Comment Brilliant! (Score 1) 232
Now if only he can come up with an easily remembered acronym to remind people that they should keep these things simple as much as possible, or else they are stupid.
Now if only he can come up with an easily remembered acronym to remind people that they should keep these things simple as much as possible, or else they are stupid.
When I was their age, we had to use Wyse terminals, outside, IN THE SNOW. NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!
Wyse terminals? Luxury.
Makes me glad I'm one of the leading edge Millennials, one of the ones that grew up with Windows 95/DOS and all the associated bugginess and user-unfriendliness of the applications of that era. We actually had to learn how our computers worked and how to really get in and fix things. These later edge Millennials that got iPhones in middle school and high school have utterly no idea how any of this stuff works.
For reasons I don't understand, the media continues to refer to the trailing edge Millennials as technology whiz kids who have grown up with technology and are "technologically savvy", but to my way of thinking they really know nothing about technology at all. It takes absolutely no skill to use some Apple store approved iPhone app with a super simple, refined UI. It did take skill to try to install and run old DOS games and get all those crazy, primitive drivers to install, work, and not have conflicts with each other. Those issues led to a curiosity about computers, which led to me learning programming, which led to a computer engineer degree and ultimately a good career in IT, but had I grown up with an iPhone I wonder if it would ever have happened.
Oh, and let's not forget leading edge Millennials are phenomenal typers too, because we grew up with Instant Messaging clients, not texting with our thumbs. Not a bad skill to have in IT.
-Born in late 1983.
Screw X and Millenials, we need a new label for the DOS generation that needed a few custom boot menu options to play our video games and knows how to wrangle TSRs, himem, and emm386.
Excel spreadsheets are what "The Business" uses when "you IT folks" can't make a "reasonable" system that retains all data forever fast enough.
Is it too late to eradicate The Business from workspeak? It's gone too far where I spend most of my days, and now we have a guy who will refer to a single person as The Business and invoke The Business when asking for anything he doesn't want us to question. In one email exchange with him going back and forth talking about The Business, I deduced that The Business really did not know what it wanted and was making nonsensical requests. In trying to get a representative for The Business that I could talk to directly, he told me that The Business was just one of our BSAs with a tenuous grasp of technology.
This sounds very much no more complex than the robot CMU had wandering around the halls in one of the buildings in the mid 90s (forget the name). You could tell it to go to some room and take a picture or deliver a message. It was fairly large, and could probably hold 10 lbs. The main difference seems to be an attached ipad for ratings.
This sounds similar to my experiences in an engineering program at a state school, just replace "Indians" with "Chinese", and instead of the TA either being in collusion or just didn't care, it was the professor that didn't care. Same sort of project, except the program was run during class on the screen during project evaluation day where we could see what everybody came up with. There was a project from a previous semester that got an A which every group had passed around. Of the 10 or so teams, probably 3 delivered what looked to be original projects, a few more looked like they had changed the UI a bit, some took the UI and and just changed the font/color, and the 3 teams of Chinese students all turned in the same project unaltered in any way. The project was 80% of our final grade, and they got As.
This devastating raid resulted in the expulsion of 0.00025% of India's students.
I'm pretty sure this has always been the case. The first time I was conscious of it was during the unabomber case when all of the news outlets were going through Ted Kaczynski's past to find the narrative they wanted. It's just a lot easier now.
Try a real e-reader, not that Sony piece of crap. I would have thrown that Sony against the wall the first time it took an hour to do anything. Try a bottom-end Kindle. It's way better than what you describe.
The first e-reader I had was a Sony touch. It worked really well for me, but I'm also just reading fiction on it and not scientific journals. It never took an hour to start up for me. I tried using it with the europe lonely planet ebook on a road trip once, and it was a bit useless since the maps and any images took forever to load. That sort of thing is not really what it was designed for though. For just reading normal books, it was great. I liked it better than the Nook and Kindle offerings at the time.
Can I buy a superfish loaded Lenovo laptop now, then join a lawsuit?
Children have a greater chance of getting stuck by lightning than catching measles.
Kinda makes sense that people who commonly do risk assessment would choose not to vaccinate.
Especially when the majority of polio cases in the united states are caused by vaccinations than any other sources combined.
PS:Iâ(TM)ve had both vaccinations.
The risk of getting struck by lightning is pretty low, but I'm still not going to stand in an open field with a metal rod during a thunderstorm.
As many people on Slashdot have probably noticed, there are more than a few geeks who are infected with Smartest Motherfucker in the Universe syndrome. Since they've gone through their lives generally being a good deal more intelligent than their peers, but with poor social skills, it can lead to an arrogance that they are smarter than basically anyone else, and that their knowledge is supreme not just in their field, but in all fields.
Well that then is ripe for anti-scientific shit like anti-vaxxer crap. They believe they are in on a secret that normal people are just too stupid to see, that they are smarter and better than those sheep doctors and so on and so forth. It feeds their ego on their intellect to believe they know better than the medical establishment.
So this surprises me not at all. SV has all the right elements to be a hotbed of this kind of shit.
I am really glad I went to a "smart" high school program because of this. Once I got into a crowd of other Smartest Motherfuckers, I realized that I really wasn't, and amongst the Smartest Motherfuckers, I was only about average. Then I graduated and went to college and was like "wait, where are all the other Smartest Motherfuckers?". Then I went and got a real job at Some Company that's nothing special, and I've largely forgotten what I learned in high school.
There is NO LINK to autism from vaccines....They don't use the chemicals in question anymore, and even if they did the link was disproven.
Not to mention that we now KNOW what causes autism and it's NOT mercury exposure as a child.
So go grab your kids and take them to the pediatrician and get them vaccinated unless the doctor has a reason they shouldn't be.
When did this happen? What is the cause?
Go into any whole-foods in Silicon Valley, and you'll see plenty of herbal medicines that do nothing but empty people's wallets. Silicon Valley isn't some kind of pro-science paradise.
I see the same thing where I live...I don't usually see many people shopping in that area though.
Being a self-perceived-intelligent pig-headed engineer myself, I think you're missing a critical component in that description. I'm right, until proven otherwise. Show me a trustworthy test, show me trustworthy data, show me trustworthy studies, show me proof from a respectable authority that I'm wrong and I will happily change my mind and apologize to you for wasting your time in having to convince me.
Not everybody seems capable of determing what sources are trustworthy and what sources are not. Combine the same self-perceived-intelligence and pig-headded-ness with a distrust of "government" or "the man", and there you have it. At that point, the "mainstream" "trustworthy" sources are just a part of the conspiracy, so the only sources to be trusted are those on the fringe that are supressed and bringing you the real truth.
I have a good friend who is a very smart autodidact, but also a massive skeptic. You could probably put him in the "holocaust denier" camp because of this. I've gotten into arguments with him about it a couple times, and the sources that he always brings up are aryan nation affiliated internet forums or postings on these forums linking to sources elsewhere. The main contention is the number of Jewish holocaust deaths. Of course, the sources that I cite to counter his arguments are all part of the Isreali Jewish conspiracy.
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
