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Comment Re:Or, stay low tech ... (Score 1) 133

Me, I just keep using old-school lab books. Unless I lose them in a fire, I can usually track down something quickly enough to not bother with anything fancier.

I use A4 refil pads. Pages can be taken out and held together with treasury tags while they are still being worked on, placed in ring binders for long term storage, and -- my personal favourite -- scanned and stored digitally.

Having used touchscreen, graphics tablets, and several stylus variants, I've come to the conclusion that there really is no replacement for paper when it comes to non-ascii content creation. The only thing paper can't do is digitally be in two places at once. Scanning helps with that, but the result is typically a non-editable file.

Comment Re:Best course is to give them working examples (Score 1) 606

Give the students the task of automating their builds.

Screw that. Give them a spindle of CDs and tell them that you want a complete rips in mp3, FLAC, AAC, and in multiple bitrates with appropriate tags from CDDB. For advanced students, give them a spindle of dvds and mkvtoolnix and tell them you want the works.

By the time they've wriiten their own ripping scripts, most of them will grok the command line completely.

Comment Re:How does advanced CS have any tie to culture? (Score 0) 612

CS culture is American male nerd culture. It's the culture of 20th century sci-fi, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, popular science, memorising digits of pi, tech gadgets, of course computers and coding.

Weird Al basically covered the entire gamut of this culture in his parody White and Nerdy. The fact that he explicitly linked being "white" with "nerdy" leads me to believe that nerd culture in the US is viewed under the such racial spectrum at least in part.

On a personal note, another aspect of CS/nerd culture which I have observed -- and which I suppose would be described as a male aspect -- is excessive bordering on the absurdest competitiveness. Memorising digits of pi is a classic example of this, but you see typical "nerd-up-man-ship" on display in Slashdot threads all the time. Who knows more obscure facts, or more pedantic details and so forth. It's a constant and often wearying aspect of nerd culture.

As they relate to CS culture specifically, these aspects are most obviously expressed in the recent rise of the "brogrammer" culture. If there was a part of CS culture that could be described as "white and male", I suppose that would be (and increasingly large) it. While programmers are not a homogeneous block, their (sub)cultures -- and public perception of them -- can be.

Comment Re:lets work on getting folks THERE first (Score 2) 365

4 after everything is tested and stable we start sending Managers

4.5 Rot and decay quickly sets it. Critical systems begin to fail and resources dwindle as engineers and scientists responsible for upkeep and maintenance are overwhelmed with red-tape and paperwork, and eventually outnumbered by a vast legion of administrative staff who inexplicably are given decision making responsibility in MB Beta.

The last computer log transmission from MB Beta recorded that the colonists died enmasse shortly after senior management voted to divert oxygen supplies from life support systems to more cost productive use in smelting facilities, leading to a 400% increase in executive bonuses in the quarter. Company stock soared on expectations of an imminent government bailout.

Comment Re:Enforcement (Score 1) 365

If any Earth Nation expects to shoot down transit flights to or from the moon to enforce their paper claim, the ramifications will be far more severe than if they simply did nothing.

However, if they choose to use tarriffs and protectionism to enforce their claims then the ramifications will be even more serious than that.

Comment Rent Seeking Revolution (Score -1) 356

Ladies and Gentlemen; Our civilisation has given rise to many world altering revolutions. From the agricultural revolution, to the industrial revolutions, to the digital revolution, our society, economy and culture have undergone massive change and improvement.

But now we stand on the cusp of a new revolution, greater than all that has ever come before. Ladies and Gentlemen we have entered the age of the Rent Seeking Revolution.

No longer will enterprise be constrained by land, labour, or capital or competition. All that enterprise requires now is connections. With the right connections to the state, its resources, and its law making process, entrepreneurs can seek Rent with impunity. Legal Monopolies, favoured taxation rates, grants, credits, tariffs, with enough leverage even a direct tap on demand into the public treasury.

The Future is Rent. In finance, insurance, real estate, and now even heavy industries; No longer will toil or responsibility be prerequisites for success. Now, with the right connections, enterprises can have the State channel funds, taxes, and tolls directly to favoured private companies. The Wealth of entire nations channelled to the bold few who move first in these new times.

Rent is Law. Law is Rent. It is pointless to resist this new human revolution. Democratic, Socialist, and Industrial Luddities cannot stand against the swelling tide of Rentiers waiting to inveigle themselves whole new businesses out of nothing but state backed favour. You can either party all night in this brave new world, or be left outside paying the bill. The risk is yours to take!

Comment Re:European Union flag (Score 1) 169

As an EU citizen you could try to change the institution.

But he's not an EU citizen. He's French. The only people who can claim in any sense to be "EU Citizens" are the various political classes across the continent. They (mis)manage, decide and direct the operation of their own countries and the EU in general, in the direction they choose, with or without the consent or support of their general populations.

As un-democratic as that sounds, in the post-war period this attitude among the EU political/executive classes did a lot of good: It stopped the Europeans from fighting one another.

However, like all elitist enterprises, the EU was inevitably taken over by vested interests. Right now, the EU's principal purpose is to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the general population to the financial/banking class. In a few years, this may still be the case, or general wealth will be going to some other group, but the essential principle is that because the EU is not a democracy it will operate for the benefit of whichever group currently controls it.

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