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Comment: Re:It's Ruby and here's why (Score 1) 466

If by basically nowhere you mean:

Twitter, LinkedIn, Github, Yellow Pages, AirBnB, SlideShare, Shopify, Cruncbase, Groupon, Bloomberg, Indiegogo, SoundCloud, Square, The City, Heroku, Zendesk, Hulu, Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp (of course), Urban Spoon, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Foreman....

That's just off the top of my head. But yea, basically nowhere....

I put Rails on my LinkedIn profile after getting about a year of experience with it at a company after doing mostly Java, PHP and Perl for the prior 15 years. My phone started ringing off the hook with full relocation package offers to Austin, LA, San Fran, and NY. The demand is insane right now.

Comment: It's Ruby and here's why (Score 2) 466

There is no language that seems to have more web relevance these days. The community and available libraries are amazing. For rapid web dev you have Rails, pretty much "the" web framework.

It's great for quick shell scripts. It's excellent as a DSL language (think Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Capistrano, Rails).

It's extremely flexible too. Just about every web start up that you've managed to hear of is a Rails shop. Rails programmers are in "write your own ticket" levels of demand too.

JRuby is under extremely heavy and active development, giving you access to do everything you can do with Java as well. Thanks to jRuby you get access to native threading, best of breed garbage collection, the insane library of Java tools that are out there and Java's JIT compiler. You can deploy to servers anywhere Java can too which even makes it viable for many enterprise shops and means you'll have access to excellent database drivers for...anything.

Lastly, thanks to RubyMotion you can write Ruby to code apps for iOS and more.

People love to hate on Ruby, but it's everywhere for a reason.

Comment: Re: This will hugely backfire... (Score 1) 422

by MillerHighLife21 (#47232899) Attached to: FWD.us: GOP Voters To Be Targeted By Data Scientists

Fairness is impossible. You send 1000 kids to the same school, some will excel, some will hang in the middle, some will end up just scraping by, and others will fail. It happens in every single school.

The differentiating factor in most cases is the kids home life, as described better here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

And regarding the typo response, there wasn't an edit button and the internet has trolls. That you felt a need to comment on it and summarily go after my level of "disconnect" without actually proposing a single solution yourself says quite a bit more.


by MillerHighLife21 (#47232863) Attached to: FWD.us: GOP Voters To Be Targeted By Data Scientists

One other consideration, is that the parents have to care. To care, they need to value education. Many parents who did poorly in school, do not value education. This is a problem not easily solved. Vouchers just aren't a panacea.

I agree. In my opinion parents caring is the defining factor. All things being equal, if parents want to find a way to give their kids a leg up...they will find a way. If parents provide a stable home environment, that goes a long way on it's own. My wife used to work in a public school. She had kids that didn't know if they were going to be sleeping INSIDE a lot of nights because mommy might have a "friend" over. That's 1 part "parents not caring" and another part "school doesn't seem that important by comparison to making sure I have food and shelter".

You see all aspects of the spectrum:
- Parents trying to create an advantage.
- Parents simply providing stability.
- Parents not caring.
- Parents creating a disadvantage.

It's the simple reality.

There's not a feasible way to create "fairness" short of taking kids away from their parents and putting them in boarding schools with uniforms. That's the only way that you can control all circumstances for all students.

The next best thing that we can hope for is public school choice OR school vouchers (or a combination of the two) because that way if a kid has parents who care but lack the financial means to relocate, at least the parent will have the ability to make the best decision to enable that child.

For children with parents who do not care or are creating a disadvantage for them...those are the more complicated challenges to solve and usually involved social services in some way.

Comment: Re: This will hugely backfire... (Score 3, Insightful) 422

by MillerHighLife21 (#47231983) Attached to: FWD.us: GOP Voters To Be Targeted By Data Scientists

Or think of it this way - besides being born well off, in what way did those kids "work hard enough to earn" a nice school?

The kids didn't. Their parents worked hard enough to make sure they could put their kids in a nice school. Parents work hard to put their kids in a position to succeed. That's why houses with zoned for better schools are worth more, because the parents buying them are willing to pay more to make sure their kids have access to it.

Involved parents that care that much also lead to the schools themselves being better by donating to fund raisers, volunteering to help with school events, taking an interest in their kids school work and making sure it's getting done. Having your kids around other kids who care about their education because it's been instilled in them creates a culture of success (and vice versa).

As a parent, if you're kids are zoned for a school that you don't feel is doing as well you can do one of two things if you want to better enable your children:

1. You can get involved with the school, school board, organize parents and get the entire community more involved to make the school a better place for kids to succeed.
2. You can send them to another school where people already are involved.

The ironic thing here is that the school voucher policy favored by conservatives would actually make it more feasible for people to send their kids to better schools without having to move for zoning reasons. This allows parents to cast a direct vote related to the quality of a school, because if it's bad parents will simply choose to send their kids elsewhere.

Comment: Re:Who Cares? (Score 1) 354

Actually, they're only made for killing if you pull the trigger. From a standpoint of self defense, the threat of deadly force is the deterrent. The entire basis of guns for self defense is to make an attacker/burglar decide whether whatever they are about to do is worth dying for. That's a significantly higher risk factor that presented by alternative weapons for self defense and that's the entire point. Contrary to popular belief, people don't buy guns with the intention of shooting other people.

300,000,000 guns in circulation in the US proves that point. If people bought guns with the intent of killing, we'd all be dead. Instead non-lethal gun ownership accounts for 99.9999% of them and 99.99% is statistically perfect.

Comment: Very true and that makes people uncomfortable (Score 2, Insightful) 772

by MillerHighLife21 (#47107433) Attached to: Belief In Evolution Doesn't Measure Science Literacy

Short of actually being able to understand and verify every single piece of data that has gone into proving it - like it or not you take it on faith. Faith is a measure of trust in your sources in the same way that people respond differently to news from different outlets. I can walk outside and prove gravity. I cannot do the same with evolution.

The basic fact of most information we receive on a daily basis is that we trust it until we have a reason to question it. Evolution has zero effect on the daily lives of anybody outside of investigative curiosity. If somebody has their life changed by God (and it happens all the time) they'll spend a huge part of the rest of their lives searching for answers and understanding...and that will give them cause to question evolution because the Bible makes a tremendous amount more sense when reading it AFTER something like that happens to you. If you're not the slightest bit religious, you have no reason not to simply accept it because it doesn't affect you at all. Plus you can use it as a cognitive tool to reinforce your belief that religious people are all simply dumber than you because they don't fully agree with something that you claim to know as a fact, even though you're simply trusting your sources.

I generally don't bother arguing the point because people don't accept information that contradicts their world view and being able to verifiably prove something from that perspective from one side or the other won't have any affect on the lives of...anyone. It's just something useless to argue about. Getting into "arguments" where nobody is going to change anyones mind and you believe you are correct serves no other purpose than to boost your own ego.

Try to wrap your mind around this and see it from another perspective. If you KNOW God is very real (not believe; God has directly impacted your life in a tangible way...you KNOW) then come at the question from that side. If you know God is real your entire perspective on the Bible and everything in it changes specifically because any questions you may be able to have about it to try to cast doubt on its text go out the window...because ultimately you know the most important part of it is very real and that changes your entire perspective on it.

One of my favorite quotes:

Many people like to assume that people just go sit in a service or read a book and are magically convinced to believe. That's naive. There is also this idea that people lack the critical thinking to question it. That's also naive since those questions are the first thing that everybody asks. It takes a lot of ego to assume every single person in those pews hasn't questioned it, strongly. Especially the ones who donate huge sums of money to it.

The reality is that life change happens much more often than most people would like to admit and hearing enough people you know give testimony about that life change creates trust in the information, even if it has not happened to you personally yet. This is buoyed by the fact that those people are telling you this because they want you to be able to receive the same help that they did. There is no financial motive. There is no other incentive than sharing their experience of something they didn't previously believe which they now feel obligated to express for the betterment of those around them.

Writing those people off, however, takes a tremendous amount of hubris. I never take any issue with a person who has questions. I only take issue with people who think they have all the answers.

Comment: Re: There Is No Demand For "smart guns" (Score 1) 584

That's true, but if you are in a situation where you are forced to brandish it in the first place you'd rather not have to wonder. Especially considering that we're now adding electronics and a power source to an otherwise totally mechanical devise you have to be concerned about battery life as well as function.

Comment: Re:There Is No Demand For "smart guns" (Score 4, Insightful) 584

An unfired gun is the best defensive weapon that exists. The threat of death is the defensive deterrent. Actually firing is the last resort.

If a gang of 10 people are advancing on somebody and the target pulls a gun, all 10 people stop advancing or run away. If you have a taser or stun gun, you're a non-lethal threat to one of them...and you get one shot. Pepper spray is largely in the same boat (plus you have to account for wind). In both scenarios, you have to wonder if the battery has run out or the spray has expired depending on how long you've carried it.

Bullets last pretty much forever. The device is mechanical and has no dependence on a battery. As a defensive weapon it provides the greatest threat to an attacker and the highest degree of reliability to the carrier for those reasons. The second you start shooting it becomes every man for himself.

Up until you shoot, simply brandishing the weapon is an active deterrent without any need to fire. Brandishing a gun is actually considered assault for that reason. People often forget that when talking about concealed carry. It's as if people imagine that the idea is to tote it around so you can relish the opportunity to shoot somebody. I know many people who are not willing to pull the trigger that will carry an unloaded gun just so that they can pull it out in an emergency to diffuse the situation if they need to.

Additionally, when somebody takes a gun to commit a crime or kill somebody, they have every intention of pulling the trigger and are guaranteed to be armed. When somebody is attacked there is a much lower chance of those people being armed and/or able to retaliate so of course those statistics will be skewed.
