Ah hah, that explains why Microsoft had to have him killed. They could deal with him annoying the shit out of users; that's just business as usual. But blowing off steam by moonlighting as a vaguely gothy, smartass open source H4X0R -- that was just one step too far.
"Clippy, we respect you. You understand that, right? We respect you. We love you. You're part of the Family. We'll always love you. But when you go against the Family's interests... well, things gotta happen. You know how it is, Clippy. You know how it is."
What I find funny is that the entire practice of weather prediction is based on a logically fallacy. They take the data from previous years and say, ok, last time conditions looked like this x happened, so we predict x will happen again. Anybody who's taken an introductory logic class knows that you can't correlation does not equal causation.
And anyone whose understanding of correlation goes beyond "an introductory logic class" knows that in fact, as long as you're very careful about what you're doing, you can in fact very often use observed correlations to make valid predictions.
There's this whole field of study called "statistics," see. Not the "X% of people surveyed believe Y" type of thing you hear on the news, but an actual science, grounded in rigorous mathematical theory and growing more sophisticated all the time at producing useful knowledge from mountains of data. People get PhD's in it and stuff. Really. Maybe you ought to read about it some time. Maybe even take a class.
Or perhaps you'd rather remain secure in your prejudices, repeating "correlation does not equal causation" like a mantra, snickering at people whose knowledge you choose not to understand.
In your particular AFSC, energy requirements may actually have gone down. Much more efficient computers, of course; also, I think, better and lower-power radar and communications equipment. Still a hell of a lot of power needed to run a modern battlefield, of course -- though on a practical level, the stuff our guys are doing in Iraq doesn't have much of the highly electronic character of the war we were training to fight with the Soviets.
[shrug] Let 'em try. Colonization provides many examples of the law of unintended consequences. E.g., the Massaschusetts colonies were founded by some of the most fanatical believers the world has ever seen. The Puritans were the Taliban of their day. Now? Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular are probably the least religious places in the US. You know, when the kids grow up, they get all kinds of funny ideas in their heads.
Realistically, we're going to see all kinds of competing religions up there: Christians from the US and Europe, hard-line Communist believers (who are religious in all but name) from China, Hindus from India, assorted Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Shintos and, so to speak, God knows what-all... Let 'em try. Because absolutely none of the folks here on Earth who are going to try to export their beliefs can predict which way their spiritual children will go.
We haven't heard enough from "the sky is falling" crowd.
Yeah, that stupid "'sky is falling' crowd." Such idiots! Also the "'pi is irrational' crowd," the "'Earth goes around the Sun' crowd," the "'infectious disease is caused by microbes' crowd," the "'current species evolved from previous species' crowd"... why won't these loudmouths just shut up already?
Actually, I agree with you. I'm thinking the ACLU, since among other things, they try to educate people about fundamental aspects of the law such as "accusation is not conviction."
By your logic, we should decide what the absolute worst problem in the world is at any given time, and focus everything we have on that one thing until it's taken care of. And then move on the next one thing, etc.
Fortunately, in the real world, we're capable of doing more than one thing at once.
And why has Apache had so very few in-the-wild exploits compared to IIS?
It doesn't. IIS has had a better security record than Apache for some years now.
I don't normally do this, but -- this claim is so contrary to everything I've ever seen or heard about web server security that I have to ask, do you have an objective source for your assertion?
It doesn't. The "-ome" and "-omics" suffixes are being thrown around with reckless abandon these days; it's like businesses sticking "e-" on everything during the dot-com boom.
That being said, I'm sure this could be a useful resource, and to be fair, it may actually be a little more appropriate to use "-ome" (which AFAIK basically means "the names of things") for a catalog like this than for the current state of the human genome, which is still basically a bunch of sequence data with a lot of significant sites, genes and otherwise, unidentified. My work deals with microarray analysis and statistical genetics; having worked with data from E. coli, mice, cattle, and people, I think it's reasonable to say we have "decoded the E. coli genome" but we're a long way from that with any eukaryote, including all mammals. And even with prokaryotes, we're a long way from really knowing everything that's going on -- job security, woo-hoo!;)
You may have read something into my post that wasn't there; I fully agree that the school (and, if necessary, the law) should punish bullies, and try to prevent bullying. I'd have been delighted if the school had kept me out of that situation in the first place! But just as you say "buying better locks" is an after-the-fact reaction, so is punishment. My point is that students who are ready to defend themselves are less likely to be bullied at all. By no means do I advocate that children who tell their parents or teachers should be told to "toughen up" or "get over it."
Ideally, parents, teachers, and students should work together against bullying, to create an environment where would-be bullies realize that it's a bad idea before they start. But in the current environment, where bullies get away with their actions all the time, those who do defend themselves shouldn't be punished for it.
Okay, your experience was different from mine, which was also at a public school; I suspect the difference was that my school had fairly settled district boundaries without any major distinction between who was bused in and who walked. Presumably the situation you describe at your school was temporary -- sooner or later, the new suburb won't be new any more. And I honestly think that my experience was more typical, but of course I don't really know.
The thing is, in more settled schools without sharp geographic divisions between groups of students, the bullies aren't the majority. There are always more "regular kids," or even hard-core geeks of various kinds, than there are jocks and cheerleaders. It's not the Old South, with a persecuted minority facing lynchings and Jim Crow laws; it's medieval Europe, with a sanctioned elite lording it over everyone else, and the school administration in the role of the Church maintaining the structure ordained by God.
At a drama school, maybe so. (Do drama schools, and other magnet schools, even have football teams?) But at a typical high school, where the social hierarchy is designed by the school administration so that jocks are number one, actors bullying athletes isn't the way it works, and you know it.
You're quite right that bullies pick on the weakest victim. That's my point. If the computer nerd can devastate the football player's life in response to a mean page on Teh Interwebs, but the tuba player doesn't know anything more about computers than the cheerleader does, guess who gets pasted online?
I agree that bullying is never justified. What I'm saying -- and I can understand if you disagree -- is that IMO the exact same action, whether it's punching someone in the face or saying nasty things about them on MySpace, may be bullying in one instance and self-defense in another.
At the point someone is willing to get personal satisfaction and validation by causing another emotional or physical pain, they have crossed the line from healthy to sadistic... In the real world, two wrongs do not make a right.
In the real world, self-defense is both a right and a duty.
Back when I was in high school, 20+ years ago, I didn't have the worry about cyber-bullying; I was more concerned about the physical, hands-on kind. This lasted precisely until the point where I learned to fight back. And I still have very vivid memories of hurting people, and of the satisfaction I took in it; does that make me a sadist? I don't think so -- I certainly don't go looking for fights these days, or try to hurt people in any way. The satisfaction was equal parts getting my own back and knowing that I was finally putting a stop to the torment that had made my life hell for years.
You know what? It worked. After a year or so of fighting damn near every day with people who had considered me their own personal punching bag, the bullying stopped. And not just for me, but for many of my equally victimized friends. That may have been "two wrongs" -- hell, it may have been a hundred wrongs -- but damned if it didn't make things right.
I'd guess that the kids who are getting the worst of the "cyber-bullying" aren't the kind of geeks who have the technical skills to take appropriate revenge. IOW, they're not the hackers; they're the "art fags" and "drama nerds" and "book dorks" who are still considered targets in the vicious high school social hierarchy, but whose chosen geekiness doesn't give them skills that are useful for fighting back.
Face it, if the schools can censor students' posts to prevent bullying (and censorship is what we're talking about, let's not mince words) then they can use exactly that same principle to censor students' posts on any other subject, including legitimate criticism of teachers and administrators. And as much as hate bullying and wish schools would do more to fight it, if it comes down to a choice between free speech vs. protecting kids from things that happen off campus on the other, I'll choose free speech every time. As I remember vividly from my own high school days, speaking out honestly off-campus about incompetent and/or malicious faculty is about the only chance smart, committed kids have to make a difference in the quality of their education. Bullying can be dealt with one-on-one; when you're up against The Man, you have to have a forum where you can organize.
(Of course, we did it without all this fancy technology you kids have these days... damn kids... grumble natter... where'd I leave my dentures...)
We'll probably get the worst of both worlds. There will be a lot of noise about protecting the victims of bullying, cyber- and otherwise, but nothing will actually be done in that regard, while new powers of censorship designed to allow schools to track down "cyberbullies" will be swiftly and effectively used to silence students who criticize the school. And anyone who objects too loudly will be tarred with the Harris & Klebold brush, maybe with a touch of bin Laden thrown in. I wish I could believe I was wrong about this, but that's likely the reality.
Actually it's even worse than that; if there are humans on the robots' side mixed in with the fighting -- and there almost certainly will be -- then bad pattern recognition means lots and lots of "friendly fire" deaths. Distinguishing friend from foe in the split second it takes to make a firing decision is hard enough for the human brain.
True enough, but if I have to choose between, say, the Linus-approved Linux kernel and Joe Schmoe's Kernel That He Made From The Linux Kernel But Added Some Stuff Joe Thought Was Cool, I know which one I'll go with.;)
I know we sort of canonize the executive class in this country
That's the problem in a nutshell.
News flash! This just in! People who actually do productive work like to telecommute, while mindless parasitical execudroids prefer to have their minions in the office where they can control them and distract them from their real jobs with meetings and other pointless busywork. More on this breaking story as it develops!
Face it, suits are the new nobility, and as far as they're concerned, the rest of us are peasant trash. Productivity isn't the point; power is. Once you start understanding the corporate world in terms of medieval feudalism, everything falls into place.
the fact is they are not true conservatives. They are politicians, and whether they be US, Canadian or some flavor of Islam, they are all corrupt once they are away from the people that put them in power. True conservatives want to preserve a business' right to a profit, but at the same time keep government intervention out of the lives of citizens
When you find some of these conservatives, let me know.
Seriously, your "true conservatives" are like the "true communists" who want to create a utopia without killing a bunch of people, or the "true Christians" who only want to follow Christ's teachings with respect to helping the poor and turning the other cheek, or... you get the idea. It's very easy, when person X who claims to be a member of group Y acts in a way that seems contrary to the stated ideals of the group X isn't a real Y, but what do you do when every single time self-proclaimed Y's get power they do the same boneheaded things X is doing?
Here in the US, I know an astonishingly large number of Republicans who are fundamentally decent people, but who will do the most absurd logical backflips to explain why they continue to support their party no matter how awful its policies. Bush isn't a real conservative, they'll tell me solemnly, the Republican House and Senate leadership aren't real conservatives, the Republican governors and state legislators aren't real conservatives... well, fine, I say, but these are the prominent people who call themselves conservatives, and self-proclaimed conservative voters like you keep letting them get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah hah, that explains why Microsoft had to have him killed. They could deal with him annoying the shit out of users; that's just business as usual. But blowing off steam by moonlighting as a vaguely gothy, smartass open source H4X0R -- that was just one step too far.
... well, things gotta happen. You know how it is, Clippy. You know how it is."
"Clippy, we respect you. You understand that, right? We respect you. We love you. You're part of the Family. We'll always love you. But when you go against the Family's interests
What I find funny is that the entire practice of weather prediction is based on a logically fallacy. They take the data from previous years and say, ok, last time conditions looked like this x happened, so we predict x will happen again. Anybody who's taken an introductory logic class knows that you can't correlation does not equal causation.
And anyone whose understanding of correlation goes beyond "an introductory logic class" knows that in fact, as long as you're very careful about what you're doing, you can in fact very often use observed correlations to make valid predictions.
There's this whole field of study called "statistics," see. Not the "X% of people surveyed believe Y" type of thing you hear on the news, but an actual science, grounded in rigorous mathematical theory and growing more sophisticated all the time at producing useful knowledge from mountains of data. People get PhD's in it and stuff. Really. Maybe you ought to read about it some time. Maybe even take a class.
Or perhaps you'd rather remain secure in your prejudices, repeating "correlation does not equal causation" like a mantra, snickering at people whose knowledge you choose not to understand.
In your particular AFSC, energy requirements may actually have gone down. Much more efficient computers, of course; also, I think, better and lower-power radar and communications equipment. Still a hell of a lot of power needed to run a modern battlefield, of course -- though on a practical level, the stuff our guys are doing in Iraq doesn't have much of the highly electronic character of the war we were training to fight with the Soviets.
So what's your definition of a "legitimate religion," and why doesn't Scientology fit it?
[shrug] Let 'em try. Colonization provides many examples of the law of unintended consequences. E.g., the Massaschusetts colonies were founded by some of the most fanatical believers the world has ever seen. The Puritans were the Taliban of their day. Now? Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular are probably the least religious places in the US. You know, when the kids grow up, they get all kinds of funny ideas in their heads.
... Let 'em try. Because absolutely none of the folks here on Earth who are going to try to export their beliefs can predict which way their spiritual children will go.
Realistically, we're going to see all kinds of competing religions up there: Christians from the US and Europe, hard-line Communist believers (who are religious in all but name) from China, Hindus from India, assorted Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Shintos and, so to speak, God knows what-all
We haven't heard enough from "the sky is falling" crowd.
... why won't these loudmouths just shut up already?
Yeah, that stupid "'sky is falling' crowd." Such idiots! Also the "'pi is irrational' crowd," the "'Earth goes around the Sun' crowd," the "'infectious disease is caused by microbes' crowd," the "'current species evolved from previous species' crowd"
Actually, I agree with you. I'm thinking the ACLU, since among other things, they try to educate people about fundamental aspects of the law such as "accusation is not conviction."
Ultimately, he did break the law by copying music he didn't have a right to
... ?
And your source for this claim is
Oh, the RIAA. Right.
By your logic, we should decide what the absolute worst problem in the world is at any given time, and focus everything we have on that one thing until it's taken care of. And then move on the next one thing, etc.
Fortunately, in the real world, we're capable of doing more than one thing at once.
The genome hasn't been mapped either. It's been sequenced. Mapping is going to take ... a lot longer.
It doesn't. The "-ome" and "-omics" suffixes are being thrown around with reckless abandon these days; it's like businesses sticking "e-" on everything during the dot-com boom.
;)
That being said, I'm sure this could be a useful resource, and to be fair, it may actually be a little more appropriate to use "-ome" (which AFAIK basically means "the names of things") for a catalog like this than for the current state of the human genome, which is still basically a bunch of sequence data with a lot of significant sites, genes and otherwise, unidentified. My work deals with microarray analysis and statistical genetics; having worked with data from E. coli, mice, cattle, and people, I think it's reasonable to say we have "decoded the E. coli genome" but we're a long way from that with any eukaryote, including all mammals. And even with prokaryotes, we're a long way from really knowing everything that's going on -- job security, woo-hoo!
You may have read something into my post that wasn't there; I fully agree that the school (and, if necessary, the law) should punish bullies, and try to prevent bullying. I'd have been delighted if the school had kept me out of that situation in the first place! But just as you say "buying better locks" is an after-the-fact reaction, so is punishment. My point is that students who are ready to defend themselves are less likely to be bullied at all. By no means do I advocate that children who tell their parents or teachers should be told to "toughen up" or "get over it."
Ideally, parents, teachers, and students should work together against bullying, to create an environment where would-be bullies realize that it's a bad idea before they start. But in the current environment, where bullies get away with their actions all the time, those who do defend themselves shouldn't be punished for it.
Okay, your experience was different from mine, which was also at a public school; I suspect the difference was that my school had fairly settled district boundaries without any major distinction between who was bused in and who walked. Presumably the situation you describe at your school was temporary -- sooner or later, the new suburb won't be new any more. And I honestly think that my experience was more typical, but of course I don't really know.
The thing is, in more settled schools without sharp geographic divisions between groups of students, the bullies aren't the majority. There are always more "regular kids," or even hard-core geeks of various kinds, than there are jocks and cheerleaders. It's not the Old South, with a persecuted minority facing lynchings and Jim Crow laws; it's medieval Europe, with a sanctioned elite lording it over everyone else, and the school administration in the role of the Church maintaining the structure ordained by God.
At a drama school, maybe so. (Do drama schools, and other magnet schools, even have football teams?) But at a typical high school, where the social hierarchy is designed by the school administration so that jocks are number one, actors bullying athletes isn't the way it works, and you know it.
You're quite right that bullies pick on the weakest victim. That's my point. If the computer nerd can devastate the football player's life in response to a mean page on Teh Interwebs, but the tuba player doesn't know anything more about computers than the cheerleader does, guess who gets pasted online?
I agree that bullying is never justified. What I'm saying -- and I can understand if you disagree -- is that IMO the exact same action, whether it's punching someone in the face or saying nasty things about them on MySpace, may be bullying in one instance and self-defense in another.
In the real world, self-defense is both a right and a duty.
Back when I was in high school, 20+ years ago, I didn't have the worry about cyber-bullying; I was more concerned about the physical, hands-on kind. This lasted precisely until the point where I learned to fight back. And I still have very vivid memories of hurting people, and of the satisfaction I took in it; does that make me a sadist? I don't think so -- I certainly don't go looking for fights these days, or try to hurt people in any way. The satisfaction was equal parts getting my own back and knowing that I was finally putting a stop to the torment that had made my life hell for years.
You know what? It worked. After a year or so of fighting damn near every day with people who had considered me their own personal punching bag, the bullying stopped. And not just for me, but for many of my equally victimized friends. That may have been "two wrongs" -- hell, it may have been a hundred wrongs -- but damned if it didn't make things right.
I'd guess that the kids who are getting the worst of the "cyber-bullying" aren't the kind of geeks who have the technical skills to take appropriate revenge. IOW, they're not the hackers; they're the "art fags" and "drama nerds" and "book dorks" who are still considered targets in the vicious high school social hierarchy, but whose chosen geekiness doesn't give them skills that are useful for fighting back.
Face it, if the schools can censor students' posts to prevent bullying (and censorship is what we're talking about, let's not mince words) then they can use exactly that same principle to censor students' posts on any other subject, including legitimate criticism of teachers and administrators. And as much as hate bullying and wish schools would do more to fight it, if it comes down to a choice between free speech vs. protecting kids from things that happen off campus on the other, I'll choose free speech every time. As I remember vividly from my own high school days, speaking out honestly off-campus about incompetent and/or malicious faculty is about the only chance smart, committed kids have to make a difference in the quality of their education. Bullying can be dealt with one-on-one; when you're up against The Man, you have to have a forum where you can organize.
... damn kids ... grumble natter ... where'd I leave my dentures ...)
(Of course, we did it without all this fancy technology you kids have these days
We'll probably get the worst of both worlds. There will be a lot of noise about protecting the victims of bullying, cyber- and otherwise, but nothing will actually be done in that regard, while new powers of censorship designed to allow schools to track down "cyberbullies" will be swiftly and effectively used to silence students who criticize the school. And anyone who objects too loudly will be tarred with the Harris & Klebold brush, maybe with a touch of bin Laden thrown in. I wish I could believe I was wrong about this, but that's likely the reality.
Actually it's even worse than that; if there are humans on the robots' side mixed in with the fighting -- and there almost certainly will be -- then bad pattern recognition means lots and lots of "friendly fire" deaths. Distinguishing friend from foe in the split second it takes to make a firing decision is hard enough for the human brain.
Since folks like you think the earth is only 6000 years old, I'm surprised you're paying any attention at all.
True enough, but if I have to choose between, say, the Linus-approved Linux kernel and Joe Schmoe's Kernel That He Made From The Linux Kernel But Added Some Stuff Joe Thought Was Cool, I know which one I'll go with. ;)
I know we sort of canonize the executive class in this country
That's the problem in a nutshell.
News flash! This just in! People who actually do productive work like to telecommute, while mindless parasitical execudroids prefer to have their minions in the office where they can control them and distract them from their real jobs with meetings and other pointless busywork. More on this breaking story as it develops!
Face it, suits are the new nobility, and as far as they're concerned, the rest of us are peasant trash. Productivity isn't the point; power is. Once you start understanding the corporate world in terms of medieval feudalism, everything falls into place.
So they're going to include, what, a LaTeX implementation so programmers can make their symbols look right?
the fact is they are not true conservatives. They are politicians, and whether they be US, Canadian or some flavor of Islam, they are all corrupt once they are away from the people that put them in power. True conservatives want to preserve a business' right to a profit, but at the same time keep government intervention out of the lives of citizens
... you get the idea. It's very easy, when person X who claims to be a member of group Y acts in a way that seems contrary to the stated ideals of the group X isn't a real Y, but what do you do when every single time self-proclaimed Y's get power they do the same boneheaded things X is doing?
... well, fine, I say, but these are the prominent people who call themselves conservatives, and self-proclaimed conservative voters like you keep letting them get away with it.
When you find some of these conservatives, let me know.
Seriously, your "true conservatives" are like the "true communists" who want to create a utopia without killing a bunch of people, or the "true Christians" who only want to follow Christ's teachings with respect to helping the poor and turning the other cheek, or
Here in the US, I know an astonishingly large number of Republicans who are fundamentally decent people, but who will do the most absurd logical backflips to explain why they continue to support their party no matter how awful its policies. Bush isn't a real conservative, they'll tell me solemnly, the Republican House and Senate leadership aren't real conservatives, the Republican governors and state legislators aren't real conservatives