You've got it all wrong. Treating disease has never been about eliminating bacteria. After all, we've reached the end of history already (when was that? some time in the late 80s?), such concepts are so early twentieth century. Treating disease is more akin to a clash of civilizations, and the only cure is the eternal spread of democracy coupled with a reformation of bacterial ideology.
Once those bacteria start listening to Britney Spears, waving their purple stained pseudopods in the plasma and embrace democracy, they'll stop the endless bloodshed and start acting like civilized Americans!
I suppose a bit of hayfever, arthritis, excema and so on isn't too bad when all your friends and associates are keeling over from the plague, smallpox, etc.
What is Political Correctness? It can't be understood without reference to the Frankfurt School, a movement composed of Jewish Marxists intent on subverting the host society they were in at the time, which was Germany in 1923.
The very idea of conflating being pregnant with "not being a real person" is exactly the sort of genocidal thing PC was, and is still about. How would Jews like the ever-present and mass marketed suggestion that they shouldn't have kids, or if they have kids they must be stupid, or that non-Jews make better husbands? Works out about the same as a death camp in the end. Gentiles don't much like it either.
Youtube is now in the hands of search monopolist Google. Many said that they paid too much, but what really was bought was influence, worth far more than any revenue stream they could derive from it.
What will happen now is that google will allow activism it approves of or is indifferent to, and lower the search rankings/drop from top 10 lists any activism that it doesn't like. The same thing it already does with news and search.
I doubt this will change anything. All it will do is further tighten control.
For example, google/youtube has already been caught pulling / removing from top 10 lists the video where the BBC stated that the Salomon Brothers building (WTC7) had collapsed... 20 minutes before the event actually occurred.
"When you see an MMORPG that can stand on the merits of its actual game play and not rely on hopeless addiction to watching stats slowly tick up, you will be seeing the first TRUE second generation MMORPG... not the copy cat Everquest crap that is spaming the market right now."
Insightful comments.
MMORPGs are the way they are for marketing reasons. You maximize the number of people who play by making the game compelling visually, make it massively online so that there is the social aspect that hooks people, etc. You maximize the number of months they continue to subscribe by catering to the entire bell curve. (It's like TV marketing in that regard.)
It does not matter what the bell curve is measuring, be it IQ, reaction time, or finger bandwidth. The important thing is to minimize the impact on the game. If someone realizes they can't win no matter what simply because they drew the short straw in the genetic lottery or didn't train their brain enough at an early stage in life, they will tire of losing and unsubscribe.
As soon as you allow the level 1 player to come along and defeat a level 60 character, all those otherwise challenged players who have spent the time and money on building their character will quit.
The phenomenon of the "ordinary hero" referred to in TFA is in fact an emergent quality of the marketing constraints. Change any of the above and subscription rates will plummet.
XP has been good while it lasted. It is certainly the best desktop OS I've personally used from MS. But I think this time will be the first time I force myself to use a linux or bsd as my permanent desktop OS... without a dual boot.
It's a bit scary, but I think that to be rid of malware permanently will be worth it. To also be able to read the code and get some idea that there are no backdoors into your computer planted by whoever would be worth it as well.
I'm at the stage where I realize that being without games is something that improves my life, so moving to an OS with a dearth of games is actually an advantage. And I can always play Wesnoth if I lapse. (www.wesnoth.org).
The main challenge is going to be Office. If worse comes to worse, I will have to go the MS/Crossover Office route.
I don't believe that anyone in the far right would actually use that argument. It smells more like something you might hear from a standard issue Republican.
"assume that you're supposed to vote for the next Nobel peace prize winner: the two candidates are Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Who do you vote for?"
I'd write in FDR, that veritable man of peace. Why, he only financed Stalin with Lend Lease until he saw that the Germans were spent, then conveniently invaded Europe to set up bases that are still there to this day. And those ungrateful Soviets only ever paid off a third of their $6 billion!
Not to mention goading the Japanese into war with McCollum's eight point plan, every point of which was implemented.
A sexually transmitted disease giving permanent beer goggles (or just an alcohol craving) would have a selective advantage. However, I don't imagine it would impact retinal cells, it would have to alter a higher, interpretive layer.
Increasing testosterone production would also work well (in both men and women).
Gifted is very likely a euphemism for high IQ, or high g. High IQ is something that is common among people with various intellectual gifts. Savantism is by contrast exceedingly rare.
It is a necessary euphemism in the age of Political Correctness. You can largely thank Gould for writing (and his publishers, for promoting) "The Mismeasure of Man", an entertaining and persuasive book that ignores extensive current research on IQ to attack a strawman of very early IQ research.
Another possibility is that there are gifted children who listen to metal because they just plain like it. Metal is a very diverse musical genre that has spawned (and is still spawning) many sub-genres (with the exception of nu-metal). With the speed, complexity and length of many songs it is not really a surprise that it will find listeners amongst those who have the mental hardware and the taste for such songs. A lot of high IQ teens are going to outgrow pop radio crap and move on to more complex genres such as metal, classical et al, just as they will outgrow tic tac toe and move on to checkers, chess, go, etc.
Or just put Centos on there. Who on earth runs Fedora as a server? If they are a sysadmin they need to be promptly sacked.
This seems like a dumb competition - of course the hackers are going to win. I highly doubt any of the hackers would win if the roles were reversed. Why not give the students several days to set up a system to spec, then let the hackers at it?
I'm not sure where you got that info from, but assuming you are correct, that means that at least 6 out of the 10 had a parent who have PhDs, which would put their IQ in the top 10% region. And that says nothing about the other 4, or their partners. I somehow doubt that they were janitors.
Their parents may have encouraged them to seek out knowledge, but if the children didn't have the mental hardware in place courtesy of their genetic code (and appropriate nutrients available to build that hardware to the genetic spec), they would not be able to do much with that information. Without that mental hardware it gets to become an exercise in pointlessness to even try - much like trying to instruct your dog to talk (he'll happily sit there and yip back at you all day, for his whole life), or to get SETI@home working on your HP-48GX.
The desire of parents to encourage their progeny to seek out knowledge is probably at least in part genetic. Most desires are hardwired. For example, young males hardly need parental encouragement to surf for porn, for example. It's something they do in spite of their upbringing.
But yeah, I totally agree that the school they went to has very little to do with their excellence. Basically, smart kid + computer/ISP/google + desire to enter such a competition + access to enough money + luck (being in right place at right time) = contestant
Things are really made for the autodidact in this day and age.
Yep, I love how we hear all this great theatre about Google "not being evil", "fighting subpeonas" and "anonymizing search records" while at the same time they become more firmly embedded in the US spy services. What else would one expect from a business that is (according to another poster) "primarily a media company, like NBC"?
Here's a quote from William Colby, former Director of the CIA: "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any major significance in the major media."
"They say that if you make a RFQ and get one offer for $100k, three for $10k and one for $1k, they're likely to drop the $100k (too expensive) and the $1k (must have missed something). MySQL and PostgreSQL score about 10x as high on the WTF scale to most PHBs. If anything is free* in their world, they expect a bait-and-switch like *upgrade now to $foo pro for the good features, that was just the hook."
I suppose if you are dealing with a PHB you have your work cut out for you, and in all likelihood at this stage of the game your boss will side with one of the major players.
A major niche (and it's really a wedge, IMO) of PostgreSQL is in the area of heavy cost constraint, used by a smart individual with some time up his sleeve. This could either be a start up business (e.g. run by a college student/grad) or in a small-medium sized business where a technically savvy employee wants to make a name for himself by building some sort of money making/saving database application and has enough time to do so. It could easily happen with a (perhaps fairly computer illiterate) founder who pinches pennies to the extent that he might begrudge even the $1000 option. Often founders of companies are this way - pinching pennies was how they got their start.
Another market niche is the fairly low priced database application needing a decent backend. You can undercut your competition knowing full well your application will work, and still make more money.
A few of these examples, especially successful startups, and PostgreSQL will build the sort of momentum that linux built 5-10 years ago in the server market. I think it is already happening. What will slow it is the difficulty in transferring from an existing database installation to an OSS version. Switching firewalls, file servers etc. is not as nearly as troublesome as database migration (from and to any platform).
However, the database functionality is there. PostgreSQL holds your data well. It hews close to the SQL standards. Complex joins are no problem. With a little work, you can make your backend sing with functions, triggers etc. And it's fast, when you are actually comparing apples to apples (i.e. you are comparing two ACID compliant RDBMS' with referential integrity constraints, not a mythical database consisting of MyISAM performance with InnoDB functionality).
I suspect the rise of PostgreSQL will be more meteoric than most pundits are expecting.
FTA: "What price changes did Red Hat make immediately in the wake of the Oracle announcement? - None. Zero, zip, nada. - We're not hearing of any individual deal discounting. - Red Hat knows that they have a premium brand, so ignoring people competing on price is the right strategy.The role of a premium brand - Lamborghini ignores price competition between Hyundai and Kia. - Oracle ignores price competition between MySQL and PostgreSQL."
This is not the case at all. In the last few years, MySQL has matured and more people have found out about PostgreSQL (in fact, PostgreSQL is probably the best kept secret OSS has to offer - it has a kick ass feature set and it's completely and utterly free). For a large amount of enterprise stuff, PostgreSQL is more than adequate and as a bonus, does not treat your data as garbage.
Anyone considering building some sort of database application has the option of spending a couple months (with change left over) from the money they would spend on an Oracle license, and invest it in learning PostgreSQL. At the current rate of developement, it will in all likelihood solve any future problem they could have. For free. No worries about licenses. Anyone in a startup where money is tight and time is cheap should be considering PostgreSQL.
This has had direct ramifications on the strategy of all the big database players. At the very least, they all now have a free entry level option to compete with OSS competitors.
It's probably the number one way to prevent malware entering your system, other than being careful what you click on with your email. I have no idea why it's not on the list.
Trains are much more important when your government's paper money doesn't get exchanged for the vast majority of oil in the world, enforced by the largest bluewater navy in the world. Since you can't just print more paper money to buy more oil, you actually have to have a decent alternative to the car. Hence people rely on trains more.
"Far right" parties certainly seem to be a large target of surveillance programs, as well as anyone else who can threaten the status quo. Far right is in itself an interesting term. Why is the label "far right" applied to the BNP, and yet the "leftist"/"communist" would be applied to the ANC or the Viet Cong, or the so-called "Chi-coms"? They are all parties/regimes that advocate putting the interests of the indigenous population first.
Perhaps the reason why trains running on time, bread, circuses and the like is that once those things stop, the real competition between various competing ethnic groups the various Euro governments have imported will become felt and people will revolt.
Translation: I want to jail anyone who praises a party I don't agree with. Or writes a book that I don't like. So, I will burn your books and throw you in jail if you so dare as praise a regime that burned books and threw people in jail, or even use well referenced argument in a debate arguing against something I don't like.
Yeah, that makes sense. How very insightful of you.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got it all wrong. Treating disease has never been about eliminating bacteria. After all, we've reached the end of history already (when was that? some time in the late 80s?), such concepts are so early twentieth century. Treating disease is more akin to a clash of civilizations, and the only cure is the eternal spread of democracy coupled with a reformation of bacterial ideology.
Once those bacteria start listening to Britney Spears, waving their purple stained pseudopods in the plasma and embrace democracy, they'll stop the endless bloodshed and start acting like civilized Americans!
I suppose a bit of hayfever, arthritis, excema and so on isn't too bad when all your friends and associates are keeling over from the plague, smallpox, etc.
What is Political Correctness? It can't be understood without reference to the Frankfurt School, a movement composed of Jewish Marxists intent on subverting the host society they were in at the time, which was Germany in 1923.
The very idea of conflating being pregnant with "not being a real person" is exactly the sort of genocidal thing PC was, and is still about. How would Jews like the ever-present and mass marketed suggestion that they shouldn't have kids, or if they have kids they must be stupid, or that non-Jews make better husbands? Works out about the same as a death camp in the end. Gentiles don't much like it either.
The first link google popped up is here:
http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html
Wikipedia mentions the Frankfurt School also, if you scroll past the introduction.
Youtube is now in the hands of search monopolist Google. Many said that they paid too much, but what really was bought was influence, worth far more than any revenue stream they could derive from it.
/ 260207building7.htm
What will happen now is that google will allow activism it approves of or is indifferent to, and lower the search rankings/drop from top 10 lists any activism that it doesn't like. The same thing it already does with news and search.
I doubt this will change anything. All it will do is further tighten control.
For example, google/youtube has already been caught pulling / removing from top 10 lists the video where the BBC stated that the Salomon Brothers building (WTC7) had collapsed... 20 minutes before the event actually occurred.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007
"When you see an MMORPG that can stand on the merits of its actual game play and not rely on hopeless addiction to watching stats slowly tick up, you will be seeing the first TRUE second generation MMORPG... not the copy cat Everquest crap that is spaming the market right now."
Insightful comments.
MMORPGs are the way they are for marketing reasons. You maximize the number of people who play by making the game compelling visually, make it massively online so that there is the social aspect that hooks people, etc. You maximize the number of months they continue to subscribe by catering to the entire bell curve. (It's like TV marketing in that regard.)
It does not matter what the bell curve is measuring, be it IQ, reaction time, or finger bandwidth. The important thing is to minimize the impact on the game. If someone realizes they can't win no matter what simply because they drew the short straw in the genetic lottery or didn't train their brain enough at an early stage in life, they will tire of losing and unsubscribe.
As soon as you allow the level 1 player to come along and defeat a level 60 character, all those otherwise challenged players who have spent the time and money on building their character will quit.
The phenomenon of the "ordinary hero" referred to in TFA is in fact an emergent quality of the marketing constraints. Change any of the above and subscription rates will plummet.
Maybe the jump is the same magnitude, but at least the jump from 98/ME to XP was in the positive direction.
XP has been good while it lasted. It is certainly the best desktop OS I've personally used from MS. But I think this time will be the first time I force myself to use a linux or bsd as my permanent desktop OS... without a dual boot.
It's a bit scary, but I think that to be rid of malware permanently will be worth it. To also be able to read the code and get some idea that there are no backdoors into your computer planted by whoever would be worth it as well.
I'm at the stage where I realize that being without games is something that improves my life, so moving to an OS with a dearth of games is actually an advantage. And I can always play Wesnoth if I lapse. (www.wesnoth.org).
The main challenge is going to be Office. If worse comes to worse, I will have to go the MS/Crossover Office route.
I don't believe that anyone in the far right would actually use that argument. It smells more like something you might hear from a standard issue Republican.
"Email has failed only if you use it for marketing or as a persuasion tool."
Tell that to the Nigerians.
"assume that you're supposed to vote for the next Nobel peace prize winner: the two candidates are Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Who do you vote for?"
I'd write in FDR, that veritable man of peace. Why, he only financed Stalin with Lend Lease until he saw that the Germans were spent, then conveniently invaded Europe to set up bases that are still there to this day. And those ungrateful Soviets only ever paid off a third of their $6 billion!
Not to mention goading the Japanese into war with McCollum's eight point plan, every point of which was implemented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollum_memo
A sexually transmitted disease giving permanent beer goggles (or just an alcohol craving) would have a selective advantage. However, I don't imagine it would impact retinal cells, it would have to alter a higher, interpretive layer.
Increasing testosterone production would also work well (in both men and women).
I never looked it at like that, you make a very good point. Thanks.
Obligatory:
SELECT * FROM album a INNER JOIN album_track t ON a.track_id = t.track_id WHERE a.genre = 'Metal' AND t.rating = 'Kicks freakin' ass!';
Gifted is very likely a euphemism for high IQ, or high g. High IQ is something that is common among people with various intellectual gifts. Savantism is by contrast exceedingly rare.
g enres
It is a necessary euphemism in the age of Political Correctness. You can largely thank Gould for writing (and his publishers, for promoting) "The Mismeasure of Man", an entertaining and persuasive book that ignores extensive current research on IQ to attack a strawman of very early IQ research.
Another possibility is that there are gifted children who listen to metal because they just plain like it. Metal is a very diverse musical genre that has spawned (and is still spawning) many sub-genres (with the exception of nu-metal). With the speed, complexity and length of many songs it is not really a surprise that it will find listeners amongst those who have the mental hardware and the taste for such songs. A lot of high IQ teens are going to outgrow pop radio crap and move on to more complex genres such as metal, classical et al, just as they will outgrow tic tac toe and move on to checkers, chess, go, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heavy_metal_
But it will be THEIR hill, and it will be THEIR beans!
Yes, it looks like those new security defenses could do with another session in the oven.
Or just put Centos on there. Who on earth runs Fedora as a server? If they are a sysadmin they need to be promptly sacked.
This seems like a dumb competition - of course the hackers are going to win. I highly doubt any of the hackers would win if the roles were reversed. Why not give the students several days to set up a system to spec, then let the hackers at it?
I have a feeling that this will generate too many false positives to be useful.
Also it may lead to a false sense of security. Usually when roads ice up, it's night time, not many cars around to provide data on road condition.
I'm not sure where you got that info from, but assuming you are correct, that means that at least 6 out of the 10 had a parent who have PhDs, which would put their IQ in the top 10% region. And that says nothing about the other 4, or their partners. I somehow doubt that they were janitors.
Their parents may have encouraged them to seek out knowledge, but if the children didn't have the mental hardware in place courtesy of their genetic code (and appropriate nutrients available to build that hardware to the genetic spec), they would not be able to do much with that information. Without that mental hardware it gets to become an exercise in pointlessness to even try - much like trying to instruct your dog to talk (he'll happily sit there and yip back at you all day, for his whole life), or to get SETI@home working on your HP-48GX.
The desire of parents to encourage their progeny to seek out knowledge is probably at least in part genetic. Most desires are hardwired. For example, young males hardly need parental encouragement to surf for porn, for example. It's something they do in spite of their upbringing.
But yeah, I totally agree that the school they went to has very little to do with their excellence. Basically,
smart kid + computer/ISP/google + desire to enter such a competition + access to enough money + luck (being in right place at right time) = contestant
Things are really made for the autodidact in this day and age.
Yep, I love how we hear all this great theatre about Google "not being evil", "fighting subpeonas" and "anonymizing search records" while at the same time they become more firmly embedded in the US spy services. What else would one expect from a business that is (according to another poster) "primarily a media company, like NBC"?
Here's a quote from William Colby, former Director of the CIA:
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any major significance in the major media."
Plus ça change...
"They say that if you make a RFQ and get one offer for $100k, three for $10k and one for $1k, they're likely to drop the $100k (too expensive) and the $1k (must have missed something). MySQL and PostgreSQL score about 10x as high on the WTF scale to most PHBs. If anything is free* in their world, they expect a bait-and-switch like *upgrade now to $foo pro for the good features, that was just the hook."
I suppose if you are dealing with a PHB you have your work cut out for you, and in all likelihood at this stage of the game your boss will side with one of the major players.
A major niche (and it's really a wedge, IMO) of PostgreSQL is in the area of heavy cost constraint, used by a smart individual with some time up his sleeve. This could either be a start up business (e.g. run by a college student/grad) or in a small-medium sized business where a technically savvy employee wants to make a name for himself by building some sort of money making/saving database application and has enough time to do so. It could easily happen with a (perhaps fairly computer illiterate) founder who pinches pennies to the extent that he might begrudge even the $1000 option. Often founders of companies are this way - pinching pennies was how they got their start.
Another market niche is the fairly low priced database application needing a decent backend. You can undercut your competition knowing full well your application will work, and still make more money.
A few of these examples, especially successful startups, and PostgreSQL will build the sort of momentum that linux built 5-10 years ago in the server market. I think it is already happening. What will slow it is the difficulty in transferring from an existing database installation to an OSS version. Switching firewalls, file servers etc. is not as nearly as troublesome as database migration (from and to any platform).
However, the database functionality is there. PostgreSQL holds your data well. It hews close to the SQL standards. Complex joins are no problem. With a little work, you can make your backend sing with functions, triggers etc. And it's fast, when you are actually comparing apples to apples (i.e. you are comparing two ACID compliant RDBMS' with referential integrity constraints, not a mythical database consisting of MyISAM performance with InnoDB functionality).
I suspect the rise of PostgreSQL will be more meteoric than most pundits are expecting.
FTA:
"What price changes did Red Hat make immediately in the wake of
the Oracle announcement?
- None. Zero, zip, nada.
- We're not hearing of any individual deal discounting.
- Red Hat knows that they have a premium brand, so ignoring people
competing on price is the right strategy.The role of a premium brand
- Lamborghini ignores price competition between Hyundai and Kia.
- Oracle ignores price competition between MySQL and PostgreSQL."
This is not the case at all. In the last few years, MySQL has matured and more people have found out about PostgreSQL (in fact, PostgreSQL is probably the best kept secret OSS has to offer - it has a kick ass feature set and it's completely and utterly free). For a large amount of enterprise stuff, PostgreSQL is more than adequate and as a bonus, does not treat your data as garbage.
Anyone considering building some sort of database application has the option of spending a couple months (with change left over) from the money they would spend on an Oracle license, and invest it in learning PostgreSQL. At the current rate of developement, it will in all likelihood solve any future problem they could have. For free. No worries about licenses. Anyone in a startup where money is tight and time is cheap should be considering PostgreSQL.
This has had direct ramifications on the strategy of all the big database players. At the very least, they all now have a free entry level option to compete with OSS competitors.
It's probably the number one way to prevent malware entering your system, other than being careful what you click on with your email. I have no idea why it's not on the list.
Trains are much more important when your government's paper money doesn't get exchanged for the vast majority of oil in the world, enforced by the largest bluewater navy in the world. Since you can't just print more paper money to buy more oil, you actually have to have a decent alternative to the car. Hence people rely on trains more.
"Far right" parties certainly seem to be a large target of surveillance programs, as well as anyone else who can threaten the status quo. Far right is in itself an interesting term. Why is the label "far right" applied to the BNP, and yet the "leftist"/"communist" would be applied to the ANC or the Viet Cong, or the so-called "Chi-coms"? They are all parties/regimes that advocate putting the interests of the indigenous population first.
Perhaps the reason why trains running on time, bread, circuses and the like is that once those things stop, the real competition between various competing ethnic groups the various Euro governments have imported will become felt and people will revolt.
Translation: I want to jail anyone who praises a party I don't agree with. Or writes a book that I don't like. So, I will burn your books and throw you in jail if you so dare as praise a regime that burned books and threw people in jail, or even use well referenced argument in a debate arguing against something I don't like.
Yeah, that makes sense. How very insightful of you.