Not quite, the summary is misleading. According to the article, the 60% number came from this: there were 600 open tenure-track positions and 1000 fresh graduates, therefore 60%. What it ignores is that those 1000 graduates were emptying themselves into a pool already overflowing with graduates and existing non-tenure professors fighting for the same jobs. The actual percentage will be much, much lower.
And that's just tenure track. Only a fraction of people on the track will actually receive tenure. Humanities tenures certainly aren't as rare as STEM tenures, but they also aren't nearly as abundant as the summary suggests.
The big problem is: if the summary is correct and the new code was signed with the same GPG key, how could we trust anything from TC from this point on? If it wasn't them posting and someone managed to pilfer the signing key, a security lapse that serious introduces major doubts about the trustworthiness of their security product. If it was them, then something happened to cause this that would make any return suspect by default.
In either case, the only safe option is to assume TC is compromised.
Tax returns contain the following: Name, address, Social Security number, income, employer info, spouse and dependent names and Social Security numbers, bank account number and routing number (if using direct deposit for your refund). Surely you can see why you wouldn't want that information falling into the hands of whoever stole your laptop, right? A tax return is basically the golden snitch of identity theft.
And let's not forget the fact that you can't leave negative feedback for a shitty buyer anymore. Or get a negative feedback rescinded. I have a negative on my seller account from a buyer who didn't like the size of the address label I put on the shipping box, a negative which eBay refused to remove.
A few years back I had a package returned unopened. Emailed the buyer to see what happened (thinking maybe I had the address wrong). No reply. Kept sending emails, about three weeks later I finally get a response: "Oh, I changed my mind and decided I didn't want the item anymore. I've filed a chargeback with my credit card company for it." Eventually, I got the contact from Paypal informing me of the disputed transaction. Her claim with her CC company was that it was an unauthorized charge. I sent everything I had (including that email chain) to Paypal. Naturally, I lost (I always expect to lose as a seller). And I couldn't leave a negative feedback for the buyer.
That was the last time I gave eBay any of my business. As long as they continue to operate like they do, I'll never buy or sell an item on there again.
Diablo 3 wasn't horrible. Not on the same level as Diablo 2, but I'm sitting at 975/1000 GS and never regretted picking it up (more than I can say for some other games). It isn't something that I'll spend hours in grinding up set gear, or leveling up all the different classes, or grinding out the remaining 3.5 million gold I need for the last 25 gamerscore, but for one full playthrough (and one additional hardcore to 30) it was enjoyable enough. Can't speak for Loot 2.0 as I never bought it for PC and who knows if that'll ever come out on the consoles.
I'd class it with the new Thief. Both are decent games by themselves, but seem like shit if you try to compare them to their predecessors. Which to me is more a reflection of the superb quality of the previous titles than the lack of quality of the current releases.
Absolutely. Especially when the domain is part of that lovely new "let's intentionally misspell or leave out a couple of letters or use some random third-world domain suffix as the last couple letters" breed of domains that makes it impossible to tell if you've typed it correctly by looking at it.
First time you go to a new domain: get there through a search engine link. Much less chance of accidentally winding up at a site that's gonna do naughty things. Subsequent visits, you should have the right one in your autocomplete, but I always make the first trip from a Google results page.
You jest, but I've seen exactly that. I was on a short contract early on in my career with a company that occupied an office in a typical large corporate center. Each floor had two sets of bathrooms shared between all companies occupying space on that floor. For the office I was contracting with, you had to swipe to get in or out. Any time spent "out" was considered personal time, and that included trips to the shared bathrooms. If you spent five minutes in the bathroom one day, you'd better work an extra five minutes some other time to make up for it, or you'd get a nastygram for not being at your desk for the full expected time (the worst I personally saw was one employee being chastised for coming up three minutes short).
My 8th grade elective (in 1998) was rocketry. We spent the semester building and launching model rockets. Something tells me that elective is no longer being offered.
You can still find sanity in a few holdouts. My high school (a magnet program, not a regular public school) had a well-stocked research lab and all students performed research. Mine involved cellulolysis and a strain of bacteria that I forget the name of now. The lab (and the research) is still ongoing, though I suspect the program's status gives it more freedom than a regular school would have. They even still had shop courses, or at least they did when I was there. No dodgeball, though, that was forbidden.
When I was nine, a classmate who had been bullying me for a couple years came up behind me during recess one day and started choking me. I'd had enough at that point, turned around, kneed him twice in the stomach and he dropped to the ground. I was given a detention, threatened with expulsion if it happened again and sent home. My parents were livid and had a very heated argument with the principal.
The school's policy was simple: all parties in a fight are punished equally, regardless of circumstances. That evening, my parents explained just how fucked up that rule was, and gave me a very simply lesson: if someone hits you, don't give them a chance to hit you again.
Nah, real friends don't give a fuck if you have Facebook (for reference, I don't). If they want to do something with me, they call, email, text, IM, whatever.
The real problem is with dating. Apologies to Artie Lange for tweaking one of his jokes: Tell a 25-year-old girl you just met who's trying to FB stalk you that you don't have a FB account, and she'll look at you like you're wearing a Revolutionary War outfit.
I went to a magnet program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Advanced_Technologies) so my experience isn't exactly representative of the typical public school curriculum. If I remember correctly, the breakdown was:
Freshman year: basic usage (Office, Photoshop, etc) and "intro programming" (Karel) Sophomore year: Fortran, Pascal, intro C Junior year: C++ (AP Comp Sci A) Senior year: No required programming courses, but I took an elective course in OpenGL 1.2
We also had a fairly comprehensive math program to go with it. Algebra II, Geometry, Pre-Calculus and either AP Calc AB or AP Calc BC depending on your performance in Pre-Calc.
It was a pretty sweet program. The research lab there was better equipped than some of the engineering labs I used in college.
Amen. Down here, it isn't the casual cyclists that people hate, it is the massive clusterfuck of 200 "cycling enthusiasts" that take up the *entire* westbound lane of the road leading out to the beaches every Saturday morning. A 10-minute drive just became a 30-minute drive because it is impossible to pass a group of bicyclists that's the length of a city block without impeding traffic going in the opposite direction.
Interestingly enough, Reno's buffer zone appears to actually be wider than required. Further reading in that FAA doc (AC 91-45C, the current FAA regs for Air Events) turns up this passage from Section 54.b: "The unlimited racing class (or other new classes with speeds in excessof 250 miles per hour) requires a spacing of 1,000 feet between the spectator and the showline."
The showline being defined as "The edge of this raceway closest to the spectator area is generally the showline over which no aircraft is permitted to pass while racing."
So in theory, spectators can be as close as 1,000 feet to the flight path of the aircraft during an unlimited race. In the case of slower races where speeds are 250mph, this buffer zone is reduced to 500 feet.
Pretty close, but then I suppose that's the whole appeal of attending. Without the danger aspect of being so close to the action, most races would be pretty darn dull (watching planes and cars turn left for four hours isn't really my idea of a fun time).
Except for the fact that the minimum safe distances DON'T account for that. Have a look at page 23 of the following PDF, that's the unlimited race course for Reno. Notice the safety buffer at the closest point: 1534'. You know how long it takes a plane going 450mph to travel 1534 ft? About 2 seconds.
Exactly. The likelihood of another suicide mission on a plane ever succeeding is very unlikely. The passengers know that you can't just sit back anymore.
My plumber was out last week, and he was telling me about a flight he was on a few years ago. Some guy (mentally unstable) freaked out and started running around the plane screaming. Three passengers tackled him and beat the shit out of him. That's the reality nowadays. 9/11 was a one-shot deal, you don't get to pull that off twice.
In addition to all the points you made, there's one other that I find to be a great help for newbies: the sheer volume of libraries available. When 99% of the low-level stuff can be done with existing libraries, it allows the newbie to focus on the big picture and slowly work down into the details.
Human teeth weren't perfect by any means. Cavities did occur, and when they did it frequently ended in abscesses and eventual loss of the tooth. What the records do show is that the number of cavities per capita was much less than your typical agrarian society (even the British have fewer cavities than Americans, despite the GP's tired crack).
The basic process of cavity formation is this: two types of bacteria feed on the sticky carbohydrates (corn-based products are particularly sticky), extracting simple sugars (sucrose, glucose, etc) from the deposits. The byproduct of metabolizing these sugars is the release of acid which lowers the pH on the surface of the tooth. When the pH drops below a certain point (5-6 IIRC) the teeth demineralize and a cavity begins.
Pre-farming, a typical human wouldn't be consuming many carbohydrates, so there would be less food for the bacteria to feast on. Consequently, you would likely have fewer cavities. You can find references to a lot of the studies on the correlation between agriculture and cavities in the abstract from this paper: http://www.jstor.org/pss/279500
Early humans did practice basic dental hygiene, though. Simple tools like chewing sticks (miswaks, neems, etc) are very effective at removing plaque when used properly (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15643758).
I have the same reaction with the H-1B guys. The smell of curry is just nauseating for me. "No, no, I don't need to come look at it, just describe the problem over the phone..."
Well, _I_ didn't shower today. We're in the middle of a drought here, gotta do my part to conserve water. All you people taking showers are ruining the planet!
These imply that the savings are negligible or, in the case of Indiana, *increased* electric usage. There is no clear answer, since the results depend heavily on the breakdown of electric usage (A/C, eletronics, etc), which varies depending on your region.
Given that serious risks and side effects involved, there's no reason why a untrained person, especially an fool that believes that their lack expertise and training means they know better than experts should treat themselves.
What *I* do to *MY* body is *MY* choice. The government shouldn't be in the business of protecting me from myself. Risks and side effects of medications should be publicly disclosed, but at that point only *I* can decide if I am okay with those risks. And if I am, it is not the government's responsibility to refuse me access because they disagree.
Oh, I agree with you there. It is almost criminal for software to not handle Unicode nowadays. But there comes a point where you have to say, "sorry, we don't support that". The presence of a tribe somewhere that speaks in a pop-click language and has no written language doesn't mean my software needs to support audio files for names.
Your software should seamlessly support the majority of users, and quasi-support most of the remainder, but there will always be fringe cases where you have to flat-out reject them.
Most of the article's points should be common sense. Not supporting numbers, caring about case, not supporting Unicode, etc. That's just lazy coders. And few things piss me off more than secret questions that are case sensitive. Three years after creating the account, what's the likelihood of me remembering if my favorite teacher was written as Mrs. Smith or mrs. smith?
Software doesn't need to be 100% correct. It just needs to be able to handle the incorrect things gracefully. You don't need to support every possible name type (letters, pictographs, audio file containing a sequence of letters in morse code, blah blah blah), you just need it to reject non-standard formats without shitting all over the server.
As far as lifespan, yeah, just yesterday I was using a bunch of spiffy Win 3.1 apps. And I hear those dirt farmers in Ghana are really tech savvy (though they spend all their time preaching on Usenet about anarcho-syndicalist communes). All software has a finite lifespan, Internet be damned, and it is typically very short. How many people do you see running Netscape Navigator 4.X nowadays? How about Microsoft Bob? Hell, I've got door controller software at work written in the XP era that can't even run properly in a SP2 environment, let alone Windows 7. When XP dies, that software is buried with it.
As the sole network admin at my last company, I reported to a software engineer who doubled as the IT "manager", who reported to the HR director who then reported to the 7 owners (a very top-heavy company, with almost 20% of the company being Chiefs or VPs).
Any purchase that cost more than a cup of coffee required approval of, at a minimum, the software engineer, the HR director and at least one Chief.
In that company, pretty much anything that involved electricity fell under the IT umbrella. I used to get phone calls when the A/C went down. Yet for some reason, I was expressly forbidden by one VP from even *thinking* about the RFID card access system on the doors. I survived 14 months, which I'm told was longer than any prior IT workers.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite, the summary is misleading. According to the article, the 60% number came from this: there were 600 open tenure-track positions and 1000 fresh graduates, therefore 60%. What it ignores is that those 1000 graduates were emptying themselves into a pool already overflowing with graduates and existing non-tenure professors fighting for the same jobs. The actual percentage will be much, much lower.
And that's just tenure track. Only a fraction of people on the track will actually receive tenure. Humanities tenures certainly aren't as rare as STEM tenures, but they also aren't nearly as abundant as the summary suggests.
The big problem is: if the summary is correct and the new code was signed with the same GPG key, how could we trust anything from TC from this point on? If it wasn't them posting and someone managed to pilfer the signing key, a security lapse that serious introduces major doubts about the trustworthiness of their security product. If it was them, then something happened to cause this that would make any return suspect by default.
In either case, the only safe option is to assume TC is compromised.
Tax returns contain the following:
Name, address, Social Security number, income, employer info, spouse and dependent names and Social Security numbers, bank account number and routing number (if using direct deposit for your refund). Surely you can see why you wouldn't want that information falling into the hands of whoever stole your laptop, right? A tax return is basically the golden snitch of identity theft.
And let's not forget the fact that you can't leave negative feedback for a shitty buyer anymore. Or get a negative feedback rescinded. I have a negative on my seller account from a buyer who didn't like the size of the address label I put on the shipping box, a negative which eBay refused to remove.
A few years back I had a package returned unopened. Emailed the buyer to see what happened (thinking maybe I had the address wrong). No reply. Kept sending emails, about three weeks later I finally get a response: "Oh, I changed my mind and decided I didn't want the item anymore. I've filed a chargeback with my credit card company for it." Eventually, I got the contact from Paypal informing me of the disputed transaction. Her claim with her CC company was that it was an unauthorized charge. I sent everything I had (including that email chain) to Paypal. Naturally, I lost (I always expect to lose as a seller). And I couldn't leave a negative feedback for the buyer.
That was the last time I gave eBay any of my business. As long as they continue to operate like they do, I'll never buy or sell an item on there again.
Diablo 3 wasn't horrible. Not on the same level as Diablo 2, but I'm sitting at 975/1000 GS and never regretted picking it up (more than I can say for some other games). It isn't something that I'll spend hours in grinding up set gear, or leveling up all the different classes, or grinding out the remaining 3.5 million gold I need for the last 25 gamerscore, but for one full playthrough (and one additional hardcore to 30) it was enjoyable enough. Can't speak for Loot 2.0 as I never bought it for PC and who knows if that'll ever come out on the consoles.
I'd class it with the new Thief. Both are decent games by themselves, but seem like shit if you try to compare them to their predecessors. Which to me is more a reflection of the superb quality of the previous titles than the lack of quality of the current releases.
Absolutely. Especially when the domain is part of that lovely new "let's intentionally misspell or leave out a couple of letters or use some random third-world domain suffix as the last couple letters" breed of domains that makes it impossible to tell if you've typed it correctly by looking at it.
First time you go to a new domain: get there through a search engine link. Much less chance of accidentally winding up at a site that's gonna do naughty things. Subsequent visits, you should have the right one in your autocomplete, but I always make the first trip from a Google results page.
You jest, but I've seen exactly that. I was on a short contract early on in my career with a company that occupied an office in a typical large corporate center. Each floor had two sets of bathrooms shared between all companies occupying space on that floor. For the office I was contracting with, you had to swipe to get in or out. Any time spent "out" was considered personal time, and that included trips to the shared bathrooms. If you spent five minutes in the bathroom one day, you'd better work an extra five minutes some other time to make up for it, or you'd get a nastygram for not being at your desk for the full expected time (the worst I personally saw was one employee being chastised for coming up three minutes short).
Obligatory comic:
http://www.screencuisine.net/h...
My 8th grade elective (in 1998) was rocketry. We spent the semester building and launching model rockets. Something tells me that elective is no longer being offered.
You can still find sanity in a few holdouts. My high school (a magnet program, not a regular public school) had a well-stocked research lab and all students performed research. Mine involved cellulolysis and a strain of bacteria that I forget the name of now. The lab (and the research) is still ongoing, though I suspect the program's status gives it more freedom than a regular school would have. They even still had shop courses, or at least they did when I was there. No dodgeball, though, that was forbidden.
When I was nine, a classmate who had been bullying me for a couple years came up behind me during recess one day and started choking me. I'd had enough at that point, turned around, kneed him twice in the stomach and he dropped to the ground. I was given a detention, threatened with expulsion if it happened again and sent home. My parents were livid and had a very heated argument with the principal.
The school's policy was simple: all parties in a fight are punished equally, regardless of circumstances. That evening, my parents explained just how fucked up that rule was, and gave me a very simply lesson: if someone hits you, don't give them a chance to hit you again.
Nah, real friends don't give a fuck if you have Facebook (for reference, I don't). If they want to do something with me, they call, email, text, IM, whatever.
The real problem is with dating. Apologies to Artie Lange for tweaking one of his jokes: Tell a 25-year-old girl you just met who's trying to FB stalk you that you don't have a FB account, and she'll look at you like you're wearing a Revolutionary War outfit.
I went to a magnet program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Advanced_Technologies) so my experience isn't exactly representative of the typical public school curriculum. If I remember correctly, the breakdown was:
Freshman year: basic usage (Office, Photoshop, etc) and "intro programming" (Karel)
Sophomore year: Fortran, Pascal, intro C
Junior year: C++ (AP Comp Sci A)
Senior year: No required programming courses, but I took an elective course in OpenGL 1.2
We also had a fairly comprehensive math program to go with it. Algebra II, Geometry, Pre-Calculus and either AP Calc AB or AP Calc BC depending on your performance in Pre-Calc.
It was a pretty sweet program. The research lab there was better equipped than some of the engineering labs I used in college.
Amen. Down here, it isn't the casual cyclists that people hate, it is the massive clusterfuck of 200 "cycling enthusiasts" that take up the *entire* westbound lane of the road leading out to the beaches every Saturday morning. A 10-minute drive just became a 30-minute drive because it is impossible to pass a group of bicyclists that's the length of a city block without impeding traffic going in the opposite direction.
Interestingly enough, Reno's buffer zone appears to actually be wider than required. Further reading in that FAA doc (AC 91-45C, the current FAA regs for Air Events) turns up this passage from Section 54.b:
"The unlimited racing class (or other new classes with speeds in excessof 250 miles per hour) requires a spacing of 1,000 feet between the spectator and the showline."
The showline being defined as "The edge of this raceway closest to the spectator area is generally the showline over which no aircraft is permitted to pass while racing."
So in theory, spectators can be as close as 1,000 feet to the flight path of the aircraft during an unlimited race. In the case of slower races where speeds are 250mph, this buffer zone is reduced to 500 feet.
Pretty close, but then I suppose that's the whole appeal of attending. Without the danger aspect of being so close to the action, most races would be pretty darn dull (watching planes and cars turn left for four hours isn't really my idea of a fun time).
Except for the fact that the minimum safe distances DON'T account for that. Have a look at page 23 of the following PDF, that's the unlimited race course for Reno. Notice the safety buffer at the closest point: 1534'. You know how long it takes a plane going 450mph to travel 1534 ft? About 2 seconds.
http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAdvisoryCircular.nsf/0/5899aca707d02f8b862569dd00768601/%24FILE/Appx1-3.pdf
Exactly. The likelihood of another suicide mission on a plane ever succeeding is very unlikely. The passengers know that you can't just sit back anymore.
My plumber was out last week, and he was telling me about a flight he was on a few years ago. Some guy (mentally unstable) freaked out and started running around the plane screaming. Three passengers tackled him and beat the shit out of him. That's the reality nowadays. 9/11 was a one-shot deal, you don't get to pull that off twice.
Definitely agree with Python.
In addition to all the points you made, there's one other that I find to be a great help for newbies: the sheer volume of libraries available. When 99% of the low-level stuff can be done with existing libraries, it allows the newbie to focus on the big picture and slowly work down into the details.
Well, what they told you is partly wrong.
Human teeth weren't perfect by any means. Cavities did occur, and when they did it frequently ended in abscesses and eventual loss of the tooth. What the records do show is that the number of cavities per capita was much less than your typical agrarian society (even the British have fewer cavities than Americans, despite the GP's tired crack).
The basic process of cavity formation is this: two types of bacteria feed on the sticky carbohydrates (corn-based products are particularly sticky), extracting simple sugars (sucrose, glucose, etc) from the deposits. The byproduct of metabolizing these sugars is the release of acid which lowers the pH on the surface of the tooth. When the pH drops below a certain point (5-6 IIRC) the teeth demineralize and a cavity begins.
Pre-farming, a typical human wouldn't be consuming many carbohydrates, so there would be less food for the bacteria to feast on. Consequently, you would likely have fewer cavities. You can find references to a lot of the studies on the correlation between agriculture and cavities in the abstract from this paper: http://www.jstor.org/pss/279500
Early humans did practice basic dental hygiene, though. Simple tools like chewing sticks (miswaks, neems, etc) are very effective at removing plaque when used properly (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15643758).
I have the same reaction with the H-1B guys. The smell of curry is just nauseating for me. "No, no, I don't need to come look at it, just describe the problem over the phone..."
Well, _I_ didn't shower today. We're in the middle of a drought here, gotta do my part to conserve water. All you people taking showers are ruining the planet!
On the other hand, modern studies such as:
http://energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-200-2007-004/CEC-200-2007-004.PDF
and
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120406767043794825.html
(don't have a link to the article they published, sorry)
These imply that the savings are negligible or, in the case of Indiana, *increased* electric usage. There is no clear answer, since the results depend heavily on the breakdown of electric usage (A/C, eletronics, etc), which varies depending on your region.
Given that serious risks and side effects involved, there's no reason why a untrained person, especially an fool that believes that their lack expertise and training means they know better than experts should treat themselves.
What *I* do to *MY* body is *MY* choice. The government shouldn't be in the business of protecting me from myself. Risks and side effects of medications should be publicly disclosed, but at that point only *I* can decide if I am okay with those risks. And if I am, it is not the government's responsibility to refuse me access because they disagree.
Oh, I agree with you there. It is almost criminal for software to not handle Unicode nowadays. But there comes a point where you have to say, "sorry, we don't support that". The presence of a tribe somewhere that speaks in a pop-click language and has no written language doesn't mean my software needs to support audio files for names.
Your software should seamlessly support the majority of users, and quasi-support most of the remainder, but there will always be fringe cases where you have to flat-out reject them.
Most of the article's points should be common sense. Not supporting numbers, caring about case, not supporting Unicode, etc. That's just lazy coders. And few things piss me off more than secret questions that are case sensitive. Three years after creating the account, what's the likelihood of me remembering if my favorite teacher was written as Mrs. Smith or mrs. smith?
Software doesn't need to be 100% correct. It just needs to be able to handle the incorrect things gracefully. You don't need to support every possible name type (letters, pictographs, audio file containing a sequence of letters in morse code, blah blah blah), you just need it to reject non-standard formats without shitting all over the server.
As far as lifespan, yeah, just yesterday I was using a bunch of spiffy Win 3.1 apps. And I hear those dirt farmers in Ghana are really tech savvy (though they spend all their time preaching on Usenet about anarcho-syndicalist communes). All software has a finite lifespan, Internet be damned, and it is typically very short. How many people do you see running Netscape Navigator 4.X nowadays? How about Microsoft Bob? Hell, I've got door controller software at work written in the XP era that can't even run properly in a SP2 environment, let alone Windows 7. When XP dies, that software is buried with it.
As the sole network admin at my last company, I reported to a software engineer who doubled as the IT "manager", who reported to the HR director who then reported to the 7 owners (a very top-heavy company, with almost 20% of the company being Chiefs or VPs).
Any purchase that cost more than a cup of coffee required approval of, at a minimum, the software engineer, the HR director and at least one Chief.
In that company, pretty much anything that involved electricity fell under the IT umbrella. I used to get phone calls when the A/C went down. Yet for some reason, I was expressly forbidden by one VP from even *thinking* about the RFID card access system on the doors. I survived 14 months, which I'm told was longer than any prior IT workers.