I am a software test engineer in Austin, Texas. I am experienced in JUnit, XMLUnit, CPPUnit, and Borland's SilkTest, in addition to being experienced in shell scripting. My main interests are the application of theory to business problems, and therefore I have always enjoyed playing with concepts like genetic algorithms, when I don't happen to be working with systems which implement them on a day to day basis. My (largely political) blog is: http://blogkinnetic.blogspot.com. See bio there as well. :-)
EOM
If doing what you love has a market, yes, the money will follow. If doing what you love does not have a market, it doesn't matter how much you love it. For example, there is a market for hybrid cars. There is not a market for flying cars, even though the relevant technology - fold-up wings and so on - is available. So if you love making hybrids, great, the money will indeed follow. If you love making flying cars, sorry, no market there. So the trick I guess is to find something you love, that also has a market. Not the easiest thing in the world to figure out.
I currently live in Austin, and quit driving a year or so ago. Car I had was old and just wasn't worth the hassle. Good bus system in town. Only if you work in the suburbs do you need a car. I use the bus nearly every day, other than if I am working from home on a particular day. I am a little ambivalent about getting another car. Lot of money involved which I could better spend on things like iPods.
Interesting, about horizontal gene transfer making concepts of heredity and so on more complex than originally thought. But it should not be titled "Darwin was wrong..." That smacks of ID, which is in my opinion nothing less than a major selective disadvantage to homo sapiens.
I get in around 9:30 and usually zone out for an hour in front of my computer, but it looks like I'm working. I then zone out for another hour after lunch too. In fact, in a given day, I'd say I do fifteen minutes, of real, actual work.
P=NP is a problem I always wonder about. Can an answer that can be verified in polynomial time also be solved in polynomial time? I do think, modeled correctly, NP problems can become P problems, but that is the trick. How to model an NP problem so that it becomes a P problem? Or, if this cannot be done, then demonstrate a proof of that. Show exactly why an NP problem can never be modeled as a P problem. Maybe this will never be solved, but certainly worth thinking about.
I appreciate the fact that there is a disclaimer about not drinking and driving. Perhaps one could further add a disclaimer that once one gets into the order of a dozen or more shots in a single night, one runs a risk of dying from alcohol poisoning, and that can happen with these kinds of "drinking games", so sort of a "proceed at your own risk" link might be appropriate and link to a medical article on the subject.
I LOVE idea number 2. For example, River Island is an awesome fashion retailer in the UK (www.riverisland.com). Perfect for "going nightclubbing" kind of apparel. So a "wrapper portal" to these kinds of sites would be great, especially for people who don't know where the "hot stores" are in a given country. I happen to know about River Island, even though I live in Austin, Texas, because I happen to have spent some time in the UK, but for people who have never been to the UK and want the "hot stuff" this portal idea would fill a real need, provided you can keep your over-head low. Can you rely on your close friends to work? Good question. I agree with President Reagan, trust but verify. You might want to retain a good solicitor to help with legal issues too. I agree the competition for Idea 3 is pretty steep, and that being able to monetize Idea 1 is going to be tough. I might get downvoted for saying this, and I don't care, but I agree with SCO CEO Darl McBride that Linux is essentially a pirated copy of UNIX, and therefore you are correct that UNIX folks won't want to buy Linux tools. Just my opinion there, so downvote if you like, but I think I'm in good company, lol. Anyway, Idea 2 I am definitely exited about, and certainly if anyone here is planning to do any clubbing in the UK and needs some "hip" apparel, definitely check out www.riverisland.com. (Of course I speak from the point of view of the LGBT themed clubs, but imagine River Island would have some good stuff for more mainstream clubs too.)
Being born in 1981, which according to wikipedia is the last year of Gen X, the following year, 1982, being the beginning of Gen Y, I consider myself more of a Gen X'er than a Gen Y'er. That said, just from the point of view of software, it is not fair I don't think to call Gen Y "entitled" because there is a lot more to know about technology than there was even 10 years ago. To keep up, people always need to be learning new things. So Gen Y has a burden unlike any previous generation of just the vast array of knowledge of different programming languages, etc. they need to be able to compete - a vast breadth of knowledge, if not depth. So it is really uncalled for to call Gen Y "entitled" as a whole group. Sure there are "spoiled brats" in every generation, but we cannot make these kinds of generalizations, especially in the technology sector. And even the whole notion of this article displays archaic thinking, regarding the job market, at least in technology. The whole "get a job" thing has been more replaced with "get a gig", i.e., people are more into independent contracting/consulting etc. than before, so Gen Y is not necessarily the same as Gen X in terms of trying to find a long-term employment, at least in technology. It is more a generation of independent consultants that is coming up. This article is wrong from top to bottom, wrong in calling Gen Y "entitled" and wrong to think that the ills of the job market are going to finally be all that damaging to them, since they are more independently minded than their predecessors. A response to this could be: What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0 and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise.
Since no active volcanoes are around, the article posits the more likely explanation is the microbe one. Not sure the half life on methane. Could this methane be lingering from whenever volcanoes were last active? If so, the more parsimonious explanation is the volcano one. If the half-life of methane is too fast for the methane detected to be left-over methane from ancient volcanoes, and if further we are quite certain there are no active volcanoes there now, then perhaps the most parsimonious explanation for the methane would be methanogens living beneath underground ice. If we can rule out the volcano theory, then the next step would be to send Bruce Willis over there to drill for methane and the methanogens that produced it.
Perfect. Just add daily editions of the new york times to the iTunes store. Maybe even have an audio version so one can listen to news stories. I love the audio books feature of iTunes, where I can download books to my iPods or iPhone. With the iTouch, one can get all the HD space of the iPhone without it being a phone, if one already has an iPhone and just needs more space. The whole iTunes/iPod/iPhone line is one of the greatest business models ever. No, I don't work for apple, so I have no stake in this, I just LOVE my iPhone!
That is a good recipe. Gee, wish I had that 10 years ago, ha!
I would suggest PHP for "scripting language" since syntax-wise it is similar to C, so if one is learning that, then PHP goes with it nicely. w3c.org has good tutorials on all kinds of web related stuff, HTML, XSL, etc., including a tutorial on PHP. Recommend K&R's "The C Programming Language". That is like my holy book of programming, or would be, were I religious, lol. Plenty of books on shell scripting at the local barnes and noble, but I would focus on general syntax, not specific operating systems, since those come and go.
The military and war generally is "politics by other means". I don't think it is fair to say people who go into the military have a "need to shoot people", though I'm sure one could find those cases. I think a lot of people join the military just for the benefits - education opportunities, and so on. Broadly, from a public policy standpoint, for example with the Iraq war, that was not motivated by "violence per ce", though one could make the argument that everyone has a need for violence just from evolution.
Iraq is just an issue of economic control. Either Iraqi's can control Iraqi oil, or we can. In fact it has nothing at all to do with terrorism, that is just for the weak minded to buy into. What it has to do with his privatizing oil. American companies do not benefit from publicly owned oil in Iraq, but if multinational or American-owned corporations own Iraqi oil, then the American people benefit. Think about it: would you rather have the Iraqis own the Iraq oil, or would you rather have the benefit of American companies owning it instead? Personally, I have a slight moral gripe about taking away people's natural resources and giving it to multinational corporations, but hey, that's just politics. War is politics by other means. Always been that way, always will be that way.
Japan was right (from their point of view) to do Pearl Harbor, because it eliminated the threat caused by the American navy, and solidified their economic control of the Pacific rim. Similarly, the US was right (from our point of view) to do the Iraq war, because it got oil out of the hands of the indigenous peoples of that region and into our hands, benefiting us, not them, and eliminating the threat caused by Hussein at the same time. Please note I say "right" not as in morally right, but just right from the point of view of economic dominance.
Violence is incidental. It is just a necessary part of war. The real point is economic control. True with Japan. True with the United States. Is that "moral" or "just". I don't know. I would like to think not. But apparently the 50 million people who voted for President Bush would disagree with me.
Since when did javascript become a "language"? Is it even Turing complete? I thought the word "script" meant "scripting language" which is NOT the same thing as a full fledged language. If indeed javascript is the most popular "language" then God or Turing help us all.
I thought I read someplace that sun spots had to do with the 1600's mini-ice age? Tying the fall of for example the Mayan civilization with the triggering of an ice age due to decrease in agricultural activity and associated re-forestation seems like a stretch.
Interesting question. I am not a biologist, but I believe I read that cells have a sort of "internal clock", modulated by certain enzymes. Normally cells reproduce in a certain way, but these enzymes deplete over time, such that at a certain point the cellular structures don't reproduce in the same manner as before. Hence, "aging". So, sure I am all for finding treatments for Alzheimer's and so on, but aging itself, as outlined above, is just really an evolutionary necessity. Stephen King treats this sensitive topic well in his novel, 'Pet Sematary', dealing with both the human resistance to, and the biological necessity of, death, including the aging process leading into that. Personally I find great comfort in the idea that even if however many millions of years from now, all or most mammals, including humans, will be extinct, some of our genes won't be, just as for example birds have some of the genes the dinosaurs had. The individual may be here for only a short time, but the genes she carries are far more transcendent.
Uh, no, it's not. And neither was it people's business whom William Jefferson Clinton elected to sleep with. There is still a right to privacy in this country. And if there is not, then I recommend emigrating to Canada.
By the way, I myself am not a philosopher, I am a QA engineer, so it is not like I have a "stake" in this whole topic, but I just like Dennett's approach to it, which is more sane than some others.
Beyond the obvious issue of over-population, two problems occur to me:
1) The human brain can only record up to about 200 years or so worth of data, so, beyond that, it cannot really store memories, so people might live to be say, 500, but the continuity of the individual would disappear. (Frank Rosenblatt of the Rosenblatt perceptron estimated that 200 year number, by the way.) Living so long one cannot recall who one once was seems a dubious proposition at best.
2) Evolution works by successive generations. If people live so long that they do not have a need to reproduce very often, then interesting evolutionary consequences will arise that I can only dimly speculate on. Seems like while the humans are in a blissful state of ageless biological stasis, other species will still be evolving, say, dolphins evolving opposable thumbs, or the like, and ultimately, humans will become trapped in a time-warp, biologically speaking. They won't evolve, but other species will. They may be sentient (e.g. chimpanzees, dolphins, even highly evolved mollusks and the like perhaps), or, they may be non-sentient, like viruses and the like. If we stop evolving, we will eventually go extinct, simple as that. Oh, and, uh, sex, Yeah, if there is no more need to reproduce, we will lose our sex drive. We could still replicate ourselves via cloning, but that whole copulation bit, that will be over.
So, basically to sum up, I see an ageless society as vastly over-populated, in 'Soylent Green' proportions, with people not even having a sense of memories about who they are as individuals. People stop f*king, since there is no more evolutionary impetus for that, and eventually we are replaced by viruses, sentient mollusks, or both.
What the anti-aging people will have to come to realize is that only the gene is immortal, her carriers are not, and if they try to be, the gene will still win in the end.
Good article. Except for the "qualia" asides. Really there is no such thing as qualia. There is nothing to explain, there is no "explandum", so to speak. There is no such thing as "redness", there is only the fact that a human subject will use the word "red" to refer to an electromagnetic pulse of wavelength 600nm. The subject will say "red" to relate the wavelength, that is, we can predict the subject will say "red" if asked for the "color" of a pulse shone at the subject of wavelength 600nm. There is simply nothing to explain in qualia, it does not exist.
To steal from Dennett, one might as well ask about gremlins that appear in the cylinders of a combustion engine. We can explain the fact that wheels move in a combustion engine via the action of the cylinders, or, we can say it is the action of the cylinders plus the gremlins. Thinking of qualia as something that needs explaining is like thinking that your car's movement is predicated upon the gremlins produced in its cylinders. The gremlins do not exist, neither does redness, nor any other type of qualia. Period.
Apple's surge over the past couple of years, with the iPhone defining the mobile phone market, and the Mac continuing to pick up pace with respect to windows, shows that for there to be a major shakeup now could be misguided. I would compare it to the Union winning the battle of Gettysburg, but then not taking the opportunity to chase the retreating Confederate army and finish off the Confederacy then and there. If Apple continues on like it has been over the next couple of years, once the economy gets back on track, they will be a dominant position such as they have not been since perhaps the days of the early Macintosh. So, no, I don't think Jobs should quit now. He should hang in there at least a few more years until the recession is over, and really leave Apple in a dominating position, if he wants to then retire. If he quits now, despite the iPhone's success, there are too many vultures out there for there to be a continued guarantee of market dominance. Macworld events aside, Jobs needs to stay at the helm for the good of Apple. The PC Wars may be over, but the phone wars are just beginning. Jobs needs to stay in there and give 'em hell.
I have thought chemical engineering would be interesting. I know there is some cross-pollination between the chemical engineering and software industries (chemical engineers becoming programmers or testers and vice-versa). I love science for one thing, and also seems like the sort of "engineering mindset" - eye for quality and processes, and just sort of logical thinking skills in general, that one needs in software one could also apply to chemical engineering. Doubt I'd ever make this move, unless the bottom just totally fell out in the software industry, but I think it is an area I could probably pick up quickly if push came to shove.
The psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter had a particular gripe with people who were rude. The empitomy of gentility and politeness himself, he did not tolerate rudeness. Life has enough problems, and petty people who don't respect their fellow human beings only add to these problems. Frankly I'm with Dr. Lecter on this one.
He brought up every "doom and gloom" scenario except the feared and scarce-mentioned-aloud "man-bear-pig".
Neither the Pakistan-India nor the Israel-Palestine situation is beyond hope of being solved.
The planet is resilient, and with proper policy making, the Arctic ice will return.
The economy is in recession to be sure, but recessions have happened before, and a good Keynesian approach to it should work - as Nixon said, "we are all Keynesians now".
So while Mr. Ebert continues to warn us about the perils of man-bear-pig and the like, I think the rest of us should think about good, practical solutions, to real, solvable problems. Hysteria doesn't get us anywhere. Smart policy does, and frankly I think the President-elect is on the right track so far.
Dude, this is not a US thing. It is more an evolutionary thing. Men hunted, women raised the kids. If the man isn't hunting enough, the woman is going to find a better hunter. This is simply evolutionary anthropology. The pressure is on the male to "hunt", or to make money. This is not a good or a bad thing, it is just Darwinian reality. At the end of the day, I think there is really no such thing as "romance" or whatever, it is more just cooperation to help the genes survive, since we are after all gene carrying robots, nothing more or less, and I am serious, this is not sarcasm. We are here to serve the selfish gene. "Love" and "to death do us part" are quaint, deluded notions from the childhood of our race, much like the God delusion.