Last week, I live-blogged a talk by theoretical physicist Amanda Peet, and while there were a great amount of comments and discussions focused on her lecture, there was also a great amount focused on Dr. Peet’s physical appearance
Random schmucks commenting on an internet blog do not constitute "sexism in science." The world is full of such people. They're about as far away from scientist as it is possible to get without actual brain damage.
... the church I just quit put out a fact sheet that men were 95% of perpetrators of domestic abuse...
When domestic abuse statistics are kept solely for physical abuse, yep, 95%. If statistics for emotional abuse were kept (and men were willing to report it (never EVER happen across the general population)), it'd be 50/50.
And in a great many cases, that unacceptable treatment came simply because of their gender.
You haven't proven there's a sexism problem, you simply dictated it like some kind of god. Where's the evidence?
They're taking the fact that all graduate students everywhere are treated like slave labor as evidence that there is sexism.
Sorry ladies, that's not why you're being treated like crap in grad school. You're being treated like crap because everyone is treated like crap in grad school. Yes, something should be done about that, but it isn't driven by sexism.
Waterfall just cannot work.
1. All the descions are taken at the time you know the least about the outcome, ie at the begining.
2. By the time you get to the end your requirements are out of date, you get the product you wanted at the start of the project not the one you need now.
Ridiculous. Maybe in stupid-ass punch-the-monkey dev shops writing web-based crap no one will care about in 6 months. There are plenty of industries where this is nonsense.
In international finance, some country decides on a new law (usually a new regulation). The software therefore must change.
Is the law going to change again this year? No.
Is the development cycle less than a year? Yes.
Is the development cycle longer than a fucking sprint? Yes.
Waterfall will work just FINE.
Wake me up when the people who broke the law start seeing some time. Let me know when the guy who exposed this illegal activity is allowed back into the country with his liberty intact.
Good night Mr. van Winkle. We'll wake you in a thousand years.
Windowless planes are coming. And they will be awesome.
Transparent aluminum!
"Windowless" first class section, maybe. Same screens used in cattle class to play non-stop ads, possibly if it offsets the cost of the fuel and increases overall profits. But wall screens like these being used merely to provide an outside view in the entire passenger section of regularly scheduled commercial flights? You'll get your flying car before you see that happen.
Quite true. Just look at the image again. No overhead bins at all, and no 6 rows of cattle class seating. Paired seats with tables. This concept is not for the likes of you or me. An Arab prince will have one. The Google Guys will have one. You and I will never see one in real life. Not even in first class, which still has overhead bins. It's a product concept solely for wealthy people, not even the merely rich.
What is Swift written in?
It is built with the LLVM compiler framework included in Xcode 6, and uses the Objective-C runtime...
So... C. Ok, we're done here.
No wait. One more thing. It's the Objective-C runtime. Which means Objective-C programs will just keep running, as they ever have.
Swift and Objective-C code can be used in a single program, and by extension, C and C++ as well.
The new language can't supplant the old one while the old one exists in the same environment. More to the point, compatibility with Objective-C, C, and C++ was an explicit design goal. So you can just pack up all the bullshit about taking over the world.
...sat in on an MIT course called "Engineering Apollo"
Even MIT is teaching courses that are nothing but rehashes of history? Seriously? I mean in theory, there's something to be learned from how it was done before, but from the description, this is just an excuse to rub elbows with an astronaut for bragging rights.
Why would anyone use a Xeon with that many cores in a desktop? o_O
For my compiler, you insensitive clod. Now that we have SSDs that can feed the beast fast enough to keep it busy, I would be delighted to have one of these on my desk.
Here is what monied capitalists most fear: If climate change is real, either free market capitalism dies or a sizable of chunk of humanity does.
Uhm, what?
Since when was Elon Musk not a capitalist? I'm pretty sure he's charging real money for Tesla Model Ss and Powerwalls. I'm pretty sure SolarCity isn't giving away solar panels for free. I'm pretty sure the Model X will go on sale this year, and people will give him money and he will give them a car in return.
Capitalism is not incompatible with environmentalism. It's just that there are entrenched interests in our current capitalism that make money in ways that are incompatible with environmentalism. Elon Musk is a disruptive capitalist who is going to make several more entrenched interests very unhappy by the end of the decade. He's already making some entrenched interests (notably United Launch Alliance) very unhappy in non-environmentally related fields. (They're having to spend money on those horrible horrible professional middle class people to get them to design a better rocket for the first time in two decades, instead of just selling the same old piece of shit for sweet cost-plus contracts.)
As of today, if you have the capital, you can give Elon Musk money and he will give you equipment that can cut your personal carbon footprint by 36%, permanently, by wiping out your emissions for housing and travel. That 36% is fully half of the footprint that you personally control. This is a transaction in a capitalist system, where the means of production are privately owned, rather than government owned, where the organization doing the producing expands its production capacity and research and development efforts using private profits, and where the purchaser has a choice of viable alternatives in some sort of market.
The US economy has been capitalist for over 200 years, and it has been getting more environmentally friendly for that entire period. Admittedly it started out rather thoroughly unfriendly, so there was a lot of room for improvement, but it has happened. Nor were the changes voluntary, but they still happened, while still being fundamentally capitalist.
With some extensive re-wiring of the power panel to move high-load devices (AC, washer/dryer, dishwasher, possibly even the gas furnace blower motor) to another panel, the 10kW unit MIGHT be useful to keep the fridge and lights going during a short-term power outage.
Why would you do that? Every single one of those things has an off switch. In all but extraordinarily rare cases, use of every one of those things is discretionary. You don't need to rewire your panel in order to keep the house running during quite a long power outage. Just don't use heavy draw appliances. If you are affluent enough to buy one or more of these battery packs in the first place, you can certainly afford to buy a few paper plates and an extra pair of underwear, if it comes to that.
Yeah, you're probably not going to be an early adopter, if you don't have solar panels already, if you don't have an electric car already, if you're not subject to substantially high differential energy pricing, and if you live in a region with a better-than-average grid maintenance organization. But the price will only come down once the gigafactory comes online. It's very likely that these packs will get cheap enough to fit in a discretionary budget just for rare convenience. My existing UPSes certainly fall into that category. You may already have a few for the same reason. It's just a somewhat bigger UPS, when all those other conditions apply.
Regardless of your individual situation, it's a gamechanging device for the vast majority of the world.
Let's suppose Wal-mart started a floor at something reasonable, say 20$ an hour.
Walmart has decided to try it. To $9, not $20, but that's their minimum for 2015. 500,000 employees will make more money, costing Walmart $1 billion more than it would otherwise have spent on salaries this year. All of it going to the people in the very lowest income bracket, who are practically required to spend every dime they earn, because they're at or below the poverty line.
We'll see how it works, both for the economy and for Walmart. (Personally I think Walmart damn well knows that some large fraction of that billion dollars will be returned right back to them in increased spending at Walmart by poverty-stricken people.)
"Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers* from it." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
