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A nice caricature can be found here: http://www.jsquared.co.uk/jennyl/verity.htm

Don't believe that his sort of response during code reviews is all that uncommon.

heya,

Lol, Elliot Carver was hinted at being a caricature on Rupert Murdoch...

Another one is the Teddy K. character from In Good Company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Good_Company_(2004_film)

Reputedly another caricature of Rupert Murdoch.

Don't worry, Murdoch isn't too well loved down under either.

Cheers,
Victor

10-20% of us know that (that's more people than most European nations), and are trying to do something to fix it. Unfortunately there are structural and procedural features of the US government which make it a statistical certainty that we'll never have more than two viable parties. Worse, the process to fix it would require cooperation from one or both of those parties (and their financial backers) so that's not going to happen.

There are people in the US advocating for social democracy, there are people who realize moving farther and farther to the right of the economic spectrum is destroying us and rotting away the middle class. There are people who realize that there is no such thing as a scaleable market solution for basic scientific research, education, or health care--but those things still need to get done. We exist, but there's just too few, and everyone else is either too scared of the caricature of "evil socialism" built up from after WWII to even consider something left of a center-right party, or they just don't care. And again, those people who don't care and opt-out of participating in civil society end up playing into the hands of the party that least represents their interest due to the structure of our election system.

You know, I'm really tired of hearing this. This was MAYBE true for Win95/98. It's simply no longer true, and likely never was. (Try putting your average user in front of a prompt asking them how they want to partition. LVMwhat? Encrypted? Manual mode?)

For the record, I've been using Linux since 1999 and FreeBSD since 1996...my first computer was an Amiga. I'm a developer and have developed for both *NIX and Win32, as well as web apps. I'm hardly an MS fanboi.

Come on man, come up with a new meme. Folks around here are beginning to look like caricatures of themselves.

I truly do not understand why a person would willingly pigeon hold themselves in this manner. Sure, you save a couple bucks on the front end but you lose valuable experience and exposure on the back end. Your education is an investment in you, why invest in only one part of you?

And if you want to move past a BS at some point, you're putting yourself behind the 8-ball. Your application will read like a 2-d caricature...

It all matters. Math, science, art, philosophy, engineering...they all tie together and knowledge acquired in one realm is transferable to other realms. It provides a foundation for creative thought.... but maybe you just want to debug code for the rest of your life.

That is a very confusing thing to those of us who see "Christians" as a giant homogeneous group.

There's also this idea that even though Christians are in control of just about everything in our country, we still have free speech. Unfortunately (from their perspective), our biggest pop-cultural influences are secular at best and downright anti-Christian at worst. When you watch TV and see casual sex, drug use, violence and other decidedly non-Christian behavior portrayed as no big deal or even encouraged as positive behavior, it's easy to feel like your way of life is under attack. Take a quick look at the TV shows out there (on mainstream TV, not on the Christian channels). There are a handful of shows (7th Heaven, etc) that have a Christian theme. But in most shows and movies any character that's Christian is only there to be an obnoxious zealot and is just a caricature of how most Christians truly act. This, too, causes them to feel under attack.

I think that looking at the entertainment industry as their main source to see how Christianity is portrayed is flawed analysis. You only need to take one look at everything outside of the entertainment industry to see that the points you make are true. But at least it makes a little more sense in this way.

if only as much work was put into the photo as was with the music, i've listened to it and love it, especially freddie freeloader and well, the cover art is just a photoshop filter, it needs much more obfuscation to be under the radar of influence, a flip horiontal and larger 8 bit NESS, and an inversion would've been very useful, or just a simple rotoscope caricature would've sufficed due to the immersive nature of this image and album.

>> Therefore, having never been employed in a real Agile environment, what about Agile lends itself to be abused this way?

Many agile methods (scrum, extreme programming) promote some level of developer self organisation. These methods are predicated on every developer being able to exercise sufficient judgement to decide and execute on what's best for the project, the implication being that management is an overhead developers can and should live without. As a consequence top down management is caricatured, with Dilbert as an unspoken reference point.

In fact, developers are absolutely dreadful at self organisation. Conversations veer off into rabbit holes on wafer thin evidence (for example, whether communications between major systems components should be synchronous or asynchronous) with vague phrases such as "over-engineered" and "future-proofed" thrown about without the slightest consideration on the overall cost of these conversations (flame wars, often) on the project, nor on how much it would be to retrofit the alternative thereafter. Also, without a very clear reward and punishment structure on less interesting but important aspects, such as documentation (code + tests is rarely sufficient), these points are often neglected.

The reality is that just as most developers are mediocre but think they are better than average, so are most managers. Working for pragmatic, technically literate managers who know the customer's business domain at least as well as the customer is a truly liberating constraint. Sadly, many developers have not and have no benchmark for comparison or demanding more of their managers. Even so, asking mediocre developers to self organise is a recipe for delay, overspend and underachievement. To add insult to injury, the claim will be made that because a series of irrelevant unit tests turn green and because unintelligible documentation exists, the code is "clean".

Not sure what your point is here. Are you saying it's hypocritical to advocate for "human rights" while purchasing/using (or even evangelizing) Apple products?

First of all, it's worth nothing that Foxconn factories make more than just Apple products. All the major manufacturers use Foxconn or similar factories with similar working conditions (actually, according to some reports Apple puts slightly more effort than other companies at insuring that worker standards are decent, but let's ignore that for now). So, basically, this isn't an "Apple" issue, this is a "technology" issue.

So, is it hypocritical to advocate for "human rights" while purchasing/using (or even evangelizing) technology? That's a tough question. Ultimately all aspects of our modern living take a toll on the environment, and, unfortunately, on other people. I suppose one could be blithely selfish and simply not care about other people's rights or standards of living. That would be less hypocritical, I suppose, but certainly not more moral.

There are also the usual progress-based arguments like: "it's better for those workers to have some kind of job rather than none", or "technology helps us be more efficient and helps us lift more people out of poverty", or "everyone is entitled to some luxuries, the key is being reasonable in one's impact", and many many others. What's my point here? My point is that there are some legitimate moral dilemmas here, and we should certainly be debating them, and figuring out a good path forward. But painting a caricature wherein "Mac users" are fundamentally and universally hypocritical (moreso than other tech users?) is a complete waste of time.

But like any caricature, there is a grain of truth in what he says. Let's take a quick poll. How many people have read a work by a "Great Author" in the last year, like Shakespeare or Faulkner? And no, I don't count Neal Stephenson as a Great Author -- the only sci-fi that might make the cut is Bradbury. My personal favorite, Elmore Leonard, is not on the list, either, so I fail.

Everyone would condemn someone who said the above quote as anti-intellectual, but maybe we should glance at the mirror first.

Not the AC, but I'll give it a try. Without touching on the political or philosophical premises, one can simply say that Rand couldn't write decent prose to save her life. She was of the "why write three words, when you can write 300 to say the same thing" school of literature. She also let her ideologies get in the way of a perfectly good narrative. So unless your reading it for the philosophy, there really isn't a point.

Also her characters were caricatures. Ill written, two dimensional, and for the most part completely unsympathetic. Reading Atlas Shrugged all I could think of any of the characters was, "who cares?". I personally wouldn't care if her dreaded undermensch bugbear came and ate them all up, which isn't really a good thing for a book whose primary purpose is to proselytize her pet philosophy; give me a reason to care!

Her pet philosophy is another matter, but that doesn't really matter in this context. Whether I agree with her, or not, doesn't change the fact that she was one of the weakest narrative authors of her time. Her actual straight nonfiction essays and rants were written much better than her fiction.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original

I'm not sure I'd agree that the Doctor has become a caricature of himself, but certainly the quality of the plots has suffered.

Moffat's desire to have a strong overarching plot means that nothing ever makes sense until the very end.

I don't think that's a bad thing, as long as the episodes along the way are enjoyable, and as long as it all makes sense in the end.

For instance, the "trust me" scene in "Flesh and Stone" - to me, it didn't make any sense the first time around. (Of course, that scene was explained in "The Big Bang"...) That episode also introduced the idea that the cracks could erase things: they also took this opportunity to remind us of some of the things that happened in "Eleventh Hour" - the duck pond (there were never any ducks, of course, because they were erased. This is also another hint about Amy's life.) The "trust me" scene was basically just a mystery - without knowing that erased things could be brought back (an idea introduced in "Cold Blood") it was pretty much an unsolvable mystery for the viewers... But the 2-parter was enjoyable on its own so the mysteries (which I mostly didn't notice anyway) weren't too distracting.

In the end, the dangling mysteries from Season 5 (apart from the bit in "The Lodger", and the various references to The Silence, which tie into Season 6) were all concluded pretty nicely. I think it worked. I'd agree that it's kind of a gimmicky way to arrange a story - but really it's just a mystery. Mysteries are fun because you're pulled along by little hints that give you the feeling of coming closer to the answer - and then a lot hinges on how the mystery is resolved in the end. In other words, the process of picking up the clues along the way can be fun even if the conclusion is unsatisfactory (hence, people enjoying "Lost", etc.) - but in this case I think the conclusion was well executed, too.

In my experience every single show that runs too long ends up turning into a caricature of itself. The writers get fixated on certain distinguishing character traits and exaggerate those. They default to the predictable. It's not surprise to see this happening with Dr. Who.

I disagree, Matt Smith has taken Moffat's excellent writing and really made something of the character, far more so than the previous two actors ever did. To be fair to them I think Davies' stories were the real problem for them; compared to Moffat's they were just childish and shallow for the most part and suffered heavily from defeating the Daleks/Cybermen every single week. It reminds me of the Borg from Star Trek - in TNG they were quite scary, with a single cube being almost unstoppable, but then Voyager came along and Janeway beat them every week until they were just a lame caricature of themselves.

Smith's Doctor is more like the pre-2005 ones, and to me infinitely preferable to Tennant's. The companions are more likeable too and the dynamic with the three of them works well. The Doctor babbles out a stream-of-conciousness monologue sometimes and it gives you an insight into how is mind is working, but also how he uses it to manipulate people by drawing their attention away from other things. The plots are complex but not hard to understand I think.

I'm not sure I'd agree that the Doctor has become a caricature of himself, but certainly the quality of the plots has suffered.

Moffat's desire to have a strong overarching plot means that nothing ever makes sense until the very end. It falls in to that same trap that shows like Lost and Heroes did, where confusing the audience was mistaken for a clever plot ("ha ha, I fooled you!"). Certainly there are good reasons to do arcs, and well done arcs are fantastic, but as it stands the main arcs of Moffet's seasons make absolutely no sense. It's very hard to enjoy a show when you have no idea what's going on.

> A single analyst at a private company in the employ of the United States government

There -- fixed that for you. It does not have to be policy for it to be an affront to the sovereign citizens of this nation. It is an affront for our government to use our money to finance research into social manipulation -- particularly when the targets of that social manipulation include dissent regarding the operation of government programs.

> 'cause by golly, we haven't had our two minutes hate yet today, and we need something to be outraged over!

I am not sure if you are being serious, as that is a sterling example of using social stigma to suppress dissent. But I will respond to your statement as though it is a genuine supposition and not a mere caricature of the very topic under debate:

What should strike you as more despicable is that at least two minutes worth of such offenses against our nation happen every day. This nation was founded on dissent, by dissenters, with the express purpose of encouraging and facilitating dissent as expressed in great detail in the Declaration and Constitution. That those sworn to defend those principles are instead using taxpayer money to fund research into the suppression of dissent is anathema to This Grand Experiment.

Then you didn't understand it. His argument was more like: "Human are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt (or not); computers are not; therefore thought cannot be reduced to computation". It has nothing to do with the non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics because even non-deterministic outcomes are computable. His speculation about consciousness and quantum mechanics is based on an analogy between the "collapse of the waveform" and thought. Even though the analogy is suggestive, according to Penrose, quantum mechanics cannot fully explain consciousness (because of consciousness's supposed non-computability) and to the extent that it cannot quantum mechanics is incomplete. It's still a crap argument but it's a hell of a lot better than your caricature. Dennett and Hoftstadter are even worse in many ways. They, like Penrose, are stuck on artifacts of theory. Stick with people that know how the brain actually works, like Edelman.

Your argument fails on several levels: 1. Your description of his argument has nothing to do with consciousness, it has to do with solving the halting problem and there's not a direct link there. It's just a different problem 2. More importantly, the argument that humans can somehow solve the halting problem and computers cannot is incorrect. We can infer that an algorithm probably won't halt, but that's a far cry from 'solving the halting problem' since A. we're using probabilistic heuristics and B. we're often wrong. To solve the halting problem, you need to come up with a way of deciding (correctly) for _all_ algorithms whether or not they halt. Can humans do that? Of course not.

Penrose's argument is a bait and switch: "Computers (Turing machines) cannot do X", but "Humans can do X", but the requirements for X for humans are greatly relaxed. It's not at all clear that a computer cannot do what humans do (i.e. be right most of the time for a wide range (but not all) problems).

His argument was more like: "Human are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt (or not); computers are not; therefore thought cannot be reduced to computation".

That is patent nonsense, though, and if it is better than the caricature of your parent, it is only very barely so. There is no proof, nor even the shadow of a supporting argument, to the idea that humans are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt, for all possible algorithms.

First, only an astonishingly small subset of all algorithms is even intelligible to a human - if a computer was to solve the halting problem for "intelligible" programs, but was not itself "intelligible", how would you go about proving that such a program can't exist? All the proofs I know of imply applying the algorithm to a derivative of itself, but you can't do that if the algorithm does not belong to its own domain. And I see no reason - much to the contrary - to think that the brain is intelligible to itself (maybe the big picture is, but you don't solve the halting problem with an overview of the code).

Second, if you say an algorithm will not halt, how do you think you can be sure, without resorting to formal proofs... which are isomorphic to programs via the Curry–Howard correspondence?

Third, humans often miss rare or fringe cases, leading them to be overconfident in their answers for as long as these cases do not occur. I mean, if humans truly can solve the halting problem, they are not doing a very good job.

And then there is the fact that the halting problem is vastly overstated: by waiting long enough, a Turing machine can come arbitrarily close to solving it. Furthermore, there is a very large number of algorithms that pretty obviously halt/do not halt, for reasons that can be codified. There is nothing at all controversial with the idea that a computer could figure out whether the vast majority of programs halt or not. It just can't work for *everything*, but the idea that humans do is nothing short of laughable.

Ignore my other response it's obviously confused. I think what I was getting at is that Penrose thinks that the very fact we are able to understand the halting problem means thinking cannot be reduced to computation. In any case I don't want to be in the position of trying to defend a position I do not hold so I am going to stop digging myself into a hole now.

His argument was more like: "Human are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt (or not); computers are not; therefore thought cannot be reduced to computation".

That is patent nonsense, though, and if it is better than the caricature of your parent, it is only very barely so. There is no proof, nor even the shadow of a supporting argument, to the idea that humans are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt, for all possible algorithms.

First, only an astonishingly small subset of all algorithms is even intelligible to a human - if a computer was to solve the halting problem for "intelligible" programs, but was not itself "intelligible", how would you go about proving that such a program can't exist? All the proofs I know of imply applying the algorithm to a derivative of itself, but you can't do that if the algorithm does not belong to its own domain. And I see no reason - much to the contrary - to think that the brain is intelligible to itself (maybe the big picture is, but you don't solve the halting problem with an overview of the code).

Second, if you say an algorithm will not halt, how do you think you can be sure, without resorting to formal proofs... which are isomorphic to programs via the Curry–Howard correspondence?

Third, humans often miss rare or fringe cases, leading them to be overconfident in their answers for as long as these cases do not occur. I mean, if humans truly can solve the halting problem, they are not doing a very good job.

And then there is the fact that the halting problem is vastly overstated: by waiting long enough, a Turing machine can come arbitrarily close to solving it. Furthermore, there is a very large number of algorithms that pretty obviously halt/do not halt, for reasons that can be codified. There is nothing at all controversial with the idea that a computer could figure out whether the vast majority of programs halt or not. It just can't work for *everything*, but the idea that humans do is nothing short of laughable.

Some or all doesn't matter in this case. It's a quite binary thing. If it can be done at all it is qualitatively different than coming "arbitrarily close". I don't ageee with him for other reasons but "close enough" arguments like yours do not refute his point.