flipper

I think OP you are on the right track trying to leverage your skills in one area by applying them to another.

I'm in the process of transitioning from IT to Law. This obviously takes longer than a year and it's certainly not for everyone. However I expect to be able to use my technical background (though not expertise per se) in legal work.

The pop band Devo have been pointing out since the 1970's that people seem to be getting dumber as technology advances.

To paraphrase the epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren - if you seek his monument, log in.

This article sums me up. When I started in my current job I had a really smart guy for a manager who was interested in hearing new ideas from his people and generally championed them. A couple of years ago we got bought out and I got a new IT manager with no real interest in technology or my job. Every idea I've had was ignored or shot down in flames. Unfortunately his attitude was symptomatic of senior management in our company.

I got disillusioned and got a reputation for being sullen and uncommunicative. I realized that even if I invented a perpetual motion machine he wouldn't be impressed (or even know what one was). So what was the point?

The happy ending is I got headhunted last week by my previous employer. My boss doesn't seem too worried about me leaving so I'm sure now I'm doing the right thing.

What do you think about the Anthropic Principle? Not only in the sense that the physics of the Universe is just right for complex life to exist, but also in the sense that if aliens 'got there first' we would never have been allowed to evolve to our current state? We don't observe alien civilizations because if they existed we wouldn't!

Life on Earth took almost 3 billion years to go from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular ones. 3 billion years is almost as long as the life of the Universe (~13.7 billion years). There's one data point that suggests that there was a big filter in our past.

I came in here to make the same point, though I too was pondering the karma hit. Have an upvote.

To drag another tangential fantasy/sci-fi reference into the discussion, in an episode of Blake's 7 Avon and Vila smuggled their supercomputer Orac into a space casino so Vila could play against The Klute, a wizened Davros-like house chess genius with a terrifying laugh. The prize for winning or drawing was 10 million space credits, lose and The Klute could choose your destruction.

Sayonara karma.

Two years ago my employer threw out the 12-month old decent chairs my IT department bought for ourselves, and replaced them with spectacularly uncomfortable new cheap ones.

So I bought a 6-year old Aeron on eBay for my own use at work and have been very happy with it. Apart from a couple of small scratches on the feet it is still like new today. As an investment in my own comfort at work it has already paid for itself.

Do any of the sites use captcha? That wouldn't stop a human nursing a PC running bots, but it would stop someone starting a bunch of bots, then going to sleep for 8 hours.

Would cloud farms be practical if your assets lived on the cloud as well? That could solve the bandwidth problem both with the render cycle and collaboration with other shops.

Or would getting the assets there in the first place be impractical?

Yeah, if I was an employer (and I have been from time to time) I'd probably read this, smile wryly, and move on. But someone else might not.

I don't have a problem with the guy asserting that he can pick up new technologies quickly, as long as he expects he will only be offered entry-level positions. You do not write Python the way Shakespeare wrote prose after six months.

I do however have problem with him not providing anything to back up his assertion. But he probably figures in a tight job market he needs to find a way to stand out, and this is it.

You could create a text file called alpha2omega.txt, which contains the line:

Look at the binary representation of pi; you'll find the sum of all human knowledge encoded there in ASCII, EBCDIC or any other code ever invented. You just need Google to index it all for you so it's useful.

Digressing for a moment, what about the reverse, i.e., how long would the average HR consultant last as a programmer? They'd have to organize a swap: the programmer hands over their brain, the HR consultant their mendacity.

I see you are an undergraduate so I presume you're young. I'm neither old nor young, so let me tell you something (I'm not being condescending, I want you to take this to heart) - you won't believe how fast it all goes past. Until you start to see it happening, you don't quite believe it. One day you're 25 and it's all in front of you. Suddenly you're 40 and you hope that you've got long enough left to do everything you wanted to before the credits roll.

Yes, it's not just the volume of the noise, it's the nuisance: constant buzzing noises (especially high-frequency ones) are much more annoying than random 'household' noises, even if they are not as loud. I would have thought though that for safety and commercial reasons the wind farms would be built some distance away from population centres.

Perhaps, but I did point out that I was talking about my direct experience. I must say that all of her colleagues I dealt with appeared to behave in exactly the same way.

Based on my own experience of MBAs I tend to agree with you. My company brought in a US name-brand management consulting firm to assist with a large M&A. One of the MBAs was assigned to help me write a transition plan for the integration of the IT systems my company would inherit. She correctly recognized that helping me was useless to her real purpose (inserting herself into my company at a high enough level that she could scout out new consulting opportunities) so she spent two months with us and delivered nothing. I wrote the transition plan on my own.

No. Have a look at the posting on reddit to see why.

Something that emacs and vi users can agree about then - we're both glad that RMS wrote emacs!

I for one am very glad RMS existed to write emacs and save us all from vi.

I've seen a few bad lawyers and there are a million and one things they'd rather do before worrying about their typography. It'll be a long while before the bad lawyers' typography is as good as the good lawyers' typography.

Impressive, yes, but they're not the first self-domesticating species.

Cats pulled this stunt 10,000 years ago.

From my own experience, women of above-average intelligence and education tend to seek men who are at least as intelligent and educated as they are. Within that pool they will still prefer men who are are socially well-adjusted, good looking, and rich, probably in that order of importance.

So if you're a male geek looking for love, whether your IQ is 130 or 160 (the pool of women doesn't increase much from one to the other), you need to work on your social skills. Actually you boys in the 160+ range need to work a bit harder as you spend so much time thinking about esoterica your 'game' is probably quite weak.

I experience the same symptoms. When I get over a difficult hurdle, and realize that successful completion is a 'formality' a wave of pleasure envelops my brain and I stop working.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it either, but in the situation you describe couldn't the cheater just raise on the flop? If they get looked up by their opponent, when they catch a lucky Ten on the turn they can just say they were bluffing with air.

I'm not a heads-up player so I'm not sure how often you could get away with such gambits. Also, in this situation the opponent might suspect the cheater holds JT, T9, 98, 87, 76, A9, A8 or any number of other hands that could have hit the flop. Wouldn't a solid heads-up player fold A4 frequently enough in that situation that they never realize they're playing against a stacked deck?

Got it, thanks.

Though I think I get the idea from the first two paragraphs, perhaps you could provide a summary for those of us without a WSJ subscription?

I tend to agree with you about the value of ethical behavior, but I would assert that many people who claim to be religious act as though they are not coerced by their God to do anything. Therefore, ethical behavior is quite valuable, from wheresoever it comes.

It's true, there are some highly ethical religious people, and some highly dogmatic and unthinking atheists.

Yes, if I was the victim in this article I would strongly consider suing the police for wrongful arrest. He would have an excellent case against the police for negligence causing him substantial loss. If the police had investigated his case properly they would have seen that there was no prospect of successful prosecution, but every chance of ruining his life.

Unfortunately that's the price paid for getting an interesting piece of science news into the main stream media - neither the journalist who wrote the article or his sub-editor probably have much grasp of what science is for so a hyperbolic but misleading headline is the order of the day.