To quote the chair of my old Classics department:
"A liberal arts education prepares you to fully enjoy a life it will never help you to afford". Equally apropos, "Majoring in philosophy prepares you to seek the answers to life's big questions -- like, 'do you want fries with that?'"

Personally, I find that a liberal arts education has value and is worthy of pursuit. However, unless you have a head start in life, or are prepared to suffer, you may not want to actually major in something soft, or at least not end there.

Studying literature helps you to understand that words matter and how to parse text for meaning. That's valuable if you decide to become a lawyer, but then you're making money from having studied the law, not from having read Milton. Likewise, studying history ought to help provide ample examples of decisions having long tails of consequence.

Whenever this topic comes up, I find it helpful to reference John Adams:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

At the macro level, he's talking about the struggle for independence, followed by the struggle to build a functioning state that can support a vibrant culture. At the micro level, he's saying that a family's arch is usually begun by a struggle in one generation get their children educated with the hopes that those children will study practical arts and sciences that will get them employed. They can then, hopefully, build a fortune that would allow the third generation the opportunity to study more "frivolous" topics.

the tl;dr is that if you're the first in your family to go to college, you're probably better off not majoring in anything with the word "studies" in the title.

I came here to say much the same thing. The push to "MVP" seems to be more like a group job interview than anything else at some of these places. I doubt that anyone seriously believes that their "app" is going to turn into a multi-billion dollar product company. They mostly want to get bought out for some absurdly huge amount and then go do their app with someone else paying the overhead. Some of them may rinse and repeat.

Breaking up Facebook would be like breaking up Standard Oil. All that would happen would be that there would no be more companies playing in the social media space, crowding out the startups even further, and Zuckerberg would get stock in all of the little baby companies just like JDR. JDR got richer as a result, and so would Zuckerberg. Not only would it mean that there are shallower pockets to acquire their toy company, it would mean that there is more noise to the signal and they'd have a harder time standing out in order to be approached.

Consider the following:

Of the cities listed, the most "disorganized" are older, east coast cities. The exception being Atlanta, which was largely burned down and re-built. Midwestern cities have a more regular pattern because they were more planned out, as opposed to organically grown. Exceptions involve unique geographical features that were hard to over-lay a grid on top of.

Miami is mostly new construction since the 1940s. Manhattan is old, but geographically constrained in a way that made the grid sensible, and if you look to lower Manhattan, there is more fan-out and the look of natural growth. Mid-to-up town is more planned.

It's like the irregularity of east coast states vs states which were created by the federal government based on planning. Wyoming and Colorado are squares, Virginia not so much.

I'm not a fancy, big-city civil engineer or urban planner, but it seems to me that this just confirms that "places intentionally built have an intentional outlay"

If the pay is junk, it means costs are down. Investors like to hear that, donâ(TM)t they?

Basically. We got 3 weeks off bankable. We could buy back another week by deferring pay up front and then cashing it out when you took the time. It was a little weird. And it made for getting extremely mad if a problem got escalated when i was on purchased pto. One of many reasons i am not there anymore (or doing ops at all)

I had a job that let you purchase additional PTO. Mostly these days now, I just get "unlimited PTO" because it doesn't show up as a liability on the books, you can't cash it out if you leave, and most people won't take as much as they probably could. Current job insists that I take "At least three weeks a year" and also does a holiday shutdown. no complaints here so far.

The article is not very well written. He also doesn't give examples, and said as much. That said, it doesn't mean that Silicon Valley isn't a bubble of group think, weird-ass ideas, and other such things. Examples have been repeatedly satirized on HBO's "Silicon Valley," including:

* Quit college and go live in an incubator, because you know, who cares about a well-rounded education
* "making the world a better place"
* "Blood Boys" and parabiosis.
* The reverse scarlet letter syndrome with the Christian in this past week's episode
* The Matrix as a pseudoreligion (living in a computer simulation)
* The obsession with "the singularity"

If you spend five minutes on twitter looking at tech people you'll see it to varying degrees.

You have a concentration of people that are generally fairly intelligent but aren't necessarily cut out for dealing with people (nerds) trying to create a nerd paradise while being taken advantage of by much more savvy people who actually control the money. They're probably no weirder than nerds of the past, but they have the platform to broadcast their weirdness and enough money for people to take them at least somewhat seriously. Additionally, because the are living in a bubble of their own creation they assume that their intelligence in one area conveys to other areas as well.

The "omg Trump" aspect of the article is really just related to an on-going, ever-present aspect of society. Nerds are weird and that weirdness has led to nerds being the traditional victims of bullying. This is the soft of thing that causes resentment, and that resentment is probably manifested in the desire to push "disruptive" technology which is accelerating the destabilization of the economy. The desire to "automate people out of a job" can't really be articulated without a whiff of malice to it. Perhaps there are some people that really think the world will be like Star Trek -- but remember, the world of Star Trek comes after a major global war. "AI" may have the prospect of greatly improving lives, but if not rolled out and implemented correctly, it's going to make life miserable for a whole lot of normal people. The current issues around data collection and analytics, which are stepping stones towards AI systems, is a current manifestation of that every bit as much as automating factory work away is.

The current and future economic issues are, in large part, what drove many people to vote for Trump. His distaste for silicon valley is palpable. His goals and not those of silicon valley. His base is not aligned with silicon valley. But the Trump issue is more or less a side-show. He can be a useful stand-in for the divergence between "normal, every day Americans" and Silicon Valley types, but it's hard to say it's all about Trump.

which would be why zukerberg says "meh". The Facebook platform may lose a user, but Facebook the company hasn't lost a user.

It seems the problem is the following:

* Facebook's business model is aggregating user data in order to allow marketers to "micro-target" ads at people with stuff they are most likely to click on

* Facebook is upset when other people use their APIs to get access to data of a subset of users, and then do their own analytics, presumably to allow them to buy ads at a cheaper rate.

* People are upset because a company associated, with some degrees of separation, with Trump, used the technique to find people to "target," and this is some how a "data breach" and "interference in democracy," but when Facebook gave the same type of data to the Obama or Clinton campaigns, it was "the campaign tactics of the future" and "an excellent use of technology and analytics".

So, from what I gather, the controversy is almost entirely to do with people discovering that Facebook isn't on their "side", that they're a company that exists to make money off of data about people, and that, worst of all, not just Democrats no how to do something with data. Even worse, one of the people involved as a Russian name, and that means that Putin did it with "z0mg h4x0rz" or something.

Critically, let us think -- anyone that was targeted with ads had it done because analysis of their data suggested that they were receptive, probably due to already agreeing. Therefor, what the hell difference did it make? Probably none.

Assuming that technology or access to information is going to decrease boredom is not a new assumption, and it wasn't really true with cable/satellite tv, the early internet, etc. either. These things just allow boring people to be boring faster. Go outside and do something. Live a life. Sitting around consuming content and complaining you're bored isn't a life.

Trusted Solaris isn't so much secure as it was Common Criteria evaluated. Security is also not Dragonfly BSD's focus, so I am curious as to why it would be mentioned. OpenBSD is, of course, an option, and if security is a primary concern, it is a perfectly good choice. I would also suggest HardenedBSD, if you would like to have the features (ZFS, DTrace, Jails) of FreeBSD coupled with security improvements based on the PaX/GRSecurity design.

NetBSD also has PaX-style memory hardening, btw. OpenBSD's userland W^X works quite differently (and will make programs abort at mmap time, rather than mapping a page as write-only and dying if it is written to).

I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually kind of like WSL. It isn't perfect, and it isn't a "real" VM (it uses a sort of kbi translation layer and is more like a jail or a container than a vm), so some things obviously don't work, particularly system tools. But that's mostly fine. I never liked Cygwin, going back years. Windows Services for Unix was cumbersome and weird. WSL doesn't suffer from as many problems, IMO.

For my home hobby workflow, being able to pop open WSL and have all the bits of Ubuntu that I care about available to write Python code, connect to a database running in RHEL7.4 in VMWare Workstation, and not have the additional overhead of another VM if I don't need it, adding a GUI, or whatever else have you is pretty nice. I have all the Windows software that I want, all the *nix tools that I need, and I can get on with doing my project now that I'm too old to have configuring my computer be my project. (And I don't want another Mac. They keep getting worse with every release, IMO).

Is it a solution for those writing systems software that requires a full Linux kernel? Definitely not. Is it "good enough" for people doing some light dev or working with data sets? Yup, at least to an extent.

FreeBSD is now the Rust of operating systems, without the memory protection...

The best I can figure is, they leveraged two pillars of a free society: freedom of press and freedom of speech, by posting on open social media platforms and buying ads. Some people donâ(TM)t like the outcome and refuse to accept that after 30+ years of dealing with Clintons in the political spotlight, enough people in strategically important locations were sick of it to not vote for her. It must have been a few months of social media lies by Russians!

The burried lead here is essentially that Democrats are insisting that Trump voters are easily misled idiots incapable of rational thought. BUT if they had believed different social media bias and voted for Clinton, then they would obviously be independent thinkers.

I didnâ(TM)t vote for Trump. I think heâ(TM)s crass and shallow. But I didnâ(TM)t vote for Hillary because I donâ(TM)t want her to be president either. I will also say this much: I have no appreciation for those who say âoeif you donâ(TM)t agree with me you are an easily duped idiot who made up his mind because of a tweet.â

But think how much fun it will be to watch Richard Hammond crash a Ferrari into oblivion like he did with the Rimac!