Do you even know any of your country's history? If your founding fathers hadn't protested your country would never have been born. Sometimes people have to make a stand based on their morals, and if they have the balls to do it non-violently then they deserve your respect.
It's quite simple - any country that treats dissenters as criminals is in danger of becoming a totalitarian state.
And personally - I don't think a DUI can EVER be considered petty.
Just after I graduated from uni, I took a bunch of temporary typing jobs (before I finally accepted my fate and took a job as a software developer...)
One of the more interesting jobs was data-entering the forensic reports that came back from the lab, for the West Midlands Police Force. These contained a basic description of the case, as well as the results from the test and the cost that they were billed at (it seems that most of the forensic stuff was done by independant companies and billed back to the taxpayer).
Most of the checks were testing suspected cannabis found by the police during a search - these always came back positive, and cost £35 per check, even when it was only 0.01 grams or similar!
More depressing was a case where someone had been stabbed and a blood covered knife had been found in a nearby rubbish bin, along with patches of blood nearby and on the suspect's clothes. There were (IIRC) 9 separate blood samples, and each one cost £750 to test.
Each one came back 'inconclusive'. That'll be £6750 please, Mr Taxpayer.
In my experience, one of the biggest problems with the music industry is as follows:
When you buy a CD from a store, there have been many many people who had a hand in it getting to you... difficult to put a specific number but I'd guess it's around 50 different people (label manager, presing plant worker, distribution liason, shop worker etc).
Every single one of these people gets a salary out of the sale of the music - EXCEPT for the musicias. They get a share from the proceeds after everyone else gets paid, if the product sells well enough. Most often they get nothing, except for the original advance (often enough to pay for a few month's rent).
Most of the risk is passed on to the musicians, who can only expect to get properly paid if they blow up, and sell lots and lots. Obviously, they have a chance of doing REALLY well (the pressing plant guy is not going to rich if the product sells out).
The irony is, people buy the product ultimately because they like the music, and really once the mastering engineer has finished (still VERY early in the process of getting it released) no-one else has any effect on the music... if the distributor messes up it doesn't make the music sound any worse.
This problem is particularly hard on the instrumentalists / backing singers in the band, as the set-up of the performing rights system in most countries greatly favours those who write lyrics or music.
As a staunch atheist / deist, I wouldn't say that the theory of evolution negates the possibility of a creator. It does go against the literal word of most religious texts, in that it denies that something put the world together using the same kind of rational process that we would use - but then very few religions are willing to accept that something that lives forever and is capable of creating a universe would be fundamentally alien to us.
Evolution also suggests that the Earth is a work-in-progress, constantly changing and adapting, and not the finished, 'perfect' creation that most (if not all) religions seem to require.
However, "God moves in mysterious ways" - who is to say that a god-like entity wouldn't utilise a billion-year process to build an ecology? What upsets the fundamentalists about evolution is not that it disproves creation, but that it disproves their version of it - ultimately they want to claim that they know the mind of god.
Here's me and a million other Brits aged 25-35 saying 'thank you' for the horrible unreliability of the Spectrum loading system. If it wasn't so hard to actually get the games to load (I'm looking at you, Ultimate Hyperloader), I doubt I would have started writing my own games instead... and ended up with a good career in computing:-)
(Seriously, happy birthday to a wonderful, wonderful machine. BTW - say to Gandalf, "Carry Me"....)
I don't want to put important decisions to the vote in this way - I don't believe that regular open votes will be given enough attention / time / effort by the voters for there to be sensible choices made.
People tend to have a distrust of politicians (which is healthy), but politicians should be considered 'experts' when it comes to voting on complicated issues. It may well be that a vote on foreign policy, public spending, constitutional affiars etc is EXTREMELY complicated and convoluted, and requires literally HOURS of debate for all involved to be informed enough to vote. Glibly choosing the side that seems right can be dangerous when the issue is a minefield of consequences and comprimises.
Also, who exactly will be doing the debating? For people to vote one way or another on an issue requires the sides to have been worked out, for the options to have been hashed out - the wording and content of any resolution should be debated thoroughly before it's voted on.
The Parliamentary system works when you have well qualified representatives, who take their duties seriously, and who are held accountable in their positions by their voters (this last area is where improved communications should be best able to make a difference).
Unfortunately, IMHO, some countries seem to have healthier expectations of their politicians than others. Some countries seem to require their policians to be expert debaters, the best-and-brightest (even if they are sleazy mofos) - others just seem to want the most charismatic... who have the most winning smile and down-at-home charm:-(
Maybe we're ALREADY part of an interplanetary expedition - if you have a Matrix-like system that holds a load of human minds / consciousnesses and keeps them occupied during the 1000 year voyage to the next planet, maybe it would keep them occupied by making them think they're living our their lives as internet geeks at the start of the 21st century?
Maybe we're all just ghosts in a big machine, jetting it's way across the galaxy.... maybe one day we'll all hear "System Wide Message - planet approaching, simulation will end in 60 minutes. Please finish any business in an orderly fashion." and next thing we know, we're waking up in orbit of Omicron Persei 8?
Oh please - you really think that these guys set themselves up so they could get someone shot?? Who - the label manager or one of the "Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, [who] were briefly detained as well" (from TFA)?
This was a (mostly) legit business in the music industry, producing mixtapes that were being sold in major retailers (eg Best Buy) - this was not Suge Knight and a front for organised gang crime. Your idea that you need to have a criminal record to be in the upper echelons of Hiphop is as naive as thinking that Ozzy Osbourne really worships the devil, or that Britney Spears really was a virgin until she got married.
Yes, RPG's do take up a lot of your time... and you can trace it right back to Lord Of The Rings.
When a game gets you to wander around a wasteland, grinding for hours, it's to give you that 'epic' feeling, the feeling that what you've achieved was actually difficult. Just like reading through those endless chapters where Frodo & Sam walk to the Crack Of Doom... Tolkien wanted to really make it seem like they had to work hard to get there, not just go for a little hike across the woods - so we have 300+ pages of walking walking crawling and you KNOW that it was hard. *
Translate that to the RPG genre, and game developers don't want you to just think 'Yep, my character just spent 3 weeks searching the land for XXXXX', they want you to really experience it!
* Although the film version of LOTR didn't spend ages following Frodo & Sam across middle earth, it compensated by playing most of the film in slow motion with a choir singing in the background...
I have to say though, she also strikes me as a fairly positive role model; intelligent, capable, and (as is unfortunately rare for women in computer games) sensibly dressed.
I'm amazed by all the statements here saying Computer Science == Maths.
In my degree - 10 yrs ago, Birmingham Uni (UK) - I took only one course that had any real maths: Computer Graphics.
Everything else had a different flavour:
Software Engineering Methodology
Object Oriented Programming
Data Structures
Computer Architecture
Databases / SQL
and most importantly:
Programming (ie regular assignment of code we had to write).
The course was pretty good (although all the SQL was theoretical; we never actually ran any SQL statements). There was hardly any maths in there, and frankly that's suited me very well - in 8 years of commercial programming, I have NEVER needed anything beyond basic arithmatic.
Obviously not every will have the same experience, but there are plenty of serious programming jobs that don't use maths. A good CS course should teach the basics of software design along with a good selection of coding techniques - as others have said here, the sign of a good CS grad is that they can work in multiple languages as they're comfortable with the underlying paradigms.
Like all of us here, I'm shocked at this case. Leaving aside the moral implications here, I'm very worried about the validity of the 'technical expertise' that got her convicted.
On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links.
"You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."
It sounds like these links were just showing up as 'visited', which does not mean they'd actually been clicked on. If this case has been based on poor tech advice like this, it's a travesty. As experts, do we have a duty to petition the judge? Would it hold any weight if it came from Slashdot.org??
It sounds like a Linux grid is an excellent solution here - however, it also sounds like their software is not exactly performing perfectly:
This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a major rework of the program
Really?
Frankly that sounds like the software is in severe need of reworking! If their machines are 20 years old that's bad enough, but if they have 20 year-old software that needs to be rewritten every time a new type of car is added, it's time for a redesign.
Slashdot Mirror
"I do understand the difference ;)"
:-)
Glad someone does:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/59/Fergie-LondonBridge.JPG
Protesters == troublemakers, huh?
Do you even know any of your country's history? If your founding fathers hadn't protested your country would never have been born. Sometimes people have to make a stand based on their morals, and if they have the balls to do it non-violently then they deserve your respect.
It's quite simple - any country that treats dissenters as criminals is in danger of becoming a totalitarian state.
And personally - I don't think a DUI can EVER be considered petty.
Just after I graduated from uni, I took a bunch of temporary typing jobs (before I finally accepted my fate and took a job as a software developer...)
One of the more interesting jobs was data-entering the forensic reports that came back from the lab, for the West Midlands Police Force. These contained a basic description of the case, as well as the results from the test and the cost that they were billed at (it seems that most of the forensic stuff was done by independant companies and billed back to the taxpayer).
Most of the checks were testing suspected cannabis found by the police during a search - these always came back positive, and cost £35 per check, even when it was only 0.01 grams or similar!
More depressing was a case where someone had been stabbed and a blood covered knife had been found in a nearby rubbish bin, along with patches of blood nearby and on the suspect's clothes. There were (IIRC) 9 separate blood samples, and each one cost £750 to test.
Each one came back 'inconclusive'. That'll be £6750 please, Mr Taxpayer.
"H2O Networks is a deploying dark fibre in the UK's waste water network" -
What a coincidence - I've been doing exactly the same thing ever since I took up the All Bran challenge.
In my experience, one of the biggest problems with the music industry is as follows:
When you buy a CD from a store, there have been many many people who had a hand in it getting to you... difficult to put a specific number but I'd guess it's around 50 different people (label manager, presing plant worker, distribution liason, shop worker etc).
Every single one of these people gets a salary out of the sale of the music - EXCEPT for the musicias. They get a share from the proceeds after everyone else gets paid, if the product sells well enough. Most often they get nothing, except for the original advance (often enough to pay for a few month's rent).
Most of the risk is passed on to the musicians, who can only expect to get properly paid if they blow up, and sell lots and lots. Obviously, they have a chance of doing REALLY well (the pressing plant guy is not going to rich if the product sells out).
The irony is, people buy the product ultimately because they like the music, and really once the mastering engineer has finished (still VERY early in the process of getting it released) no-one else has any effect on the music... if the distributor messes up it doesn't make the music sound any worse.
This problem is particularly hard on the instrumentalists / backing singers in the band, as the set-up of the performing rights system in most countries greatly favours those who write lyrics or music.
As a staunch atheist / deist, I wouldn't say that the theory of evolution negates the possibility of a creator. It does go against the literal word of most religious texts, in that it denies that something put the world together using the same kind of rational process that we would use - but then very few religions are willing to accept that something that lives forever and is capable of creating a universe would be fundamentally alien to us.
Evolution also suggests that the Earth is a work-in-progress, constantly changing and adapting, and not the finished, 'perfect' creation that most (if not all) religions seem to require.
However, "God moves in mysterious ways" - who is to say that a god-like entity wouldn't utilise a billion-year process to build an ecology? What upsets the fundamentalists about evolution is not that it disproves creation, but that it disproves their version of it - ultimately they want to claim that they know the mind of god.
Here's me and a million other Brits aged 25-35 saying 'thank you' for the horrible unreliability of the Spectrum loading system. If it wasn't so hard to actually get the games to load (I'm looking at you, Ultimate Hyperloader), I doubt I would have started writing my own games instead... and ended up with a good career in computing :-)
(Seriously, happy birthday to a wonderful, wonderful machine. BTW - say to Gandalf, "Carry Me"....)
*reads again* - oh.
Except that Cheyenne Mountain, in the 'real' world, is a joint American Canadian installation.
I don't want to put important decisions to the vote in this way - I don't believe that regular open votes will be given enough attention / time / effort by the voters for there to be sensible choices made.
:-(
People tend to have a distrust of politicians (which is healthy), but politicians should be considered 'experts' when it comes to voting on complicated issues. It may well be that a vote on foreign policy, public spending, constitutional affiars etc is EXTREMELY complicated and convoluted, and requires literally HOURS of debate for all involved to be informed enough to vote. Glibly choosing the side that seems right can be dangerous when the issue is a minefield of consequences and comprimises.
Also, who exactly will be doing the debating? For people to vote one way or another on an issue requires the sides to have been worked out, for the options to have been hashed out - the wording and content of any resolution should be debated thoroughly before it's voted on.
The Parliamentary system works when you have well qualified representatives, who take their duties seriously, and who are held accountable in their positions by their voters (this last area is where improved communications should be best able to make a difference).
Unfortunately, IMHO, some countries seem to have healthier expectations of their politicians than others. Some countries seem to require their policians to be expert debaters, the best-and-brightest (even if they are sleazy mofos) - others just seem to want the most charismatic... who have the most winning smile and down-at-home charm
Maybe we're ALREADY part of an interplanetary expedition - if you have a Matrix-like system that holds a load of human minds / consciousnesses and keeps them occupied during the 1000 year voyage to the next planet, maybe it would keep them occupied by making them think they're living our their lives as internet geeks at the start of the 21st century?
Maybe we're all just ghosts in a big machine, jetting it's way across the galaxy.... maybe one day we'll all hear "System Wide Message - planet approaching, simulation will end in 60 minutes. Please finish any business in an orderly fashion." and next thing we know, we're waking up in orbit of Omicron Persei 8?
Dude......
Oh please - you really think that these guys set themselves up so they could get someone shot?? Who - the label manager or one of the "Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, [who] were briefly detained as well" (from TFA)?
This was a (mostly) legit business in the music industry, producing mixtapes that were being sold in major retailers (eg Best Buy) - this was not Suge Knight and a front for organised gang crime. Your idea that you need to have a criminal record to be in the upper echelons of Hiphop is as naive as thinking that Ozzy Osbourne really worships the devil, or that Britney Spears really was a virgin until she got married.
Yes, RPG's do take up a lot of your time... and you can trace it right back to Lord Of The Rings.
When a game gets you to wander around a wasteland, grinding for hours, it's to give you that 'epic' feeling, the feeling that what you've achieved was actually difficult. Just like reading through those endless chapters where Frodo & Sam walk to the Crack Of Doom... Tolkien wanted to really make it seem like they had to work hard to get there, not just go for a little hike across the woods - so we have 300+ pages of walking walking crawling and you KNOW that it was hard. *
Translate that to the RPG genre, and game developers don't want you to just think 'Yep, my character just spent 3 weeks searching the land for XXXXX', they want you to really experience it!
* Although the film version of LOTR didn't spend ages following Frodo & Sam across middle earth, it compensated by playing most of the film in slow motion with a choir singing in the background...
Yes, she is extremely fine :-)
I have to say though, she also strikes me as a fairly positive role model;
intelligent, capable, and (as is unfortunately rare for women in computer games) sensibly dressed.
In my degree - 10 yrs ago, Birmingham Uni (UK) - I took only one course that had any real maths: Computer Graphics.
Everything else had a different flavour:
- Software Engineering Methodology
- Object Oriented Programming
- Data Structures
- Computer Architecture
- Databases / SQL
and most importantly:Programming (ie regular assignment of code we had to write).
The course was pretty good (although all the SQL was theoretical; we never actually ran any SQL statements). There was hardly any maths in there, and frankly that's suited me very well - in 8 years of commercial programming, I have NEVER needed anything beyond basic arithmatic.
Obviously not every will have the same experience, but there are plenty of serious programming jobs that don't use maths. A good CS course should teach the basics of software design along with a good selection of coding techniques - as others have said here, the sign of a good CS grad is that they can work in multiple languages as they're comfortable with the underlying paradigms.
On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links. "You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."
It sounds like these links were just showing up as 'visited', which does not mean they'd actually been clicked on. If this case has been based on poor tech advice like this, it's a travesty. As experts, do we have a duty to petition the judge? Would it hold any weight if it came from Slashdot.org??
It sounds like a Linux grid is an excellent solution here - however, it also sounds like their software is not exactly performing perfectly:
This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a major rework of the program
Really?
Frankly that sounds like the software is in severe need of reworking! If their machines are 20 years old that's bad enough, but if they have 20 year-old software that needs to be rewritten every time a new type of car is added, it's time for a redesign.