As a scandinavian I can't help but think "Why would you drive anywhere in-town if you're got summer all year?" I suspect it's a cultural difference (since I have american friends who have failed to understand my surprise when they casually mentioned driving down the block to visit someone they could've walked to in less than five minutes)...
My point being, wouldn't it be easier to have some form of public transport and lots of bike paths? Those things that do need to be transported separately could be transported using electric vehicles.
Well, I suppose a workaround to that would be to set up an encrypted tunnel to some machine outside their network and running your own DNS server there, depending on your work IT policies you could even use your employer's VPN to run "private" DNS requests while still using your own internet connection for actually accessing the net.
That said I sure wish ISPs wouldn't do dumb shit like this, it pretty much breaks DNS.
You know all those "the government place a transmitter in my brain" people are going to have a field day with this one. Now they get to panic about government mind-control and RFID (or in their lingo "the mark of the beast") at the same time.
I've never heard Kings of Leon so I can't say if they "deserve" to be popular but I will say this, there have been countless examples of bands/musicians who have produced pretty good music, music which has some artistic merit and a small but loyal following, for a long time and then one day they release an album or a single where they simply mix their sound with whatever is popular at the time and all of a sudden they become popular, their original fans and other fans of the genre reject them and they go on to make big bucks before fading into obscurity because they couldn't keep up with the constant changing whims of the mass market. Does this mean the band's music was bad to begin with? Or does it simply mean that there is at any given time certain sounds and styles which are trendy and if someone chooses to latch onto one of these trends and has some basic talent one is able to become rich and famous (until the a new trend comes along)?
I've found a lot of intelligent people (including geeks) are stoners and even those who aren't a well-acquainted with stoner culture tend to know what 420 means. As for 1488 I will admit that I've never seen both 14 and 88 written together but I do know that 14 is a number some american nazis use because of something some american nazi said once and that 88 (H = 8th letter in alphabet, HH = Heil Hitler) is a very common "secret code" among nazis (and a lot of them can't understand how they keep getting outed when they walk around with shirts with a big "88" printed on them, or register themselves as "88_viking_88" on community websites and forums). So in conclusion I'm guessing 1488 is a nazi "code".
So a group that could be said to not have a very solid and formalized definition of intelligence would consider you unintelligent if you lacked a physical quality that they considered to be "intelligence" (but which would better be characterized as "street smarts")? Still doesn't convince me that dexterity is a subset of intelligence.
Dexterity btw is a subset of fine motor skills.
Basically, motor skills are not intelligence no matter how much you claim that they really are and that those of us in the "developed" world are merely exerting a cultural bias by not acknowledging this. In fact, I could easily claim that the people in these societies are merely doing the very same thing you're accusing us of doing, that they're simply applying their cultural bias. I could even go further and point out that our concept of intelligence and our general definitions of various physical and mental qualities are more refined than their definitions and that it stands to reason that it is more likely that they're the ones with the cultural bias.
It's just another one of those "we took a quick glance at various previous presidents of the US and made up a bunch of numbers we figured would sound reasonable", I seriously doubt there's much accuracy in those numbers.
As I don't have the book in question (and even if I ordered it from Amazon it wouldn't get here before this discussion would get locked) I'll just ask you: Should I take it that the book defines "first generation rich" as "parents weren't millionaires but they may very well have been upper middle class with a few smart investments, $500k in the bank and an extended family with similar finances"? What I'm implying here is that there's a bit of difference between a "self-made man" who's from a family with a total yearly income of $25k, who's the first person in his/her family with a college education etc. and a "self-made man" from a family with a yearly income in excess of $300k who think it's only natural to pay for college for their children (and of course the mandatory "travel in europe for a few months before going to college", paid for by mommy and daddy).
Well, from what I've seen it seems that the whole "high IQ => fails in the army" thing could be better described as "people who try to think for themselves, are creative and question authority generally have trouble with starting at the bottom of strictly hierarchical organisations where you're expected to just conform and follow orders no matter how stupid the orders may be".
(Most people I've known who started military careers and have risen through the ranks were great at following orders and just doing what others told them to do)
So I doubt it's just an IQ thing, it's more that in the military (any military) you're expected to conform and just do as you're told, someone for whom it comes naturally to try creative "outside the box" solutions to problems or who simply has a higher than average ability to analyze problems and figure out solutions is likely to not fit in, something that is true in any organisation that tries to fit everyone into a Lowest Common Denominator role.
You seem to have left out "...a copy of Mac OS X which is sold as an upgrade for earlier versions of Mac OS X running on Apple hardware." at the end of your post.
My boss has always been a VB guy, even to this day he always tries to push VB (not VB.NET, plain old VB6/VBScript) for all new projects but he's become a lot more quiet about that since that time when he put aside an entire day for me and to write a small app in VB and I managed to throw together the same functionality in Python in under an hour...
There's something to be said for good high level languages with sane syntax and a large standard library.
I use Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 all the time and I like them just fine, I've tried CS4 but I decided to hold off on upgrading until my next hardware upgrade cycle (and the original release seemed a bit buggy).
But maybe you're one of those guys who think the GIMP is teh awzoom and that it has been better than Photoshop since the late 90s since "it's free software!!1"?
How would telling TDS that they can no longer have a government-sanctioned monopoly somehow lead to "Gov't run backbones"? Sounds more like what the parent is suggesting is that the government shouldn't be allowed to sanction monopolies for private companies as they see fit.
That doesn't sound very militant. Would you go to "Ham, bacon & Pork - The only all-pig fast food restaurant" with a muslim?
Just because vegetarians in the western world generally don't use an invisible friend to justify their vegetarianism doesn't mean they don't take it seriously (whatever their reason for it is).
Protein deficiency is not a problem with any decent vegetarian diet, that vegetarians suffer from protein deficiency en masse is just another myth about vegetarianism spread by people who don't really know anything about the subject and parents who don't want their teenagers to stop eating meat (seriously, several of my friends have heard this myth from their parents and later in life their parents admitted that they just used it as an argument to keep their children from going vegetarian).
Actually, vegetarianism is not bad for you if you have some basic knowhow about what to eat (and no, the vast majority of vegetarians don't need vitamin or mineral supplements).
As for the vegan couple who mistreated their infant, that's like saying that walking is dangerous because your uncle was tossed in front of a car by gang members when he was out for a walk...
/Mikael (vegetarian for about 10 years now, still no health problems whatsoever (since it's bound to be brought up in some sort of ad hominem "you're just defending your stupid lifestyle choices" attack))
I think what was implied wasn't just the tax laws and such, in IT "everything" changes. A better description would probably be to imagine working as an accountant if the only thing related to the job that wasn't changing seemingly at random was the tax laws (which would still change but the changes would at least make some sense).
I thought the whole point of economic growth was that everyone got richer. But then I never bought into trickle-down economics.
You just missed the part where they define "everyone" as "my frat brothers and our families". Relative to the rich regular people are always going to be poor though (in this kind of system), if the rich have a roofs over their heads then the working class is sleeping under bridges, if the rich have their own movie theaters and swimming pools then the working class has 40" LCD TVs and inflatable kiddy pools. This is, IMHO, by design with our current economic system (and most others that have been tried). Admittedly it's not so much a conspiracy as the fact that those with power and money (which leads to power) all happen to have good reasons (from their POV) to protect their relative wealth and power.
isn't "...moving up in IT." a bit of an oxymoron? From what I've seen "moving up" from a regular IT position generally involves going into management and essentially becoming a non-techie, and if I'll be completely honest I don't consider that being "The best in IT", I consider that being management (just because someone manages geeks doesn't mean this person is a geek him-/herself).
Perhaps because there's a difference between cleaning up actual feces while being told to do so by people who see you as the person who is there to clean up poop (in a very literal sense) and cleaning up "mental poop" while being told to do so by people who see you as either the "computer janitor" or "that geeky guy who does stuff with computer codes and what not"?
Also, where I live the only people who seem to be making less money than nurses are McDonald's employees and the poor bastards stuck in tech support (really, a few special nursing classes that teach you basics like "put the pillow under the patient's head, not over it while pushing down really hard" and "if someone comes into the hospital bleeding and limping, call for a doctor right now" during high school will generally earn you significantly better pay than 3-4 years of university level computer science around here).
Slashdot Mirror
As a scandinavian I can't help but think "Why would you drive anywhere in-town if you're got summer all year?" I suspect it's a cultural difference (since I have american friends who have failed to understand my surprise when they casually mentioned driving down the block to visit someone they could've walked to in less than five minutes)...
My point being, wouldn't it be easier to have some form of public transport and lots of bike paths? Those things that do need to be transported separately could be transported using electric vehicles.
/Mikael
Well, I suppose a workaround to that would be to set up an encrypted tunnel to some machine outside their network and running your own DNS server there, depending on your work IT policies you could even use your employer's VPN to run "private" DNS requests while still using your own internet connection for actually accessing the net.
That said I sure wish ISPs wouldn't do dumb shit like this, it pretty much breaks DNS.
/Mikael
Actually, the Mighty Mouse has had right and left click (plus a scroll ball) for quite some time now.
The Magic Mouse added multitouch, not a second mouse button.
/Mikael
You know all those "the government place a transmitter in my brain" people are going to have a field day with this one. Now they get to panic about government mind-control and RFID (or in their lingo "the mark of the beast") at the same time.
/Mikael
I've never heard Kings of Leon so I can't say if they "deserve" to be popular but I will say this, there have been countless examples of bands/musicians who have produced pretty good music, music which has some artistic merit and a small but loyal following, for a long time and then one day they release an album or a single where they simply mix their sound with whatever is popular at the time and all of a sudden they become popular, their original fans and other fans of the genre reject them and they go on to make big bucks before fading into obscurity because they couldn't keep up with the constant changing whims of the mass market. Does this mean the band's music was bad to begin with? Or does it simply mean that there is at any given time certain sounds and styles which are trendy and if someone chooses to latch onto one of these trends and has some basic talent one is able to become rich and famous (until the a new trend comes along)?
/Mikael
I've found a lot of intelligent people (including geeks) are stoners and even those who aren't a well-acquainted with stoner culture tend to know what 420 means. As for 1488 I will admit that I've never seen both 14 and 88 written together but I do know that 14 is a number some american nazis use because of something some american nazi said once and that 88 (H = 8th letter in alphabet, HH = Heil Hitler) is a very common "secret code" among nazis (and a lot of them can't understand how they keep getting outed when they walk around with shirts with a big "88" printed on them, or register themselves as "88_viking_88" on community websites and forums). So in conclusion I'm guessing 1488 is a nazi "code".
/Mikael
So a group that could be said to not have a very solid and formalized definition of intelligence would consider you unintelligent if you lacked a physical quality that they considered to be "intelligence" (but which would better be characterized as "street smarts")? Still doesn't convince me that dexterity is a subset of intelligence.
Dexterity btw is a subset of fine motor skills.
Basically, motor skills are not intelligence no matter how much you claim that they really are and that those of us in the "developed" world are merely exerting a cultural bias by not acknowledging this. In fact, I could easily claim that the people in these societies are merely doing the very same thing you're accusing us of doing, that they're simply applying their cultural bias. I could even go further and point out that our concept of intelligence and our general definitions of various physical and mental qualities are more refined than their definitions and that it stands to reason that it is more likely that they're the ones with the cultural bias.
/Mikael
It's just another one of those "we took a quick glance at various previous presidents of the US and made up a bunch of numbers we figured would sound reasonable", I seriously doubt there's much accuracy in those numbers.
/Mikael
As I don't have the book in question (and even if I ordered it from Amazon it wouldn't get here before this discussion would get locked) I'll just ask you: Should I take it that the book defines "first generation rich" as "parents weren't millionaires but they may very well have been upper middle class with a few smart investments, $500k in the bank and an extended family with similar finances"? What I'm implying here is that there's a bit of difference between a "self-made man" who's from a family with a total yearly income of $25k, who's the first person in his/her family with a college education etc. and a "self-made man" from a family with a yearly income in excess of $300k who think it's only natural to pay for college for their children (and of course the mandatory "travel in europe for a few months before going to college", paid for by mommy and daddy).
/Mikael
Dexterity is not intelligence no matter how hard you try to make it sound like it is.
/Mikael
Well, from what I've seen it seems that the whole "high IQ => fails in the army" thing could be better described as "people who try to think for themselves, are creative and question authority generally have trouble with starting at the bottom of strictly hierarchical organisations where you're expected to just conform and follow orders no matter how stupid the orders may be".
(Most people I've known who started military careers and have risen through the ranks were great at following orders and just doing what others told them to do)
So I doubt it's just an IQ thing, it's more that in the military (any military) you're expected to conform and just do as you're told, someone for whom it comes naturally to try creative "outside the box" solutions to problems or who simply has a higher than average ability to analyze problems and figure out solutions is likely to not fit in, something that is true in any organisation that tries to fit everyone into a Lowest Common Denominator role.
/Mikael
You seem to have left out "...a copy of Mac OS X which is sold as an upgrade for earlier versions of Mac OS X running on Apple hardware." at the end of your post.
/Mikael
Learn Python, seriously.
My boss has always been a VB guy, even to this day he always tries to push VB (not VB.NET, plain old VB6/VBScript) for all new projects but he's become a lot more quiet about that since that time when he put aside an entire day for me and to write a small app in VB and I managed to throw together the same functionality in Python in under an hour...
There's something to be said for good high level languages with sane syntax and a large standard library.
/Mikael
It's not that I don't care whether it's free or not, it's that usefulness outweighs ideology in some cases.
/Mikael
I use Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 all the time and I like them just fine, I've tried CS4 but I decided to hold off on upgrading until my next hardware upgrade cycle (and the original release seemed a bit buggy).
But maybe you're one of those guys who think the GIMP is teh awzoom and that it has been better than Photoshop since the late 90s since "it's free software!!1"?
/Mikael
How would telling TDS that they can no longer have a government-sanctioned monopoly somehow lead to "Gov't run backbones"? Sounds more like what the parent is suggesting is that the government shouldn't be allowed to sanction monopolies for private companies as they see fit.
/Mikael
I believe the specific test you're referring to is Starfish Prime which was part of the Operation Dominic test series.
/Mikael
That doesn't sound very militant. Would you go to "Ham, bacon & Pork - The only all-pig fast food restaurant" with a muslim?
Just because vegetarians in the western world generally don't use an invisible friend to justify their vegetarianism doesn't mean they don't take it seriously (whatever their reason for it is).
/Mikael
I'd say that first sentence would be true even if you removed "vegetarians" from it...
/Mikael
Protein deficiency is not a problem with any decent vegetarian diet, that vegetarians suffer from protein deficiency en masse is just another myth about vegetarianism spread by people who don't really know anything about the subject and parents who don't want their teenagers to stop eating meat (seriously, several of my friends have heard this myth from their parents and later in life their parents admitted that they just used it as an argument to keep their children from going vegetarian).
/Mikael
Actually, vegetarianism is not bad for you if you have some basic knowhow about what to eat (and no, the vast majority of vegetarians don't need vitamin or mineral supplements).
As for the vegan couple who mistreated their infant, that's like saying that walking is dangerous because your uncle was tossed in front of a car by gang members when he was out for a walk...
/Mikael (vegetarian for about 10 years now, still no health problems whatsoever (since it's bound to be brought up in some sort of ad hominem "you're just defending your stupid lifestyle choices" attack))
I think what was implied wasn't just the tax laws and such, in IT "everything" changes. A better description would probably be to imagine working as an accountant if the only thing related to the job that wasn't changing seemingly at random was the tax laws (which would still change but the changes would at least make some sense).
/Mikael
I thought the whole point of economic growth was that everyone got richer. But then I never bought into trickle-down economics.
You just missed the part where they define "everyone" as "my frat brothers and our families". Relative to the rich regular people are always going to be poor though (in this kind of system), if the rich have a roofs over their heads then the working class is sleeping under bridges, if the rich have their own movie theaters and swimming pools then the working class has 40" LCD TVs and inflatable kiddy pools. This is, IMHO, by design with our current economic system (and most others that have been tried). Admittedly it's not so much a conspiracy as the fact that those with power and money (which leads to power) all happen to have good reasons (from their POV) to protect their relative wealth and power.
/Mikael
isn't "...moving up in IT." a bit of an oxymoron? From what I've seen "moving up" from a regular IT position generally involves going into management and essentially becoming a non-techie, and if I'll be completely honest I don't consider that being "The best in IT", I consider that being management (just because someone manages geeks doesn't mean this person is a geek him-/herself).
/Mikael
Perhaps because there's a difference between cleaning up actual feces while being told to do so by people who see you as the person who is there to clean up poop (in a very literal sense) and cleaning up "mental poop" while being told to do so by people who see you as either the "computer janitor" or "that geeky guy who does stuff with computer codes and what not"?
Also, where I live the only people who seem to be making less money than nurses are McDonald's employees and the poor bastards stuck in tech support (really, a few special nursing classes that teach you basics like "put the pillow under the patient's head, not over it while pushing down really hard" and "if someone comes into the hospital bleeding and limping, call for a doctor right now" during high school will generally earn you significantly better pay than 3-4 years of university level computer science around here).
/Mikael