time as we shifted operating systems, hardware, software platforms, moved from physical machines to virtual machines an so on. The only constants have been my office, my lunch companions and the desk lamp.
I do. Typesetting and "desktop publishing" in the 1980s (It was still code back then). Technical writing since 1992. Automated testing since 1994. The technologies change, true. I've been through four automated testing systems (Visual Test, a homegrown C++ system, QuickTestPro and finally TestComplete) and had to learn powershell, c#, vb.net, how to run a dozen VMWare ESXi servers effectively and a few other odds and ends along the way, but I'm still working. One day, I'll be rebuilding a server to install a larger hard drive, the next, I'll be writing code to control 80 machines simultaneously. The day after that, I'm analyzing costs on a spreadsheet and planning server expansion. So, after 20 years, I'm still working in software. Pay's not bad either.
There are mitigating factors of course. I don't drink, drug, eat fatty foods and I exercise regularly. All this seems to extend your brain's working life. I can usually figure out what's going on and cobble up a working idea or two before the twenty year olds are out of the gate. Aside from tolerable brain health, I can usually get to solutions faster just because I've seen so many issues before in different guises. Luckily, as long as you do it without embarrassing them, they're usually open to suggestions.
In fact, I got a liberal arts education, complete with arts and humanities.
Within the domain of of arts and humanities is "useful information that makes you a better citizen/person" such as philosophy, creative writing, primate and cultural anthropology, political science, sociology and so on. Other areas like the aforementioned ethno-musicology, gender studies and performance art - not so much. There are core subjects, most of which are semantically equivalent to "human behavior of groups" or "communicating in a useful manner" that are useful. There are also lots of courses that are the equivalent of "underwater basket weaving" or "art appreciation" that are not.
The point is utility. Ethno-musicology isn't generally useful enough to be included in a college curriculum. It's a net drain on resources.
If the athletics department makes money, it's sole purpose should be to plow that money back into other departments that train students to do actual useful things (i.e. non-entertainment oriented tasks which would exclude ethno-musicology, gender studies and performance art and include math, engineering, accounting, CS, architecture and so on).
If our entire transportation sector used these things, about how much atmospheric oxygen would be in battery use at any given moment? I'm hoping it would be insignificant, but that's how we start thinking about a lot of things.
MBAs who can't quite grasp the obvious *business* implications explained in simple words by CIOs who understand risk management, cost-benefit analysis and the financial implications quite well (Some CIOs are just a little better at math than some CEOs). True, CIOs are light on marketing and sales, but that's what CEOs are for.
Or the 99%, or the little people, or whatever. Thus it will be until the oil runs out and the current governments fall. The "good" news is that the price increase/energy return gets so horrible so fast that this could happen before 20 years is out.
There's no reason to send people under the sea when a nuclear powered robot can do the same thing, cheaper and safer. You'll lose a few, and a few nuclear payloads too - but then, that's already happened, eh? The trick will be making a decent self-destruct mechanism so that they can't be stolen and re-purposed. The cost advantages and inherent stealth of submersible drones make this a no-brainer for the military.
Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them... Or simply deciding to allocate resources elsewhere when (Squirrel! ) some other technology looks more interesting to some 20-something with the title of "Manager"
Like many of the more readable writers, certain concepts were simplified. The "droud" in Niven's books stimulated pleasure centers. Doing this is different than relieving depression. Admittedly, the brains wiring isn't following such neat little concepts, but conceptually, relieving depression so you can feel normal is very different than seeking pleasure for its own sake.
Torture is easy, from an administrative standpoint, and I'm sure it pleases the more cognitively challenged soldier and bureaucrat and so it persists, even if it doesn't work very well. What you want is reliable information. Hurting people is simply not that effective at obtaining this. Hallucinogenic drugs, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and high resolution fMRI in combination with computational linguistic analysis of what the prisoner said would be first tools of choice if you actually wanted to shake loose useful intelligence. In the case of religious fanatics, cognitive therapy aimed at changing core beliefs would almost certainly be a more effective method than torture.
And thus evolution proceeds on its merry way. Unfortunate that the parents didn't kill themselves straight off and it's children that must suffer the stupidity of the parents.
At least it does for me. Look, I grew up in a small isolated town of 3000 or so. All white population. Very little overt prejudice against anyone of another race. It just didn't come up. OK, I grow up, go to college, then move to a large (1 million +) city. Since I'm fresh out of college, I live in a poor black neighborhood where I'm threatened at bus stops, had my car torched, had bottles thrown at me and been mugged. 7 incidents of that nature in 7 years there. 6 out of those 7 incidents involved a black person.
So, I wasn't raised to hate anyone. Before I got to the city, I wasn't scared on anyone based on race. After 7 years, however, I had developed a finely tuned paranoia regarding young black men. I avoided them on the subway, bus and especially bus stops. I would cross the street to avoid crowds of them. Each incident (other than the white panhandler who tried to beat me with an umbrella and caused me to start avoiding street people) made that fear a little worse.
Is that fair or rational? No. There were plenty of exceptions, and plenty of decent, friendly black people too, but the little reptile in the back of my brain doesn't work that way. He's all about survival and he frightens easily. He's got nothing else to go on but appearance, and black skin with "African" facial features in a bad neighborhood is a "be scared" signal. And this little reptile in my head, he's got a great memory, but he's not under my conscious control.
As long as there's no fear, I have no problem when I go to lunch with black male co-workers, but then, we're not in a bad neighborhood, my co-workers are all smart, well educated and funny, and while at least one of them could take me apart with one arm, he is as about as threatening as the average teddy bear.
Some people on both sides need "the talk" to be scared. Others of us come by it quite by accident. Sad, but true.
Money is a bitch of a self-replicator with little regard to its hosts. At some point it'll change from useful symbiont to pathological menace in whatever field you go into.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, my no. 6 companies at least since then. That being said, however, I've worked in my current software position since 2001. Whether I've been in the same job is debatable. We've had three different owners and what I do has changed markedly in that time as we shifted operating systems, hardware, software platforms, moved from physical machines to virtual machines an so on. The only constants have been my office, my lunch companions and the desk lamp.
I do. Typesetting and "desktop publishing" in the 1980s (It was still code back then). Technical writing since 1992. Automated testing since 1994. The technologies change, true. I've been through four automated testing systems (Visual Test, a homegrown C++ system, QuickTestPro and finally TestComplete) and had to learn powershell, c#, vb.net, how to run a dozen VMWare ESXi servers effectively and a few other odds and ends along the way, but I'm still working. One day, I'll be rebuilding a server to install a larger hard drive, the next, I'll be writing code to control 80 machines simultaneously. The day after that, I'm analyzing costs on a spreadsheet and planning server expansion. So, after 20 years, I'm still working in software. Pay's not bad either.
There are mitigating factors of course. I don't drink, drug, eat fatty foods and I exercise regularly. All this seems to extend your brain's working life. I can usually figure out what's going on and cobble up a working idea or two before the twenty year olds are out of the gate. Aside from tolerable brain health, I can usually get to solutions faster just because I've seen so many issues before in different guises. Luckily, as long as you do it without embarrassing them, they're usually open to suggestions.
In fact, I got a liberal arts education, complete with arts and humanities.
Within the domain of of arts and humanities is "useful information that makes you a better citizen/person" such as philosophy, creative writing, primate and cultural anthropology, political science, sociology and so on. Other areas like the aforementioned ethno-musicology, gender studies and performance art - not so much. There are core subjects, most of which are semantically equivalent to "human behavior of groups" or "communicating in a useful manner" that are useful. There are also lots of courses that are the equivalent of "underwater basket weaving" or "art appreciation" that are not.
The point is utility. Ethno-musicology isn't generally useful enough to be included in a college curriculum. It's a net drain on resources.
1 trillion Cf of natural gas. Isn't that energetically equivalent to 166 million barrels of oil? (i.e. 6000 cf of natural gas = 1 barrel of oil).
So, that works out to 6.64 billion barrels of oil. The USA uses 9 billion barrels of oil a year. The world uses about 30 billion barrels a year.
I'm sorry, where does "vast" come in here? Did I drop a digit somewhere?
If the athletics department makes money, it's sole purpose should be to plow that money back into other departments that train students to do actual useful things (i.e. non-entertainment oriented tasks which would exclude ethno-musicology, gender studies and performance art and include math, engineering, accounting, CS, architecture and so on).
when we discover it's already been done.
If our entire transportation sector used these things, about how much atmospheric oxygen would be in battery use at any given moment? I'm hoping it would be insignificant, but that's how we start thinking about a lot of things.
They forgot the rest of the headline.
MBAs who can't quite grasp the obvious *business* implications explained in simple words by CIOs who understand risk management, cost-benefit analysis and the financial implications quite well (Some CIOs are just a little better at math than some CEOs). True, CIOs are light on marketing and sales, but that's what CEOs are for.
They *do* increase employment. In China.
Or the 99%, or the little people, or whatever. Thus it will be until the oil runs out and the current governments fall. The "good" news is that the price increase/energy return gets so horrible so fast that this could happen before 20 years is out.
Cheers!
There's no reason to send people under the sea when a nuclear powered robot can do the same thing, cheaper and safer. You'll lose a few, and a few nuclear payloads too - but then, that's already happened, eh? The trick will be making a decent self-destruct mechanism so that they can't be stolen and re-purposed. The cost advantages and inherent stealth of submersible drones make this a no-brainer for the military.
Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them...
Or simply deciding to allocate resources elsewhere when ( Squirrel! ) some other technology looks more interesting to some 20-something with the title of "Manager"
Like many of the more readable writers, certain concepts were simplified. The "droud" in Niven's books stimulated pleasure centers. Doing this is different than relieving depression. Admittedly, the brains wiring isn't following such neat little concepts, but conceptually, relieving depression so you can feel normal is very different than seeking pleasure for its own sake.
Well, try not to introduce too much noise or they'll shut us off. So, please just sit there. Quietly.
Optimist.
Oh wait. That's already happened.
If not random, they at least have a minimal correlation with reality.
Or was it just me?
At least in the Indian government. Unfortunately, they too must pander to morons to get re-elected. Sadly, some things are universal.
Torture is easy, from an administrative standpoint, and I'm sure it pleases the more cognitively challenged soldier and bureaucrat and so it persists, even if it doesn't work very well. What you want is reliable information. Hurting people is simply not that effective at obtaining this. Hallucinogenic drugs, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and high resolution fMRI in combination with computational linguistic analysis of what the prisoner said would be first tools of choice if you actually wanted to shake loose useful intelligence. In the case of religious fanatics, cognitive therapy aimed at changing core beliefs would almost certainly be a more effective method than torture.
My children would *never* abduct unicorns, you insensitive clod! Heffallumps, however, are a different story.
And thus evolution proceeds on its merry way. Unfortunate that the parents didn't kill themselves straight off and it's children that must suffer the stupidity of the parents.
At least it does for me. Look, I grew up in a small isolated town of 3000 or so. All white population. Very little overt prejudice against anyone of another race. It just didn't come up. OK, I grow up, go to college, then move to a large (1 million +) city. Since I'm fresh out of college, I live in a poor black neighborhood where I'm threatened at bus stops, had my car torched, had bottles thrown at me and been mugged. 7 incidents of that nature in 7 years there. 6 out of those 7 incidents involved a black person.
So, I wasn't raised to hate anyone. Before I got to the city, I wasn't scared on anyone based on race. After 7 years, however, I had developed a finely tuned paranoia regarding young black men. I avoided them on the subway, bus and especially bus stops. I would cross the street to avoid crowds of them. Each incident (other than the white panhandler who tried to beat me with an umbrella and caused me to start avoiding street people) made that fear a little worse.
Is that fair or rational? No. There were plenty of exceptions, and plenty of decent, friendly black people too, but the little reptile in the back of my brain doesn't work that way. He's all about survival and he frightens easily. He's got nothing else to go on but appearance, and black skin with "African" facial features in a bad neighborhood is a "be scared" signal. And this little reptile in my head, he's got a great memory, but he's not under my conscious control.
As long as there's no fear, I have no problem when I go to lunch with black male co-workers, but then, we're not in a bad neighborhood, my co-workers are all smart, well educated and funny, and while at least one of them could take me apart with one arm, he is as about as threatening as the average teddy bear.
Some people on both sides need "the talk" to be scared. Others of us come by it quite by accident. Sad, but true.
Money is a bitch of a self-replicator with little regard to its hosts. At some point it'll change from useful symbiont to pathological menace in whatever field you go into.
So go do what you love best.