Robert Wood in a 1909 experiment proved more carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere reflect the sunlight and reduce sun heating. Quite the opposite of what the mainstream climatologists predict.
We did hire a prostitute for a depressed friend to make him feel better. Not openly. I have no idea how it works for your company, that's why I wrote "maybe".
Your trying to be judgemental and look down on everyone around completely discredits your arguments.
I agree with the commenter who points out that the culture is not dominant, and if it's that bad, it won't have much acceptance.
And all who care of the sexism in IT, geek culture, etc., should turn themselves to the core problem. Use the Japanese method: ask 5 questions "why?"
Why are geeks so sexist? They see women first of all as a sexual object.
Why they do this? Because this is what they want. They are sexually hungry young men.
Why are they sexually hungry? They don't have much dating and sex. I admit that some guys are ok in this area and just misbehave.
Why do they have issues? Because they're geeks, and geeks are uncool, not sexually attractive.
Now, start curing this issue, not telling them to behave.
If a person is depressed, up to having no appetite, it's a common complaint from the relatives that the sick person is mistreating them, doesn't want to talk, closes the door, etc. Do you think a depression can be solved by telling that person to behave? Or by telling "life goes on", "birds are tweeting, ha ha"? No. It still doesn't make that person's needs met.
Yet when it comes to social phoenomena, the treatment that is zealously promoted is to treat the outcomes, not the source.
So, I suggest to the IT industry managers: start making your nerds' needs met. I don't know how. Hire a prostitute? May be valid in some special cases. Make a dating event? Maybe. Hire a psychologist? Can be useful. Make a party with a most-women company? Maybe.
Basically, I think it's worth trying to let them have more dating and learn some social skills. (This all has to be in a very delicate way, of course.) But stop teaching people how to live. If you don't like how they behave, fire them, don't try to become a father who dislikes his son but keeps living together. (This is exactly what the article says: I hate this, but I stay!)
The fed money transfers from Moscow to Caucasus and nat. republics are huge, and that's their deal: Moscow pays, the republics' rulers provide near 100% votes.
In this case it's an obvious fraud, but technically such an outcome is possible and legal: voters can take a special paper and vote at another spot, rather than their home one (say, if they are in another city). So, in theory 140% can be achieved.
Not at all. The majority of the people aren't that fool. I'd say you can't fool others at all: earlier or later this gets discovered.
A small number of the ruling party supporters do suppose this. I guess part of them are real zealots, but there is another part that are just paid for blog & news comments. (Screenshots of announcements of such jobs were circulating recently.)
Now, the problem is if we (Russians) can achieve anything with this evidence. The quality of the political opposition is very low. Most of them do fight each other more than work for the people's needs.
I don't believe in these numbers. Badoo's strategy is scraping other social networks and spamming you and your friends with emails, pretending they sent messages to you and you to them. It's the second worst spammer on the web I know.
This looks impressive, but I think an SVG image would be just enough and the right tool for single-color logos like those of Adobe, Twitter and Nike.
For Nike it will be just a background declaration, the curve with Bezier parameters and the foreground color. It will be much more compact and be able to scale.
And just as much cross-browser as CSS, which means not totally cross-browser. Your logos are broken in Opera and IE, for example.
I understand it takes much effort and expertize, but it's not the right tool for drawing images. You could do this by just exploring the UTF characters table and positioning differently colored characters near each other to make an image. But the fastest way to draw a vertored shape in a browser is still SVG.
I agree that even this book is good enough. The main thing is try thinking of what others get from you, and curiously thinking of what you thinking of yourself.
I can recommend the "59 seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot" by Richard Wiseman, where he also explains what to tell at interviews and how to present your strengths and weaknesses.
Another thing I did and it was very useful was a psychological workshop lead by an actor with higher education in theater. That woman could decipher any our messages and explain what others get from them, that the way you communicate is often more important and tells more than the message itself.
So, my advice would be go get some knowledge, try in real life, then again knowledge and reflection, and so on. If you do it consistently, it doesn't make you the world's most nice person, but you'll definitely be more competent than many people around.
As Paul Graham noticed earlier, computers became something like TV on the working desktop, smartphones are even a more danger. I hope in my lifetime I'll see something new to displace smartphones/tablets and make them look old like TV now, and be less dangerous and less addictive.
I am really disappointed seeing the "yet familiar" argument behind the C-like syntax.
It takes a day to get used to Python syntax, and another day to make it subconscious, that is to stop forgetting it.
The arrow in CoffeeScript is a pain to type, but overall CS saves you a lot of time.
How come Google that can dictate rules to some extent, doesn't have the balls to fix the long lasting issue with syntax? Why voluntarily subject oneself to, probably, years of pain?! Did they just start following letter-by-letter the success stories, like the one of Javascript? (scheme+smalltalk+java/c syntax)
Python has a great, clean, compact and expressive syntax and a lot of syntactic sugar. Erlang does concurrency and error handling well. A mix of the two would be a great language to work with.
This was the most useful episode of the series that I've seen. Basically, before watching this I had no idea of the most fundamental feature of Javascript, which is events loop and that only one function is executed at time.
This means that you don't have to worry if any other data is updated while a function works.
It also means that expensive code should be done as timeouts loop or some other way, but not as a for loop, which blocks the browser or server completely.
This article seems too simplistic and an immature viewpoint to me.
1. People do note if you are interested or not. Speaking all the time mostly equals to being self-centered. Making questions all the time can certainly please a self-centered person, but not those who note subtleties: getting a disinterested or a stock question is the same repelling as domineering.
2. People are adaptive and notice patterns. A good way to be boring is to do the same pattern in conversations. Try to seduct a girl by just making questions to her. (Where do you live; Are you stydiyng or working; etc.) That doesn't work.
3. Those who follow such too simple rule can easily be abused: a lot of people complain to others and search for those who'd just listen. They can never get enough, and what's worse they don't value you.
You have to be able to tell some words of support, but also, to not become a moral drainage to someone, you need to LEAD. This is a complicated thing, so I don't extend it here.
5. Making questions takes skill. Questions may be stupid, irritating, insulting or nerdy and boring. There's no boolean choice, to speak or to make questions, as it is presented in the article.
6. A good story teller is better than a good question maker. This also takes skill and the sense of what's a good place to which story.
For talks as an entertainment, which is my primary concern here, the difficulty is in INVOLVING THE interlocutor's PERSONALITY. Consider 2 questions one might ask:
(a) Do you think Paris Hilton's recent behavior is acceptable? (b) What would you do if you were Paris Hilton? (her father, brother, etc)
The second one lets the inerlocutor imagine oneself in an interesting situation and involves the personality. This thing is rare, I do value it high; too many talks happen in the upper atmosphere without involving you, and too many people don't get it and don't try to involve others, thinking that just smiling or being joyful, or flattery is the key. Though, this also takes skill, and I suppose that if you try too hard, people can get bored even of being _tried_ to involve: we all are good at noticing patterns.
An irrelevant degree takes some years that you could invest into a working experience, and more importantly, it delays maturity. But it can give you a valuable knowledge (of course, if you earn grades for real things, not for imitating some nonsense). This is hard to learn in everyday life.
I program in Python and earlier was a DB developer, but have an economics masters degree. The most useful thing of this degree was maths and games theory that surprisingly comes to conclusions on things like morale, honesty and dignity, and shows that they're not relative as the classic economics implies.