Slashdot Mirror

Hi, you have no clue how police work. You're arguing from general perception and caricature, stop it.

Already here, and while it may not be a free download, but Iron Sky looked as slick and professional as any Hollywood film. Great story, Great acting, and special effects to rival a blockbuster.....for around (as I recall...might be off some) 9 million US....

Plus, no political correctness B.S....
The Palin caricature is priceless....

And Udo Kier!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky

The average viewer is not watching for that reason, they are watching the equivalent of a minstrel show but with nerds instead of African Americans. They only want a caricature of what nerds are, and they want to laugh at them, not with them.

Except it isn't quite like a political cartoon or a caricature because on Facebook it may not be immediately obvious that this isn't really him. There isn't somebody jumping out from behind his picture and saying, "Live from New York it's Saturday Night!". I'll admit that I haven't taken the time to examine the page in question, but even if it is a parody is this really the sort of thing that Facebook wants on their site? They're in the business of delivering "real" people, not parodies of real people, to paying advertisers. The customers are the advertisers, not the users, and Facebook is first and foremost a business or at lease their shareholders hope that it is.

Spoken like a true BOFH who thinks the world revolves around the IT department. Thank you for the great caricature.

Looks like a well organised set of beliefs to me. In fact it looks so well organised that I suspect you of caricaturing it. Just because you disagree with something doesn't make it moronic or incoherent.

Personally, BSG is unwatchable garbage. Yes yes, throw rocks at me, but B5 outranks it from here to the next wormhole.

Regular people are boring, nobody watches TV shows for the regular people. Without caricatures, we'd be reading the news.

I think you're hating a fake caricature of Mrs Thatcher created by her opponents. Some of the lines are quite ironic, she literally did bring light by ending the block strike of the electricity workers and so ending the power cuts. And the nurses strike she ended by increasing their pay in exchange for a no strike deal. So the 'dying' part sounds good right.

"to be consoled as to console" and you do remember the council strikes where they refused to bury the bodies unless they got 20% like the miners? (They settled for 15%), I bet the relatives were happy to see their loved ones buried.

"where there is doubt, faith;"
Sterling plummetted inflation 15% and rising and man we were hungry! I was starving, I had so little food they nicknamed me 'bones', my stomach was inside my rib cage. "where there is despair, hope;" yep, that line sums it up! She gave us hope!

Is there a line about justice, because she gave union members a vote in their union... No more "no union card, no job, no pay, you starve"!

I think many of you have a false image of some golden time in the 70's before she came along, but those times were terrible. We voted her in for a reason, and we kept voting her in each and every time. She left because of a backstabber (Hesletine) , Brits remembered what the 70's were like and we kept voting her in to stop that hell ever coming back.

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace."
"Where there is hatred, let me sow love;"
"where there is injury,pardon;"
"where there is doubt, faith;"
"where there is despair, hope;"
"where there is darkness, light;"
"and where there is sadness, joy."

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

You are not the GP, but you're making the same mistake. "Just for profit" != "profit NOW" Also, you are conflating the motivations of individuals within the company with the purpose management of a company in and of itself.

MBAs want to make more profit NOW. Not just this quarter, or this month, but NOW. And they don't care if it's only on paper, or only stealing sales figures from tomorrow. They will play a shell game to look better in the short run without producing anything.

By your own words, that is not managing for profit, it's managing "to look better". Managing in a way that deliberately compromises or destroys an institution's ability to continue generating profit is by definition not managing "just for profit".

The reality is that many engineers do things that are nearly as bad as the caricature of a MBA you describe, and can be extremely ineffective at managing even if the company flourishes while they are at the helm. The reason is that they compromise the systemic health of the organization by effectively turning it into a mechanism to extend the reach and scope of their own creative abilities. This typically represents the best way they know how to "make a better product", but leads to a company that is absolutely reliant on that specific person remaining at the helm in order to function*. That is why so many once-great companies crap out once their founders leave. Driven by the sole purpose of creating great products, the founders inadvertently constructed a fundamentally unstable organization without systemic protections against being taken over by idiots and shysters (in the best case this happens organically after they retire, but can also happen even before they actually leave--or can even force them to leave against their will). This also destroys profitability and threatens the company's survival in the long term (though on a longer-term horizon than the kind of deliberate value destruction described in your post).

* This is not too dissimilar to the situation where a programmer creates a polyglot codebase that elegantly solves complex problems, but that only he or she can ever get to compile or run without crashing and leaving behind only inscrutable log files and core dumps.

Since I'm a software developer at Harvard (I did not work on this project,) I believe my response was quite appropriate.

You obviously feel strongly about this, with 'curmudgeon', 'trollish', an exaggerated caricature of the view you disagreed with, and false placement of the caricature within quotes.

Educational websites such as those discussed here clearly mean to reach out to a wide audience. The intended users can be expected to come from a wide range of situations with a wide variety of resources from 'luxury' to 'struggling'. There can hardly be a clearer or more obvious case of need for site software to match users' potential needs: the obvious desideratum is for a broadly accessible robust site with no more complexity than necessary.

When it turns out that the site software on the contrary has narrow technical constraints limiting the breadth of its accessibility, it does squarely raise questions about the designers' competence or motives.

Unfortunately yours is not the only voice of scorn for those with limited resources. (And for those who would post reminders that much of the new software is cost-free, they need reminding in turn that to run it often requires high-spec hardware that is not.)

Mmmm. Problem of definition of words here. It's not that the solutions cannot be profitable, it's that the solutions they dream up will be...centered around the idea of maximizing repeat customers (even at the cost of long-term profitability). Think of it as selling someone a generator, then selling them a thimble of diesel to power said generator once every few hours...not terribly efficient, and it pisses off the customers, who inevitably search out other long-term solutions, impacting your long-term bottom-line. This particular group has the kind of caricature / image of the kind of person who would design a bio-degradable car which melts if left out in the rain...not terribly useful for those who want a maximum ROI.

Here's a fine example. Everyone, and their kids, are working on the 'drinking water' problem in Africa, right? You have Life Straws, graphene filters, etc. However, what do all of these solutions have in common? They generate repeat customers. They all have components that wear out, and need replacements after several uses. They are not solutions, in that you hand them out or set them up in some remote village, and the drinking water problem is solved; they're solutions in that they're temporary fixes, highly profitable, have great PR, provide lots of jobs at home, and are guaranteed to have repeat customers. That's the difference between owning land, and renting it.

And it's like a disease. You no longer own anything anymore. Your body, your mind...and the results are a constant churn of crap.

Nonsense. Religion isn't going away, nor should it. Roddenberry's biases is one aspect of his work that dates it. In general, one of Scifi's greatest flaws is despite its portrayal of fascinating scenarios and technological wonders it is difficult to apply to actual people because its main characters are often not people. Instead they are agnostic idealogues that come across as shallow. Its wooden/unrealistic portrayal of human depth due to many authors who insist in creating a caricature of religion for the sake of either making it either a cliche'd villain or the elimination of meaning altogether makes many of the great ideas presented therein flawed...

Good scifi takes into account that intelligent people can and do acknowlege a higher power without turning all evil or into one-dimensional automatons.

Your characterization of "without violence" is the whopping ridiculous caricature here. Though much of the violence occurred in waves somewhat preceding the immigrant settlers, immigrants were encourage by, e.g., the Homestead Act of 1869 to expand/settle into land "vacated" starting from the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and continuing during enclosure of land by settlers. Note that the earlier part of the settlement waves (correlated with Westward expansion) required specific historical happenstance --- the temporary availability of large tracts of arable land --- which we don't have lying around to hand out free to immigrants any more.

The later immigrant waves (late 19th - early 20th c.) relied on a different form of violence, but violence nonetheless: immigrants were welcomed to be shunted into the worst extremes of unregulated Capitalist labor --- short, miserable lives in deadly factory and mine conditions. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse was rampant. Dissent and worker organization was brutally suppressed, by private police forces like the Pinkertons. As before, this immigrant wave no longer provides a model for current refugee relocation: the immigrants were only "welcomed" because the industrialists needed a big disposable labor pool in this country. In today's globalized economy, industrialists are happy leaving laborers in whatever poorer-off country they started in; with neocolonial arrangements, you no longer need to move laborers to your own country of residence to exploit them.

Massive dislocated refugee groups need a country that will accept them in order to help them. History only shows countries accepting immigrants to help themselves; and, currently, no one is particularly running short on labor material (hence high unemployment across the globe). In a better world, governments would be controlled by people more willing to help their fellow humans. In the world we have, it's best to avoid dislocating people in the first place, because they won't be given anywhere to go. The problem is not that *theoretically* large populations of humans can't be peacefully relocated, but that the conditions under which such peaceful relocation could theoretically occur (including charitable and self-sacrificing nations with vast resources) exist virtually nowhere on earth.

So, does America provide a model for how to relocate huge swathes of refugees?

Of course it does. But you have to actually understand the history to a modest degree rather than just ridiculously caricature it. Tens of millions of people came to the New World and found a home without violence.

The Immigration Act of 1924

Hence, my cutoff date of the 1920s.

Could be worse. These "best and brightest" could have been elected and run amok. Oh, wait, that was 2008. ;)

No seriously though, one man's "bring the government to its knees" is another's "bring spending back in line with sane levels more similar to (population-adjusted) 2007 levels instead of keeping it at 50% above that forever with all the implications that will have on our debt and/or tax levels and economic growth". I suppose it must be nice to be able dismiss all your political opponents with caricatures of their views, though I'm idly wondering whether making that decision instead of going for intellectual honesty is itself consistent with the brain scan differences reported in this article :)

Interestring then that the numbers are far higher than you state, and are directly enacted by those voted out in 2008 (They took office in 2009, and inherited the mess those leaving in 2008 and before left behind)

Now, is it fair to say that the new crop hasn't done enough to rein in spending? Yes, probably. What's one of the major "debt" causes though? That whole prescription medicare law, passed in 2003 by the GOP listed as bigger debt (deficit) driver than even ObamaCare?.

So, let's start lowering our deficit, start with the unfunded Medicare plan. Once you remove that, we can start on other problem areas. Oh, you'll have to increase taxes too, to at least 2000 levels (pre-bubble) just to even the playing field. I just would like to be there when you tell your elders.

We have the power, it's just that when half of Americans vote for people promising to bring the government to the knees, you don't wind up with the best or the brightest being elected.

Could be worse. These "best and brightest" could have been elected and run amok. Oh, wait, that was 2008. ;)

No seriously though, one man's "bring the government to its knees" is another's "bring spending back in line with sane levels more similar to (population-adjusted) 2007 levels instead of keeping it at 50% above that forever with all the implications that will have on our debt and/or tax levels and economic growth". I suppose it must be nice to be able dismiss all your political opponents with caricatures of their views, though I'm idly wondering whether making that decision instead of going for intellectual honesty is itself consistent with the brain scan differences reported in this article :)

I don't know, it seems like early 19th century Americans from the south exceed patent trolls and even whatever screwed up bigoted caricature of Muslims you have in your head, as an easy and relatively recent example.

There never was a wild west. Try basing your opinions on reality instead of cultural caricatures.

And that is one reason why men have an excuse to disregard what women say.

But the reason they get the headlines is [...] because it give men an excuse to disregard what women say more generally. Caricature feminists and then diregard them.

You are revealing that your world view includes a large group of men who make collective decisions and carry them through like an organized men's political interest group - for example influencing or planting reporters to focus on such stories and then use the stories to undermine feminism. Such a group doesn't exist. That your worldview includes such a group anyway shows a clear us-versus-those-pigs mentality that is more likely the true reason that men are disregarding your views. I just followed your lead in psychologizing about people I don't know.