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Comment Exactly why we need a more open immigration policy (Score 5, Insightful) 567

1. Advanced material wealth and higher education suppress birth rates.
2. Advanced material wealth and higher education attract immigrants.
3. Emigrating is difficult under the best and most legal circumstances. Therefore, immigrants tend to be more ambitious and harder working than average.
4. Consequently, immigrants can supplement native birth in broadening the economic base, while simultaneously adding economic dynamism via their own ambition and the more generalized effects of cultural diffusion.
5. Profit!!!
6. GOTO 1.

Comment Basketball is a gateway drug for nerds to sports. (Score 2, Informative) 97

All of the "Why the hell are we talking about sports on Slashdot?" commentary above is to be expected... but let's get this established for the record: You people are talking about of your ass.

To the uninitiated, watching basketball can feel tedious and repetetive, with guys running back and forth, making similar looking movements, play being stopped for unfathomable reasons, and so forth. If you experience this sensation, it is because you are a noob. N00B. You are not trained to understand the numerous split-second decisions that are being executed within the span of a 24-second shot clock. Of all professional sports, watching basketball has the steepest learning curve. That is reason #1 why it is the perfect spectator sport for geeks.

This leads to the next point, which is that basketball is the most cognitively demanding of all professional sports for the player as well. Because the game is has a relatively small number of players on each side, and each player faces an ongoing series of 1-on-1 interactions with those players over the course of a quarter, a game, or a season. Good players study detailed scouting reports of their opponents in each game which details their strenghts, weaknesses, and habits. If you are going to defend Steve Novak knowing he is a phenominal 3-point shooter but not good on the dribble drive, then you are going to close in on him so that you can bother his jump shooting. But a guy who has a strong ability to drive will get right past you if you get too close to him on defense. If you're defending a guy like Kobe Bryant who can both shoot and drive, you've got a much harder job. Another player on your team may have to offer "help defense" which means rotating off of his own man to help you defend. That means the NEXT player over on the court has to notice that the help defender has left his own man, and the next guy "rotates" over so that the one guy on the floor being left open is as far away from the ball as possible. If the player on offense then chooses to throw a pass to the open man, the entire defensive lineup needs to rotate back into proper position. Good team defense requires the coordination of a dance team while improvising like jazz musicians. So that's reason #2 for nerds to like basketball. The stereotypical "dumb jock" will not excel in this game.

Actually, I have to cite another example for reason #2 because I know I'm going to get pushback on the notion that people who devote their lives to physical activity might possibly be really smart: Guys who have phenomenal bodies and weak minds can be successful in pro ball assuming they don't get injured... but eventually their limited mental agility makes them predictable, which makes them less effective. "The book" is out on them and they become easy to counter. Once they start getting near 30 years old, they lose their elite athleticism as well and become largely useless. Guys like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Ray Allen who continue to be highly effective, star-level players into their mid-30s do so because they have tremendous minds for the game they are playing.

"Moneyball" was largely about using statistical analysis to acquire players who were undervalued by other teams because the old-school methods of player evaluation were unscientific and based on folklore and assumptions regarding pro baseball. Baseball is, in video game parlance, a "turn based" game. It is slow. Everyone has a clearly defined role. The mathematics involved in baseball analytics isn't trivial, but it's roughly akin to "value investing" in financial terms. It's harder than balancing your checkbook but it ain't rocket science. OTOH, basketball analytics really *IS* rocket science. Basketball is chaotic and non-deterministic by nature. Outcomes result from a rapidly cascading series of interrelated events. Quantifying this is possible, but it is really, really hard. The Moneyball revolution has led to many NBA teams hiring and retaining full-time analytics teams where statisticians and data miners vie to determine who should be drafted or traded for. Or which players on the roster should be on the floor together, or kept the hell away from each other. So reason #3 then is that basketball provides endless opportunities for you to argue with people about whose statistical models are good, and whose are total crap.

But hey, don't take my word for it. Or Paul Allen's. Or Malcom Gladwell's. Or MIT. Here's some resources for those who aren't married to their own stereotypes:

Basketball on Paper by Dr. Dean Oliver.
Mathletics by Wayne Winston.
This NY Times article describes how an otherwise anonymous Small Forward named Shane Battier uses careful study of player tendencies to be an indespensible member of his team.

Admittedly, I don't expect to change a lot of minds here. But knee-jerk haters need to STFU.

Comment There is only ONE way to do this successfully. (Score 1) 279

American soldiers have to pull the trigger. Period. Any "anti-theft" modification to an existing weapon system is either going to going to be vulnerable to cheap circumvention or is going to take far too long to develop and implement to be relevant for this conflict. Or both for that matter.

This is a political problem, not a technology problem, and not a logistics problem. If NPR can put American reporters on the front lines in Aleppo, then SOCOM can insert and extract anyone they need to at any point. That's not a solution to the political problem either. Even if special forces personnel got in and out without being noticed, it would be impossible to deny US involvement and be believed. At that point, you might as well just do what we did in Lybia: Establish air superiority, pure and simple.

Personally, I suspect that we haven't gotten more involved in Syria specifically because of the election cycle. Our "I got your back" strategy in Libya was very successful but outside of the circle of foriegn policy nerds, the administration got surprisingly little credit for a creative solution that saved thousands of lives and manufactured a lot of goodwill in the region. With that tepid public reaction, there was no way were they going to stick their feet in the Syrian swamp before today. Assuming a re-election is secured, you can expect US involvement in bringing down Assad to move back to the front burner. Our foreign policy goals with respect to both Iran and Israel are too important to let this bump along indefinitely.

Comment Prior Art? (Score 3, Interesting) 98

If the Twin Peaks patent is on GPL-violating code, then that would seem to me (IANAL) to be a clear and direct example of prior art. You'd have a case of an entity stealing work, then patenting it, and then attacking the people they stole from. That could be an incredibly embarassing thing for Twin Peaks. OTOH, if the GPL infringement is on unrelated code, then I would imagine that there could be seperate verdicts that each could be found guilty on. The question there would be: Are the damages comparable enough to force a settlement?

Comment First step, don't look for "passion." (Score 3, Insightful) 454

Religiosity in Operating Systems is a character flaw, not a strength. Clearly this is going to be a hard concept for you to work your head around because you yourself are evangelical about UNIX. If you find somebody who is evangelical about Windiows, you're basically asking for interpersonal conflict as this engineer with "passion" for Windows is going to feel outnumbered and isolated if your whole team uses emotional language like you do.

What you' are REALLY looking for are skills and atrributes that are OS-agnostic while still demonstrating serious practical experience with Microsoft server products:

  • Does your candidate demonstrate an analytical, problem solving mindset?
  • Does your candidate show the ability to play nicely with others?
  • Does your candidate demonstrate a sense of personal accountability for the work that they do?

If you don't feel comfortable saying "yes" to all the above questions, then all the nuts and bolts technical stuff means nothing. Once these fundamental questions have been answered, there are some specific technical avenues to explore with your future Windows sysadmin:

  • Ask them how familiar they are with Powershell, and see if they can cite examples of where they used Powershell to create a technical solution or make their jobs easier through automation.
  • Ask them if they have ever worked to integrate Active Directory with other LDAP sources

There are a bunch of technical questions you probably need to ask that I can't possibly suggest to you, because I don't know the details of your envirionment. But these two are mandatory. Powershell is a scripting language developed to handle all kinds of administrative and automation needs for a system administrator, and it was written by two UNIX guys. If your future Windows admin understands and appreciates Powershell, they not only have a skillset that is going to be demonstratably useful in the future, they will be more likely to "think like a UNIX guy" than someone who went to an MSCE puppy mill. The AD/LDAP integration question is the one thing I know about your environment. If you're going to operate UNIX and Windows servers in the same ecossytem, some level of integration is inevitable and making sure the guy on the Windows end has the technical chops is essential.

Comment Random binary distribution FTW! (Score 2) 261

51%? So what this tells me is that a majority of respondents didn't understand enough to care, or didn't care enough to understand and provided random answers. This is what happens when you take squishy social science methodologies and put them in the hands of even squishier marketing consultancies. Just bend the scientific method over and shove a white paper up it's ass.

Comment Re:The most efficient car is a city (Score 1) 1184

You're right about this:

Policy makers should focus on making development more walkable.

You're wrong about this:

He's got the wrong target.

The walkability of any community is primarily a function of municipal governments at the city/county level, as well as neighborhood boards, zoning comissions, and the like. I think the last thing anybody on the right OR the left wants is to filter local decisions like this through a federal bureacracy.

There is an inflection point between the two, and that is when those local entities request federal transportation dollars to be used for multimodal projects rather than just highway expansion. So a fair response to your concern would be to look at this administration and ask whether or not they have been willing to approve more innovative use of those tax dollars than just widening roads. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that question, as IANACP (I Am Not A Civil Planner).

Comment Alan Dean Foster (Score 5, Informative) 1130

Foster has single-handedly committed all the cardinal sins that Serious SF Authors(tm) must never do:

Movie/TV spin-off novels? Check (See: Splinter of the Mind's Eye).
Crossing over into Fantasy? Check (See: Spellsinger).
Dabbling with humor? Check (Spellsinger, Glory Lane, etc.).
Indulging a disrespected fringe group? Check. (Furries man. See Spellsinger (again!), Quozl, the Icerigger trilogy).

If there is a scale that measures prolific hackery, with Peirs Anthony on the bottom and Stephen King on the top, I would put Foster far, far closer to King. Glory Lane, To the Vanishing Point, and Into the Out Of are all truly excellent reads. They're not life changers, they're just damn good. He's got a fine roster of clever and poigniant short stories. For old school geeks, the most notable of which is "Why Johnny Can't Speed" which has been cited as direct inspiration for the classic Steve Jackson game Car Wars.

And hey, without Car Wars, SJ Games might never have been successful enough to launch GURPS. Without GURPS, there would be no GURPS Cyberpunk, no Secret Service raid on SJ Games in 1991, and maybe no Electronic Frontier Foundation either. How's that for underrated?

Comment Fight noise with more signal. (Score 1) 575

If educators are getting their panties in a bunch over what some ex-hedge manager is doing on Youtube, then can I kindly suggest... THAT THEY DO SOMETHING ON YOUTUBE!?!?!?!?!? I have a tremendous amount of respect for individual educators but little respect for the K-12 establishment. If you're a teacher and the best thing you can think to do with your time is tear down what you perceive as underqualified competition, then I have no time for you. If you want me to check out your Youtube video, call me. I got a couple 14yr olds who are about to run headlong into Algebra this fall If you can hold their attention better than Kahn can, I'll be right there pimping your stuff on "teh interwebs."

Comment This is great news! (Score 1) 398

The land in this transaction has been privately owned by colonial graybeard corporations that have had a long history in the islands. It's not something residents dwell on much because that relationship is entrenched in the culture and hsitory of the islands.

Now that this property is being transferred to a nouveau carpetbagging haole, there's a great opportunity for all kinds of stupid local political drama. Do not expect this to sail through the PUC approval easily.

Hawai'i state govt. + soveriegnty agitators + IT's most notorious arrogant bully = first class entertainment.

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