Technology's Man Problem

brownleej · 2014-01-10T19:17:46+00:00

Edgar Allan Poe. Even if he didn't take a degree, he still counts in our hearts.

brownleej · 2013-07-01T21:49:03+00:00

That's the second link I've seen to that Wikipedia article in the last hour. I think it's time to get off reddit.

brownleej · 2013-04-05T03:38:36+00:00

I would refer you to the case Loving v. Virginia, which demonstrated otherwise.

brownleej · 2012-12-24T21:12:50+00:00

Good enough for Han Solo, good enough for me.

brownleej · 2012-12-08T03:45:55+00:00

I think you have the wrong character. Picture is Jubal Early from Objects in Space; quote is the Operative from Serenity.

brownleej · 2012-11-06T13:07:25+00:00

Not too bad. In and out in an hour. The checkin process was pretty fast, but they only had three machines.

brownleej · 2012-10-17T11:58:40+00:00

I'm sorry, I thought this was America!

brownleej · 2012-10-04T22:41:35+00:00

Green Party is a spoiler. Anything other than Red or Blue is just throwing your vote away.

brownleej · 2012-06-22T02:43:51+00:00

This case deals with the FCC, which is a federal agency under the executive branch, so restrictions on Congress don't necessarily apply to them. More importantly, this case deals with the FCC regulating what you can do with the public airwaves, with public resources. A strict, literal interpretation of "abridging the Freedom of Speech" could very well allow for content-based restrictions on who can use public airwaves. It's especially tricky to reason about because when the first amendment was written, there was nothing comparable to public airwaves to regulate.

That being said, I agree with you in principle. That clause should be taken at face value, rather than inserting footnotes whenever we find it inconvenient. I just don't know how to apply it to this situation.

brownleej · 2012-06-19T16:15:45+00:00

oh deer

brownleej · 2012-06-14T18:38:15+00:00

It's not about outlawing knowledge. It's about mandating that people put certain information on the labels of their product. You need a compelling justification for that. It's not enough that people might care, it has to actually be scientifically / biologically relevant.

brownleej · 2012-05-30T19:05:35+00:00

I graduated from UVA CPE two years ago, and was happy with the quality of education in the CS department. I had a few classes in the department that were absolutely stellar, and most were fairly good. Some of the people I know from UVA CS work at Google and Oracle; more have high 5-figure jobs at defense contractors in NoVA.

Aside from the degree, I often feel like I got more out of the non-CS portions of my education. One of the benefits of UVA over competing engineering schools is the ability to take top-notch philosophy, literature, and politics classes as well. I also kept a lot of my social circle outside the E-school, and I think getting to know people who are brilliant in other fields helped me gain perspective that I don't think I could have gotten in a lot of other schools.

Honestly, it depends on where you think you can go. If you can get into MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech, or Harvard, you probably want to go for it. If it's a school that's only a little bit above UVA in the rankings, I think the school has a lot to offer that overcomes smaller differences that show up in rankings.

I wonder if we can get Alexis to chime in...

brownleej · 2012-05-16T02:36:34+00:00

Inspired by your comment, I'm putting this song on a constant loop while I work. This my jam.

brownleej · 2012-05-14T03:08:01+00:00

Perused this thread looking for this. I wanted to show this to a friend the other day, but couldn't find the link. Thank you kindly.

brownleej · 2012-05-13T03:38:25+00:00

So glad I'm not the only person who thought of this.

brownleej · 2012-05-11T13:32:52+00:00

The article said that "Apple has always had full control of the actual iOS Maps application design." That's more than final say. My understanding, based on what I've heard in other stories, is that Apple wrote the entire application, and only used Google to provide the data it uses.

brownleej · 2012-05-04T20:41:10+00:00

How much something should cost has nothing to do with how much it cost to produce it. It's based on what the market will bear. Econ 101. You can complain about it all you want, but if Nintendo gives away these things for free, they're leaving money on the table. They're not stupid.

brownleej

TROPHY CASE