It is neither a scientific nor a societal accomplishment, it showcases neither innovation nor courage. It's just - something that happened.
While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?
If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.
Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.
Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
Whoever was the first to use "bitch" as a verb was almost certainly a male asshole who wanted to subordinate the woman he was talking to. By repeating it, that is the sentiment you are reinforcing, because the meaning does not change. You're normalizing female subordination.
The NASA's decision to support SpaceX with money and expertise is a step in the right direction.
NASA (and Roscosmos) should delegate to private companies all of the operations in LEO. They should focus their efforts on sending humans deeper into space.
I want to see a day when docking at the ISS is considered a boring affair.
You can say that Knuth went of the grid to accomplish something extraordinary, but I did it once I've realized that my life is actually mine to live and that the world would not end if I'm not reachable. I quit being Atlas and the sky didn't fall.
Can we still save the term "life hacker"? For me, that'd be someone without a cellphone.
That would be me.
I don't own a cellphone since 2004. I've got tired of being constantly available (and disrupted), so I ditched the damn thing. It may not be practical for everybody, but it works for me. The world has its own pace and I have mine.
For me, the biggest inconvenience of not having a cellphone are those businesses (websites) that insist on a "cellphone #" being a required field during a sign-up or when requesting a quote.
What exactly is the author's conclusion? To ask more questions?
It seams to me that in a post named X-vs-Y you should arrive at some sort of conclusion. Say, X is the way to go or something like that.
I'm not a db geek and I'm not pro-NOSQL or pro-RDBMS. Having no horse in the race, and a very modest knowledge of DBMS, I wonder what would be the best choice in this specific use case (building mailman archive)?
As for mutual hatred, many people lost their families in the war, and obviously many Serbs were part of the aggression, so the relationship is no wonder.
- if you're in Croatia, Tesla was a Croatian (and a god)
Don't be so sure.
During the recent war they burned his memorial house and destroyed the monument in front of it. They also demolished his monument in the nearby town of Gospic at the beginning of the recent war and it appears they don't want it back: http://bit.ly/JnSQkg
I think it's in society's best interests to roll these people up. I have absolutely zero qualms about taking people off the chess board that think it's a great idea for everyone to pile into the van and visit the bomb site.
I agree.
That's why we formed the PreCrime police force, but were forced to shut it down because of that movie with Tom Cruise ... Minority Consort or something like that.
I think that the end users you're referring to are just a minor subset of the end users I had in mind.
Let me give you an example of an average end user.
This guy calls the customer support (via skype) and complains that he has no internet. He says that skype is working, uTorrent is working, but he has no internet. Obviously, his network connection is OK, but he's not stopping with "there's no internet!"
Can you guess what's the problem?
The guy who sold him the computer also explained to him how to use skype and how to pirate movies (that was what he cited as his reason for buying it in the first place). So far so good. One thing he also did was to setup yahoo.com as the homepage for this guy.
Searching for porn and free goodies, our customer installed some malware that hijacked his browser and change his homepage from yahoo.com to something else. And suddenly, "my internet is not working". This guy is asking us what button he needs to click on to get his internet back. For him, internet is having yahoo.com as the homepage.
I'm not making fun of this guy. I've met a ton of similar cases. What I've learned is that people are not interested in how it works, they just want it to work so that they can use it for pirating movies or any other thing they use their computers for. They want you to hide a complex functionality behind a simple button they need to click on.
Same disinterest I've encountered while developing custom software. The customers simply don't want to mess around with the software. They want to enter some data and click on the button. For anything else they prefer to call you so that you can make that button do something else. This may be anecdotal evidence, but I'm yet to encounter a customer who wants me to build the kind of software you're describing.
I know not of these "end users" of whom you speak. There is only programming. - Unknown programmer of the future
Sometimes, I wonder if we live on the same planet - me
I'm not trying to be a dick, but that "quote" at the beginning of the article is just absurd. The "end users" would form an angry mob, drag that programmer out of his Ivory Tower, and kick his ass.
I think you seriously overestimate the interest of the end users in programming. End users want that the damn thing do what it is supposed to do, and go home to their lives. They don't want an interactive programming environment - they want a button to push and be done with it.
Sure, compared to some other rifles it's not as precise, but I can shoot you in the head from a distance of 150 m - and I'm not exactly Thomas Beckett. There were guys in my ex-platoon who could shoot you in the eye.
While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?
If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.
Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.
Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?