You could substitute literally any reasonably broad subject into your post and it would mean precisely the same.

In other words, it's perfectly possible to leave a large, broad subject out of general education. Most of the skills will be somewhat glanced upon in other subjects. Those that love it will probably find it anyway. But so what?

You could use exactly the same arguments to not teach science, or maths, or foreign languages, or English or art or "making things" (DT in the UK), or geography, or history. The fact that it's possible to leave out a subject and not infinitely bad to do so is not an argument against leaving it out.

You'll also note I specified any reasonably broad subject. A fairly good bu very rough guide is if universities usually have a whole faculty dedicated to it, it's reasonably broad.

So yes, computing should be taught in schools, for much the same reason the other major subjects are taught. It's a part of the modern world and knowing a bit about it is now useful to being a reasonably well rounded human. It also teaches certain skills naturally---breaking down a problem into its smallest elements---which seems to be somewhat lacking in education at the moment. That is a generally useful skill which is also necessary to write any program.

So get off your high horse. Computing SHOULD be taught at school precisely because there's nothing particularly special about it to distinguish it from all the other major subjects.

And make the most amazing youtube videos, which would of course substantially increase the number of drones.

And then what do you do when you find it's a drone?

If the answer is "shoot it down" there are severe unintended consequences. A teenager pointed out to me that people would fly drones in there and post the best "drone gets shot down" videos on youtube. I think his explantion used the phrases "cool" and "really cool" several times.

Use a plain old radio direction finder?

You mean to find the 2.4GHz signals the transmitter is emitting along with every wifi AP, bluetooth device, microwave, wireless keyboard and mouse, fitmess monitor and ect...?

This is in urban areas. Basic radio direction finding won't work. You'd have to have a hugeass SDR and decode every signal in each direction to figure which might be the one of interest.

I have thought about such things. After discussing it a 15 year old boy pointed out that if drones flying into the Whitehouse were shot up with shotguns, then there'd be a rash of people trying to get the best "drone blasted to bits" video for youtube, which would make things worse.

When you add electronic elements to your detection scheme,

But in an urban environment, electronic emissions are going to be coming from more or less every direction.

Actually go back and read the comment carefully and read specifically the bit I quoted and was responding to.

I was disputing that multiple primary partners (which implies a polyamorous relationships because that's the only place "primary partner" has useful meaning) was more common than homosexuality.

So like I said, you've yet again grabbed the wrong end of the stick incredibly hard and are doggedly determined not to let go. No matter how much I show you have spent the entire thread trying very hard to answer an question I never asked, you will keep on justifying why your wrong-end-of-stickgrabbing is so very right. A clue: it isn't.

The point I then raised is that multiple partners is fearsomely difficuly because of things like inheritance.

You then told me that Canada deals with it. By not dealing with it! lol! Smug!

Yeah, the specific question was in this specific post.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

The question being how to deal with inheritance for more than one partner.

So far your contribution has been to tell me Canada dealt with it just fine. By not allowing more than one partner! lolololitrolu etc.

Since you seem to have a habit of grabbing the wrong end of the stick very hard and never backing down, I look forwards to you rationalising how you made any contribution to the conversation whatsoever.

I don't view IT as an epithet I view it as a specific skillset that we don't need full time in house. IT is about being an expert at OS, Network and Database management. If we want to deploy openstack, we call our contract IT company. If our fileserver goes down, we call IT. If we are seeing a performance bottleneck in our network we call IT.

Everybody else though is focused on a completely different task, making great visual effects. To do that we write tools to assist artists, streamline workflow and automate time consuming tasks.

If I have trouble with a linux box I call a kickass IT guy who knows Linux backwards and forwards. If I need someone to streamline the workflow for managing a VFX sequence with 800 assets with evolving character rigs and ensuring that an animator can transfer their animation to a new rig I'm not going to IT I'm going to a technical artist who has deep domain knowledge on both character animation and rigging.

If that developer decides that they need a database to track animations between versions they will probably develop on a database on their local workstation. When they're happy and want to move it to production then we meet with IT, tell them "We'll have 40 users with about 10,000 requests per minute." They'll recommend hardware or say that an existing server can handle it and deploy a production ready database. They'll ensure it fits in with our existing security policies, firewalls, access rights etc and then handle maintenance and backup.

Just because someone touches a computer doesn't make them "IT". Not because IT is an insult but because it would redefine the role too broadly. Would you call a technical animator who works on developing fluid simulations an IT person? No.

Similarly someone who works on the Unreal Engine's source isn't in "IT" they are a developer. They are working on very specific problems unique to computer graphics or audio or AI or Animation etc. The person though who ensures that developer has the infrastructure they need isn't someone to be looked down on, they're just in a very different role. However when that developer says that they need 10TB of shared storage at 400MB/s to 5 users then you call IT. That's specifically *not* working two jobs that's using people where they are most productive. I see the hierarchy as such:

Physicists - Develop principles.
Fabrication Experts - User principles of physics to create better chips.
Chip Designers - Design processors which can "do work".
Fundamental Software Developers - Write the software to expose the hardware to regular developers. (OS, Drivers, File Systems, Runtimes, Networking Stacks, Compilers etc, Databases, etc.)
IT - Deploys and maintains the hardware designed by Chip Designers and software by the Systems Engineers doing the low level fundamental work necessary.
Developers - Those who write functional software to solve specific problems.
Users - People who use the software.

As I see it a fab engineer should understand physics, a chip designer should understand the limitations of fabrication, a systems engineer should understand chip design, IT should understand drivers and other low level systems engineering, Developers should know how to do limited deployments of their development environment.
Users should ideally be able to write tools to solve their problems.

But to use the obligatory car analogy, I'm not going to call a civil engineer to consult on how to tune the steering on a race car. I will call them and have them design a great race track to drive the car on, but their role is one of deploying and repairing infrastructure for cars to drive on, not to design the cars except where the two overlap by necessity.

Which was not under contention. The chasing of an irrational goal is rational, whether or not the goal is irrational. Which was what that was about.

I disagree: if your goal is irrational then no matter how rationally you go about pursuing it you are still acting irrationally.

Which is exactly what I meant by 'ignoring my points'.

I think we're talking at cross purposes. Would you mind telling me precisely which point you feel I haven't addressed and I'll attempt to address it.

Firstly, they found the only possible way of making a double guitar even more badass: adding that flame thrower to the end, making it the last word in guitars. That counts for a lot.

Secondly, I thought the lead acting was really, really good.

The support was a little weaker, but I didn't find it impinged.

Speaking of impressive camera work...

I left the film thinking (among other things) "my god, Tom Hardy is ***HUGE***".

Turns out eh's actually an inch shorter than Charlize Theron (though obviously rather stockier). I thought he must have been 6'4" from the film, at least.

I'm always amazed how effectively they can make someone look tall!

OK pedantic nit picking it is then.

You waded in mid-thread then smugly come up with padentic "clever" points which of course haven't been addressed to you personally because as I said you waded in mid thread.

Go pat yourself on the back for being awfully, awfully clever and then realise that you ruined the chance for a sensible discussion about an interesting topic by ignoring the context and trying to score points.

Especially after I've already shown that what you just wrote is incorrect by definition.

Huh? An irrational goal is irrational by definition because it's defined as an irrational one.

No goals are inherently rational or irrational.

Now that I disagree with. Goals are the result of emotion which is pretty much the epitome of irrationality.

In any case, you ignored my points on this topic

I thought I addressed them in a way you didn't like. If you count that as ignoring, then OK.

At our company we outsource all of our IT. All projects are run by the actual users. This works perfectly. 'IT' handles the things that we know they're good at: keeping the email up and running, maintaining servers, troubleshooting workstations etc. The users do what they're good at: solving industry specific problems.

I wouldn't bother contacting our IT before starting a project because the only requests I'll have for IT are possibly provisioning a new ______ server that we need for the project or having them integrate our development server into the network. Once we've got a project up and running we can then do a handoff meeting with IT on what they need to know to keep it running. "This service needs a _____ box with a _____ connection to the network. If the box dies, re-install ______ and configure _____ service like _____." They can then handle maintenance. For our company, IT is essentially a Colocation service.