The headline saddened me, but then I red the article and it takes the locksmith only a moment! You can't really fault people for not comprehending how much training went into that and how much more expensive it could be if he broke the lock.
Dare I suggest he spend some time telling his customers about his time as an apprentice, the broken locks, and how long it took to get good. Then after that pick the lock. Educate your customers.
There should be as many scientists roughly in each party.
Political parties are not static. They move and evolve and change, and grow and shrink and may become tiny and spend years in the political wilderness.
When a party is reduced to a regional rump, and has several litmus test for their tiny, tiny tent. When one of the most important test is are you anti or pro science, you can't seriously expect a lot of scientist to belong to club which is fervently against anyone who dares to believe in evolution.
I hadn't thought of DOS attacks as an internet equivalent to a sit-in. But I think is an apt analogy, is a sit-in not equally disrupting to a brick and mortar business?
Let me first clarify that I'm not talking about education as a type of technical school that will teach you what ever skill is hot at the moment.
Rather I think the original point of this discussion started with the claim that good design is not just how things looks but rather a deep understanding of how the whole thing works. Knowledge which is both wide ranging and deep is a prerequisite for good design.
That is something I strongly agree with.
A liberal arts education was suggested as the thing which provides both deep and wide ranging knowledge. And obviously I am bit sceptical of that.
For example:
I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own.
Exactly! Except I don't quite agree with never discover on their own. College happens to coincide with the time of your life where you are learning the most about yourself.
And if you decided to travel the country (or the world) on a motorcycle, I bet you would learn a lot about yourself and have incredible freedom, and discover things you'd never even dreamt about.
But I don't mean to disparage college. College also brings together other students and professors and it's very safe, so an absolutely great experience.
However, I do find that often people who defend liberal arts education imply that self discovery without it is just not as good. I strongly disagree with that, I don't think you even need college for self discovery. Curiosity and a sense of adventure is just as good. Add travel to that mix and I think few colleges can beat that.
The other unfortunate implication is that people who don't have a liberal arts education are a bit shallow or narrow focused, or not quite as well rounded. This I find frankly offensive. But never mind how I feel about it, I think it's plainly wrong.
Science and engineering don't sap student's souls. Scientists and engineers are not all boring, grey people, with no sense for art or music. I recall the Ad Council commercials with a boy telling the street musician to get a job, and a little girl asking her dad to read to her from the Federal Reserve meeting notes.
Actually, if I had to name the one area of study which saps people's souls with overbearing work loads, it would be medicine. And MDs aren't exactly known to be shallow or not well rounded.
For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being.
Is a perfect example of implying that scientists and engineers are just not as aware of the nature of the universe, the subtle connections in it, the beauty in it. That scientists and engineers just aren't quite as "creative".
College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.
And amazingly science and engineering work in exactly the same way for science and engineering students.
I mean literally no one wants to hire software engineers right out of collage. So yeah, pretty much exactly like a liberal arts degree :)
That may be true for small groups like clubs, gangs, and tribes, but I don't think you can generalize that to governments.
Or in other words, the more actively engaged the electorate is, the stronger the "public" lobby is vs. other private lobbies.
And the smaller and more local a government is, the more engaged the electorate is. Prime example, the smaller states have more independent senators, governors, etc.
By independent I mean literally (I) and not (R) or (D), not just metaphorically independent.
Some times when I think about what it would be like to be stupefyingly rich, I think about all the money super rich people have given universities. And then I think the real way to make a HUGE difference would be to start a huge self-learning thing.
It would be like a university except it would really be up to the students to learn what ever and how much ever of it they wanted, and the autodidact-versity would just provide the venue and the books and the internet connection.
I also think that any certification that comes out of this process would be there only if a student wants it. And the student would decide what level of certification they care to try and get. And much like a Ph.D. thesis defence, a committee would take an adversarial position to the student and if the student successfully defends what they've learned, they would get a shiny certificate of some kind.
Or maybe all will just hinge on a student contributing something to human knowledge by publishing a scientific paper which gets cited by someone. Only if your paper got cited do get the right to call yourself a... something what ever.
Really? I've always found the number one barrier in medtech to be fact that the feds won't let you unleash cutting edge new medtech on humanity without a crushing time and money penalty to prove it is safe and worth it.
Just so people don't miss interpret what I'm saying: I do think we should try to prove medtech is safe and does something. But I think the quantity of proof we require slows down innovation tremendously. And the penalty we pay for bringing things YEARS to market later then we could have is human lives.
Ah yes, but with better management both could still be in business.
Or in other words, Starbucks could also have been mismanaged.
And http://www.peapod.com/ is still in businesses.
As others in this thread have pointed out, the key distinction between bubble 1.0 and 2.0 is complete nonsense vs. real value.
Most likely currently hugely overvalued value, but still real value.
After bubble 1.0 burst, it hurt the very concept of business on the internet badly.
When 2.0 bursts, a very few companies will close shop, the rest will simply be worth a lot less and lay off people but will return to operating profitably as before.
Given that we have 50 states and that their politicians are a lot closer to the people and that the Federal government would still be enforce freedom of mobility between states, I'd say that would be a huge improvement.
Ron Paul is by no means perfect but Sweet Zombie Jesus, he is still 100 times better then the wast majority of politicians.
You must have had a truly great “liberal arts education”!
I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college.
In my experience, a "liberal arts education" is a great way to spend a lot of money while having a hell of fun time and learning about history and stuff, in an extremely safe environment.
Obviously a tiny percentage of students with true passion for knowledge will seek out challenges and get a lot more out of college.
But the difference between the average liberal arts student and the average science/engineering student, is that the average science/engineering student does not need to seek out the opportunity to work hard and be wrong.
And that is why if I am forced to pick with no other information, I pick science and engineering.
IQ found to be influenced by a whole mess of genes, and nutrition in parents, and grand parents, and hugely by the environment. And IQ tests found to be very bad at distinguishing between knowledge and intellect.
What's funny about that is that it was based on a real case, and the real case was actually worse. The movie played things down a bit, to make them more believable.
I would guess car rental companies would be a better first partner, they already put cameras in their car. A lot of the videos you see on youtube, with drivers crashing thanks to behaviour which could get them a Darwin award, are from rental cars.
Then they could partner with FedEx, UPS, or DHL.
Then car manufactures can put in optional parental override, but a better marketing name would be computer assist. Especially for old people, they wouldn't get computer override, they'd have computer assist.
And a few years after that, when the statistic are in and computer driven cars are much, much, much less likely to kill anyone then human driven cars. Even after you discount drivers under the influence. Then we'll see political pressure to have computer "assistance" in every car.
Having been in 3 major car accidents, one for each decade I've been alive, where I was at the wheel only once and alcohol was not involved in any of them... I have to say I do not find these numbers at all surprising. I would have guessed higher.
I started running with an ancient pair of shoes. Flat, thin sole, absolutely no cushioning in it. After quite some time, I bought new running shoes, thick sole, lots of cushioning.
On my first run with the brand new shoes, I was much faster. MUCH faster. I got home amazed and thought I should have switched a long time ago, what was I thinking running in those ancient beat up shoes!
And I thought these new shoes must have a lot of bounce in them. So I jumped up a bit - nothing, no bounce. So I took them off, and tried to bounce them again. Still no bounce. They are cushioned, they dampen shock, absorb it, they are the opposite of bouncy.
Well then I should have been slower, why did I run faster with dampening? I kept thinking about that, and then the next day my knees were in pain. And that's when I seriously started researching running and shoes.
And I've pretty well convinced myself barefoot is the way to go. But to avoid stepping on you name it, look for shoes like the Vibrams, avoid heavy cushioning.
A long long time ago art, craft, science and even what then passed for engineering and manufacturing, were all pretty much the same thing.
Over time we started to separate things, first science split off, but eventually we even split craft from art.
And what's left in art is not some sensible definition like what can educate the illiterate, enlighten the literate, and entertain the enlightened.
It's not even some fuzzy definition like what ever is a comment on the human condition. The stand for an art piece could totally be that, until the artist tells you it's just the stand the art is still coming. Even some artists who make amusing and animated art have been accused of not making art at all but some kind of crafty floss for the eyes bullshit that so totally not art.
(Please be aware that when I wrote the above I had sculptures in mind, not video games.)
Art, and I don't just mean the products of art, but the all encompassing culture, critics, buyers, sellers, "artists", groupies, the whole thing: it is all a social hack.
If you totally buy into and can't use your own taste to tell something good from something else, we'll then you've been totally 0wn3d.
If you just like music and some other artsy type things, but don't get "it". Well then you're doing much better then people who overpay for crap they don't understand, but you still don't get it.
If you get recognition and/or fame, money, what ever, but you get for something which requires a lot of work/effort/time/talent, what ever, then you're really good at that thing! But you're not necessary also really good at art. Even if the thing is something everyone agrees is super artsy, like painting.
If you're getting paid, especially if it's a lot, for anything that doesn't require much of anything, this includes work/time/loss of dignity/etc, if you can get paid a lot from "art" for not doing much, well then you get it and are winning at this particular game.
Well you could calculate the total damage of a spill and personally charge everybody from middle managed up for it. If that's not enough, go after the share holders, even grandma Millie.
But we can't do that, the whole point of LLPs and Incs. is to limit the investor's liability.
This is partly why we have agency risk.
This is why while I consider myself a libertarian, I still think we need competent and aggressive regulators in all the places where the market is not self-corrective.
But I'm not sure how we could avoid regulatory capture for ever.
Dare I suggest he spend some time telling his customers about his time as an apprentice, the broken locks, and how long it took to get good. Then after that pick the lock. Educate your customers.