Comment Re:Which is why we disguise cell towers (Score 1) 216
If the cellphone company chooses to comply with the court order, no warrant is needed.
Which companies voluntarily turn over customer location data to the police? Please name names.
If the cellphone company chooses to comply with the court order, no warrant is needed.
Which companies voluntarily turn over customer location data to the police? Please name names.
COBOL is an excellent example
Is it? How come I never see job ads for COBOL programmers? I know no one who uses it. I have often heard that it is used in "banks" or for "business" programming. But I know several people that work as programmers at banks, and none of them use COBOL or are aware of it being used at all. They are all Java shops. Same for programmers writing business logic. So I think that all these myths about demand for COBOL programmers is a load of hogwash.
Perhaps ADA would be another example?
Ada was oversold in the 1980s, and quickly developed a reputation for poor performance, and heavy resource requirements. Few systems were written in it, and even mission critical military systems (which Ada was designed for) could commonly get an exemption to use something more sensible.
Since you can't measure programming ability "somehow" or otherwise, you don't know what the curve would look like.
Except that you CAN measure it. Just give each person a few programming tasks that should take ten minutes or so. I do that all the time. It is called a "job interview". My experience is that most applicants are incapable of programming even trivial solutions, or even getting the syntax right
The distribution is not "U" shaped, and it is not normal (bell shaped). It is high on the left, and slopes downward to the right.
I think Morse needs to come back for data entry. Only one button needed.
Morse code would be one solution, and isn't that hard to learn. Voice input would be another. A small camera that can read sign language might work, but ASL requires two hands and would be hard to read from the wrist of one of the hands. Another solution would be to project a keyboard onto a surface, and then use a camera to read the taps. The watch could detect the wrist movement, and the tension in the tendons, to detect keys as the user typed on an "air" keyboard. But perhaps the best solution would be a cranial probe that could detect the letters or words as the user was thinking them.
I don't know if sloppy practice explains the earthquakes in Oklahoma, though.
The groundwater contamination is a serious issue, that needs to be resolved, probably through more frequent inspections and higher fines. The earthquakes are a trivial problem. They are small, and transitory. Once the frackers move on, the earthquakes will stop. Fracking has generated over a million jobs, adds hundreds of billions of domestic production to the US economy every year, and, by replacing coal with gas, has done more to reduce CO2 emissions than all other efforts combined. If the price of that is a few rattled windows in rural Oklahoma, then so be it.
I thought we were talking about IBM?
If that meeting with Bill Gates never happened, IBM would still have found someone to provide an OS for their PC. Apple would have still produced the Lisa, ushering in the GUI era. Only an idiot would minimize MS's influence on computing, but let's not pretend that we would all be using carbon paper and typewriters... the PC market was very active when the IBM clone steadily gained prominence, with several vendors of mouse-driven GUIs.
Can someone enlighten me as to why funky chemicals are needed to break rocks?
They are not needed to break the rocks, but to dissolve the hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are not normally soluble in water, so you need detergents or other chemicals to form an emulsion that can be pumped to the surface. After the hydrocarbons are separated, the "funky chemicals" are mostly recycled and pumped back down the hole. But they are temporarily stored in holding ponds, which can leak if not properly sealed. Some of the chemicals also leak because of bad seals on the pumps and pipe joints. It is unlikely that there is leakage directly from the shale, so the groundwater contamination is not an inherent problem with fracking, but rather with sloppy practices and corner cutting.
many users inexplicably believing that programming requires a "special mind", dividing people in to two groups: "can program" and "can never program".
This is not "inexplicable". It is obvious to anyone who has taught programming to beginners, or any type of introductory abstract math. About a third of the population is simply incapable of abstract reasoning. If you think otherwise, I invite you to come to my house, and I will give you a free dinner while you explain "vectors" to my 15 year old daughter. Good luck with that.
I mostly see the 'U' view of things in younger west coast programmers with fat wallets and a superiority complex
I am a west coaster, and have never heard of the "U" shape myth, and what you say makes no sense. What the "U" shape means is that there are many bad programmers, many great programmers, and almost no average programmers. Believing that greatness is common is the opposite of a "superiority complex".
I doubt that the "U" myth existed before the author of TFA made it up.
Done what, exactly? Created a command-line personal computer? There was a healthy marketplace full of those - some affordable, some expensive. Within a year or two of release of the Lisa, there were a bunch of windowing environments - some quite competitive like the Amiga, some terrible like Windows. I don't mean to dismiss the level of prestige that IBM brought to the table as far as businesses were concerned, but it's not as if businesses would not have eventually adopted PCs. Visicalc was already making PCs common in the business environment.
And when individual companies do this, like, oh, HP, they pay the price. So, it may be a widespread problem, but it is self-correcting.
While Carly was CEO, HP lost 65% of its market value. But she walked away with more than $100 Million. So how is that going to self correct?
Warp drive would involve fielding to warp space, not seeing the connection with this device.
If this device actually works, it means everything we think we know about physics is wrong. At that point, all bets are off, and anything may be possible. FTL travel is widely believed to be impossible, because mass approaches infinity as velocity approaches light speed. But if momentum isn't conserved, then we may be able to blow right through that limit. This is just like back in 1989, when cold fusion was first announced. The possibilities are endless.
Here they could have the key to warping space/time, and the first use is to putter along in orbit cheaply.
You know someone is a small scale thinker, when they miss the bus, and wish they had a Star Trek transporter device, so they could beam themselves to the next bus stop.
What I find ironic is that the people who wrote the basic items that are taken for granted, be it the Linux kernel, apache, the HTTP protocol, the IP protocol, Mosaic and its derivatives... are all people likely over 40+.
Sure, but those guys aren't hunting for jobs in the classifieds. By the time a programmer is 40+, they should have a deep network of friends and ex-co-workers, and can quickly find a new job based on their reputation. If they can't, and are instead replying to your Dice ad, then the odds are high that they are a turd.
Two wrights don't make a rong, they make an airplane. Or bicycles.