Interestingly, this plays into the previous argument that sucking up the otherwise unemployed into menial, subsidized jobs is moderately preferable to just having them on welfare or committing crimes.

In reality, it's all very complex these days because implementing a balanced economic-social-contract requires inordinately enlightened voters.

Have you considered that "having a well-rounded liberal arts education" is critical to employability? It is. If you can cogently discuss the Byzantine Empire, perhaps do Calculus, deliberate the nature of political systems, and can craft a decent metaphor, it says something about your adaptability. That's what employers want, and it's why they considered a real education to be a marker for career-material. While the "customer" sees university as a gateway to employment, they apparently fail to realize why it ever was a gateway.

This fact is lost on people like Ms. Thompson. It is apparently lost on you as well. I'm sorry that you feel that employers are demanding that you have evidenced an ability to adapt functionally to a wide array of subjects. I'm sorry that you don't like that they are more concerned with their studying their subjects than justifying why you want to pay to take a class. Bottom line, you want to pay because your employer wants you to learn something there. If you don't like that, don't get a job. If you want to understand why, ask the employers.

This reminds me of the demotivational poster for Consultants. It states "If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made prolonging the problem." The watering down of education is precisely a matter of extracting value from the reputation of the institution. It's literally about capitalizing on the fact that you don't understand why universities are valuable, and it similarly capitalizes on the fact that you don't want to. Yeah consumer! Go ahead, shoot yourself in the foot. It's what Ms. Thompson did.

When universities become trade schools, it's no wonder that you have less chance of getting a job with that degree. Laud the productizing of education as being "what the customer wants". This article clearly shows that this particular segment is only good for taking their money and hopefully redirecting it into something useful. Something that actually generates some educated citizens. Something reinforces the benefits that they provide to our economy. Something that preserves and advances the knowledge of mankind. You know, a *university*.

I just hope that the people in charge of universities don't forget that's what they're doing.

Note that certs can and are used for things other than SSL on DNS names. In fact, the field used for the domain name is "Common Name". The CN field is used for a dozen things depending on what the cert is used for.

We should probably blame Netscape and everyone else who pushed using X.509 unchanged instead of trivially adding a field that required a valid DNS name.

This is a mismatch between the X.509 standard and how browsers use it. Most interesting is that the browsers have the information to correctly parse it, whereas the CAs don't have the information to do so, unless they are only issuing certs for SSL. As someone who would like to see widely usable PKI outside of the web-browser, I'd really rather fix the browsers than break the certs.

Microsoft is a marketing company more than a software company. This is a deft stroke of shaping opinion. Why?

Because the tacit assumption is that Open Sourcers focus on price, not value. They want to provoke the predictable "Microsoft software is too expensive" response. It lets them cast Open Sourcers as not being able to bridge the gap between technology and product.

Technology does something specific. A product solves a problem. All that this line of commentary does is to underscore Microsoft's message that Open Source isn't ready for business. Railing about expense without attacking the core problem of value only plays into Microsoft's hand.

What's more tragic is that they may be right. There are precious few Open Source technologies that are developed and focused to the point of being a product.

I did a control system for a covered skid that contained three natural gas compressors. They had to pump it up to 3600 psi (245 atmospheres). It was for fueling vehicles. The pressure had to be that high so that the tank would equalize to a reasonable pressure / gas content in under 10 minutes.

It was 40 degrees F in the winter and 95 degrees F in the summer. Took about 6 months so I got to feel both. It also reeked of natural gas, was greasy, oily, etc. There were metal shavings and fumes from all of the machining and welding.

I also worked a similar gig off and on for about two years involving a circuit-board drilling operation. Imagine walking through a factory floor with acid baths and various machinery to work on scoring machines and massive computer-controlled drills. The drills were pretty serious (60krpm) and they each had a 1.5 ton block of granite just to dampen vibration. To this day, it's the only computerized machine I've worked on that required a pneumatic hook-up.

Here's a photo of the drills from the internet: http://www.cerambus.com/equip/images/4-MK%205%20DR.JPG

As of Python 2.6, look at the multiprocessing module.

The shared memory feature is nice.

As of Python 2.6, look at the multiprocessing module.

Look at the multiprocessing module.

Not only does it implement processes in a way that is quite similar to the existing threading implementation, but it provides a ton of synchronization / locking primitives that work seamlessly across processes. This includes the ability to utilize shared memory. It's crazy that this module doesn't get more press, because there's nothing quite as easy in most other languages.

Actually, cartesian products and joins aren't gone. It turns out that they just end up being done client side.

It's the tragedy of "join-less" databases. Joins do something that you need. The lack of joins forces people to correctly normalize, which ironically they should have been doing anyway. It doesn't take away any genuine need to join though. :(

In the end, the problem is that people just want a "default tool". They don't want to think about their requirements for data consistency. The really scary bit is that while RDBMses are the "default tool" of yesterday and slacker DBs are the "default tool" of tomorrow, neither of them are really the "problem".

The "default tool" attitude IS the problem. Unless you carefully weigh your data consistency requirements, you shouldn't be making that call at all.

I welcome the slackers and all of their new options along the spectrum of speed versus consistency. It's just that most of the people developing applications scare the shit out of me. They're so cavalier (or should I say, "agile", or maybe "pragmatic") about requirements that it's truly disturbing.

That said, if you're really interested in all of the options, I also recommend checking out memcachedb, memcacheq, and redis.

Maybe it's a declarative language?

I don't know why, but "They dropped dolomite on it." made me think of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072895/

Actually, this isn't that much voodoo.

It's just saying that, if someone has a 1/10,000 chance of being wrong, their assurance that there is a 1/1,000,000,000 chance of something isn't that good of a bet. In other words, if you want the latter level of certainty, you don't really have it, because of the fallibility of the research itself.

This is actually rather obvious. If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%. Or something like that.

Assuming his brother Jethro is just as bad (but uncorrelated) with him, then their dual recommendation that it will go flat only gets you 25.25% certainty, not 1% (or 0.01%). The numbers may not be exactly right (my stats are rusty), but you get the point.

Basically, they're saying that the research provides a wider error bound than it may claim, assuming that scientists uniformly make logical mistakes--which they very probably do.

The implication, then, is that the LHC estimates should be independently done by other teams. This is, well, the basis of the scientific method, so essentially this study provides a statistical analysis of what we already know--after enough work, science gets results. Of course, the base theories assumed by all of the researchers could be wrong, which would be unfortunate, but the LHC is going to nail that one pretty quickly. :)

This is not surprising, but not voodoo either.

Free markets != no regulation. Unregulated markets generate monopolies. These are clearly bad.

For a market to function as free, it must be uncontrolled by any coercive forces. Monopolies control markets. Most big corporations try to do so today. It's appropriately called "Marketing", which doesn't just mean "advertising" as most people think.

Governments are pretty much the only response to that, short of riots. Democracy, being a civilized mob, is effectively that. Of course, the government can fail at keeping the market free, but it's hardly worse than the alternative.

At some point, you've got to draw a line that says "This is the limit of a player's coercive effect on a market". The government is the only place to do that. Unless you think the buyers should. Oh wait, we're (in theory) a democracy, same thing.

Do you live in a magical world where markets are free without government intervention? If you "criminalize" market manipulation and then get the government to "enforce the law", you just regulated the market.

Similarly, free market != 100% employment. Especially when the market trades in a currency. Monetary policy is a big deal. You can't avoid this without participating in civics. I'm sorry that you're civically lazy. Time to get back to work.

If you want our democracy to function, I'm fully willing to support you fixing that. If you want our market to function freely, I'll gladly support whatever regulations will achieve that. The problem is, in general, a lack of civic spirit. People don't want to work together to make the government functional. A lot of it is due to people with highly unrealistic ideologies. People that are not unlike you.

Ummm, Hobbes wasn't really predicting any sort of future. The entire "nasty, brutish, and short" thing is presupposed upon a continual condition of war. I don't think that Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine support any statement that war doesn't cause a man's life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". He seemed to imply that humankind's natural state was war, which is debatable, but not entirely unsupported by average conditions for much of the world's populace.

That said, predictions are based on assumptions. We produce tons more food, and we're trashing our coastlines with the agricultural run-off. We're producing less food by fishing. Right now, it's a drop in the bucket. What percentage of the world's food is disappears when fishing is no longer viable?

Of course, we can change course for most things. We can fight run-off and protect fishing. The whole point of TFA was that we can't reverse dissolved carbon dioxide levels or ocean temperatures. Similarly, we can't immediately un-melt glaciers. We can't adapt ourselves out of basic facts of chemistry. We're working on relativistic physics, though.

Humankind's ability to adapt has dick to do with heat and carbon in the ocean. The only thing we need to do is hit a certain carbon-level. If you think getting the Chinese or Indians to curb industrializing will be as easy as getting people to switch from horses to cars, I truly fear for us all. I suppose we could bomb them, but I don't think that'll help.

The horse analogy is a good one. However, we can't innovate ourselves out of every problem. When we abandon this rock as unlivable, I'm sure someone will point to innovations in spaceflight. That's great. Of course, we could have just not flooded our coastlines, killed our oceans, and wiped out our forests.

It appears your argument is "we've always found a way before". Well, that's just as good of as the assumption that we'd all have been riding horses right now. Apparently not liking the result of a model somehow correlates it with failed models.

Meanwhile, the people who are going to try to innovate and prevent our way out of this mess will be paying attention to good research and data like this study, instead of trivializing it out of some sort of fearful reliance on manifest destiny.

This should freak you out. Maybe not a lot, but it should be of concern. There is absolutely no solid reason to say "it's probably not accurate". There is reason to say "let's be calm about this". In the meantime, let's just hope nature doesn't decide to take us down a peg.