The disbelievers will in the near future miss out on genetic enhancements/cloning/implants and thus be weeded out of the population as they become unable to compete. Problem will fix itself.
Probably not. A number of medical technologies we now consider part of the standard of care -- anesthesia, aseptic surgical technique, vaccination, x-rays, antibiotics, and blood transfusions all come to mind -- met with fierce challenges on religious grounds when they were first introduced. Over time, as the benefits became obvious, the true believers changed their tune (evolved, one might say...) and "moved the goalposts" to find new things to object to. Only a very small number of fanatics now refuse any of the treatments I listed above, but a much larger group of fanatics willingly takes advantage of them while trying to hold back, e.g., stem cell research with religious objections which sound strikingly similar to those raised against now-common practices in the past, as well as attacking the fundamental biological education which makes such discoveries possible. If the nuts actually had the courage of their convictions to live and die by their own nuttiness, the rest of us would be much better off.
... the invention of the new high-tech material called "canvas" has led to a dramatic decline in traditional cave-painting skills among incoming art students at Bedrock University.
Okay, fine, substitute "is or isn't" for "is" in my original post. My point stands; reality is reality, and not swayed by public opinion -- unlike the law, which is no more (and no less, to be sure) than centuries of opinion set down on paper. Comparing a scientific argument to a legal one is the problem, and seems to be characteristic of the "teach the controversy" ID crowd.
To be honest, most of the time I'd rather deal with the 4004 BC, six-day creation, King James only, Biblical literalist type of creationist than the sneaky, underhanded intelligent design variety. The former at least understand and acknowledge that reality has a form independent of what we think or would like it to be. It's no coincidence, I think, that the success of the ID movement is largely due to Phillip Johnson, a lawyer. I don't actually share the common dislike of lawyers -- good ones are valuable people doing good work -- but legalistic thinking is really antithetical to science.
There's a big difference here. The law is decided by people (and not just lawyers and politicians, at least ideally -- you know, that whole "we the people" thing?) and it says, and means, whatever people decide it says and means. If enough people decide that they don't like the law as it is, it changes. Ultimately, law is nothing but codified opinion.
OTOH, evolution just is. Your belief in it, or lack thereof, makes no difference whatsoever to its reality. And one of the most incredibly frustrating aspects of the evolution vs. creationism argument (and in general, the never-ending struggle between science and pseudoscience) which often makes scientifically-minded sorts come across as arrogant and short-tempered, is that we get really, really tired of dealing with people who just can't seem to get their heads around this distinction.
I am all for stamping out child porn, it is sick and damaging.
Careful -- you've already fallen for their manipulation of the language. They're hoping that by using the words "children" and "pornography" in close conjunction, you'll automatically think, "Oh, child porn, we've got to get rid of that!" But COPA has nothing to do with child porn; it has to do (allegedly) with children seeing porn on the web -- the vast bulk of which is not child porn; it's regular old-fashioned adult porn. Conflating the (very mild, and entirely within the parents' domain) issue of little Johnny looking at dirty pictures with the (very serious, and entirely criminal already) problem of child porn is a cynical and dangerous political ploy.
No, you're not, especially with a DoJ run by someone who has openly endorsed torture (in terrorism cases, not obscenity, granted -- but just wait to see how long it is before we start hearing "Al-Qaeda is funded by porn sites!") Microsoft is big and bad and scary, but the government is a great deal scarier.
Think selective enforcement. Realistically, everyone knows they're never going to get rid of internet porn, and they're never going to keep kids from seeing the stuff. That's not really the point. What is the point is that this law, if upheld, will give them a club to hold over the head of every single person in the US who posts anything on the web, ever, as well as the service providers which provide the hosting space, if even one of those postings contains a dirty word or risque picture. It doesn't mean they'll break down your door in the middle of the night -- but it means they can, if you piss them off enough. And you'll never know what constitutes "enough" until you're in handcuffs.
Apparently you would prefer that no one on Slashdot ever have an opinion about anything, ever, but simply leave it to our Wise And Good Leaders, Who Know What Is Best For All Of Us.
Honestly, I'm a pretty decent guy. I get along well with the people I work with, and for the most part always have, in a number of different settings (the military, corporate IT, and now academia.) And although of course I've had to do things I disagreed with, for the most part, when I felt strongly about an issue, I was able to bring management around to my point of view through reasoned discussion.
My original post, as only one other poster seems to have noticed, was directed at a specific type of manager -- the type who automatically dismisses people who don't dress the way he does, who refuses to recognize that for the most part (not always, certainly, but that's the way to bet) casual dress is just as much a mark of the competent techie as a sharp suit is of the competent businessman, who honestly believes that Microsoft is better than F/OSS because Bill Gates wears a suit and Richard Stallman doesn't. And who, not incidentally, inevitably ends up driving competent tech people away from his organizations because smart people refuse to put up with his crap.
People like that are really just as lacking in social skills as the stereotypical smelly geek; but (as with smelly geeks, come to think of it) there are a lot of them, and they congregate in groups where their antisocial behavior is not only accepted but encouraged, and they reinforce each other. Unfortunately, because they are primarily interested in telling people what to do rather than actually doing anything useful themselves, they tend to acquire enough power to make other people's lives miserable.
Believe it or not, I don't prejudge people in suits; I deal with them exactly as I do everyone else, and that's pretty well. However, I refuse to deal nicely with anyone who does not extend me the same courtesy.
(Oh yeah -- I'm obviously not a full-time writer, and never have been except for a brief period a number of years ago. The truth is, making a living from writing is damned rare. Which is too bad, but so it goes.)
To every suit who doesn't take me seriously because of my appearance (and yes, I do bathe regularly, and my clothes, casual as they may be, are clean and good repair):
Deal with it. I'm smarter than you. I could do your job in my sleep; you couldn't do mine in a million years. You need the product I, and people like me, provide; and good luck finding someone who dresses like you who can provide it. If you prefer to buy crap from other suits, go for it. Your competitors, who are also smarter than you, will happily deal with us long-haired freaks to get the good stuff.
At 37, I haven't suffered any harm from this attitude yet.
A few years ago I remember someone telling me about a Sears Roebuck catalog he'd seen from the early 1900's. One of the more expensive items was an electric motor which came with a variety of specialized tools and adapters. The idea was you would take a drill, saw, whatever, plug it into this motor to draw power (mechanical power, I mean; probably incredibly dangerous, to judge by similar setups on modern farm equipment, but presumably it worked), do the job, unhook the tool, and then fit the next weird adapter to the next tool.
And in those days, when electric motors were fairly expensive all by themselves and had a low power-to-weight ratio, it probably made sense. These days, of course, every power tool has its own motor, and that's how people prefer it.
Considering that most TV's and DVD players and stereos and, hell, microwave ovens now have more computational power than the average user had on his desktop a couple of decades ago, I see no reason to assume that the trend toward divergence isn't continuing into the present day.
I can think of a number of possible opponents with significant naval capability -- i.e., WW2-style naval air-vs.-air and air-vs.-ship battles, with lots of casualties on both sides -- for France, the UK, or both over the next 50 years. So, you can be sure, can their respective governments.
You can turn a lot of that off; play around with the Dock (and vaarious other) settings in System Preferences. Personally I like the "Genie Effect," but I can certainly see where not everyone would.
Believe it or not, there are those of us who, regardless of party affiliation, think the principle of checks and balances is more important than the politics and personalities of the moment.
All I'm saying is that private companies CANNOT do whatever they want just because they are private.
In principle, of course, you're absolutely right -- but the difference is that Microsoft broke the law (and mostly got away with it, grumblings on/. notwithstanding) while Google didn't. There is simply no comparison between Google's behavior as the leading search engine and Microsoft's behavior as the leading OS provider. Google does what successful business are supposed to do: offer a good, popular product or service which people choose to use based on its merits.
Whether Google actually constitutes a search engine monopoly is an interesting question; given Yahoo's position as a pretty strong number two, I'm inclined to say not, but it might be worthy of a court test one of these days. I really doubt Kinderstart are going to be the ones to make this happen, though.
They aren't suing because of bad rankings. They are suing because Google wont say why it ranks some sites hight and bans other sites. There is more merit in this case than most would think.
Google chooses not to reveal its pagerank algorithms precisely to prevent the kind of link-bombing in which Kinderstart was almost certainly engaged. And why should they? This is one of the few cases where "security through obscurity" kinda works -- unlike with, say, encryption algorithms, which depend for security on a secret number, and which generally get stronger when they're open for public scrutiny, the security of Google's page rankings depends on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. They have no obligation to reveal their algorithm to Kinderstart or anyone else.
Now, as a generally pro-F/OSS guy, I personally think it would be great if Google came up with "public key pagerank" -- i.e., a pagerank algorithm that could be released as open source without compromising its effectiveness for a specific application -- but apparently that hasn't happened yet.
If anyone has a case here, it's Google; they could sue Kinderstart and everyone else who tries to manipulate the rankings, and probably under the DMCA they could press criminal charges as well. They don't, for two reasons: it would interfere with the warm'n'fuzzy "don't be evil" vibe they're still trying to project, and it would be a waste of time and money, in that they'd probably spend a lot more trying to track down the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?) of sites that try to do this crap than they would collect in damages. But personally I hope they turn around and grind Kinderstart.com into the dust.
BTW, the first search result that comes up on Google when you search for "Kinderstart" now is this, which seems like a legitimate business rather than a badly designed wannabe portal. How is this a bad thing?
Well, people are free to believe whatever they want, of course, and they do, including many beliefs which are lacking in any evidence whatsoever. But that's not really the point. "Proof" in the sense that most people use the word is impossible in science; all we have is "preponderance of evidence" and "lack of disproof." This is, of course, good enough -- the main reason scientists fight so hard against the use of the word "proof" is because impossible-to-meet demands for proof tend to be used by anti-science types to attack the very well-supported theories which constitute our entire understanding of the natural world.
The most useful business skill a technical person can develop is the ability to look someone in the eye and lie to them with a straight face. As far as I can tell, that's what separates the good business people from the ones who will work 25 years in the same job and never make more than $40k.
Depending on your definition of "good," apparently. "Proficient," yes.
Out of all developers, almost certainly all *good* developers, the number that wish to work for free (beer if you wish, or whatever), is small.
You are, perhaps deliberately, confusing proportion with raw numbers. You may be right (or you may not; I really have no idea) that the proportion of developers (good or otherwise) who want to let others benefit from their work without demanding payment is small -- but there are a hell of a lot of developers in the world, and obviously enough of them are willing to share their work to make F/OSS a going proposition.
I just checked out the hucksterish link in your.sig line, and I have to say, I'm not surprised that someone who would link to such a site thinks the way you do. Fortunately for the rest of the world, there are enough of us who are more interested in turning out good code than we are in "changing the paradigm" with get-rich-quick schemes. And you and people like you will keep on enjoying the benefits of our labor without paying us a single red cent. You're welcome.
Prove that you had a perfect vacuum in the chamber before you put the water in. (Good luck on this one.)
Prove that your sample was pure water. (Ditto; water is really, really hard to purify.)
Prove that your "electrical process" did not somehow introduce new material into the chamber.
Prove that your instruments are reading the elements in the chamber, and their proportions, correctly.
And after you're done proving all those things, prove that the techniques you used to prove them are correct.
Etc. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Now, in practice, we tend to accept that our lab equipment is pretty much doing what it's supposed to (after calibration and testing, of course) because this approach seems to work. But this is not the same thing as proof.
Slashdot Mirror
The disbelievers will in the near future miss out on genetic enhancements/cloning/implants and thus be weeded out of the population as they become unable to compete. Problem will fix itself.
...) and "moved the goalposts" to find new things to object to. Only a very small number of fanatics now refuse any of the treatments I listed above, but a much larger group of fanatics willingly takes advantage of them while trying to hold back, e.g., stem cell research with religious objections which sound strikingly similar to those raised against now-common practices in the past, as well as attacking the fundamental biological education which makes such discoveries possible. If the nuts actually had the courage of their convictions to live and die by their own nuttiness, the rest of us would be much better off.
Probably not. A number of medical technologies we now consider part of the standard of care -- anesthesia, aseptic surgical technique, vaccination, x-rays, antibiotics, and blood transfusions all come to mind -- met with fierce challenges on religious grounds when they were first introduced. Over time, as the benefits became obvious, the true believers changed their tune (evolved, one might say
The primary article of faith of the true believers in science is that science can discover everything that matters.
I have never known any scientist to claim this. I have, however, known plenty of anti-science types to claim that scientists claim this.
... the invention of the new high-tech material called "canvas" has led to a dramatic decline in traditional cave-painting skills among incoming art students at Bedrock University.
Okay, fine, substitute "is or isn't" for "is" in my original post. My point stands; reality is reality, and not swayed by public opinion -- unlike the law, which is no more (and no less, to be sure) than centuries of opinion set down on paper. Comparing a scientific argument to a legal one is the problem, and seems to be characteristic of the "teach the controversy" ID crowd.
To be honest, most of the time I'd rather deal with the 4004 BC, six-day creation, King James only, Biblical literalist type of creationist than the sneaky, underhanded intelligent design variety. The former at least understand and acknowledge that reality has a form independent of what we think or would like it to be. It's no coincidence, I think, that the success of the ID movement is largely due to Phillip Johnson, a lawyer. I don't actually share the common dislike of lawyers -- good ones are valuable people doing good work -- but legalistic thinking is really antithetical to science.
There's a big difference here. The law is decided by people (and not just lawyers and politicians, at least ideally -- you know, that whole "we the people" thing?) and it says, and means, whatever people decide it says and means. If enough people decide that they don't like the law as it is, it changes. Ultimately, law is nothing but codified opinion.
OTOH, evolution just is. Your belief in it, or lack thereof, makes no difference whatsoever to its reality. And one of the most incredibly frustrating aspects of the evolution vs. creationism argument (and in general, the never-ending struggle between science and pseudoscience) which often makes scientifically-minded sorts come across as arrogant and short-tempered, is that we get really, really tired of dealing with people who just can't seem to get their heads around this distinction.
seriously, it feels like the 80's again with all this stupid management jargon
... on the Internet!!!
This is new and different! It's stupid management jargon
I agree with you that a 3D interface offers the opportunity for some group of developers to do some really cool, useful things.
I'm reasonably certain, however, based on previous experience, that Microsoft won't be the ones to do it.
And then whichever one of them says, "No! No! Let the other one have it instead!" -- that's the one who gets to keep the logo? ;)
I am all for stamping out child porn, it is sick and damaging.
Careful -- you've already fallen for their manipulation of the language. They're hoping that by using the words "children" and "pornography" in close conjunction, you'll automatically think, "Oh, child porn, we've got to get rid of that!" But COPA has nothing to do with child porn; it has to do (allegedly) with children seeing porn on the web -- the vast bulk of which is not child porn; it's regular old-fashioned adult porn. Conflating the (very mild, and entirely within the parents' domain) issue of little Johnny looking at dirty pictures with the (very serious, and entirely criminal already) problem of child porn is a cynical and dangerous political ploy.
I'm not just being paranoid am I?
No, you're not, especially with a DoJ run by someone who has openly endorsed torture (in terrorism cases, not obscenity, granted -- but just wait to see how long it is before we start hearing "Al-Qaeda is funded by porn sites!") Microsoft is big and bad and scary, but the government is a great deal scarier.
Think selective enforcement. Realistically, everyone knows they're never going to get rid of internet porn, and they're never going to keep kids from seeing the stuff. That's not really the point. What is the point is that this law, if upheld, will give them a club to hold over the head of every single person in the US who posts anything on the web, ever, as well as the service providers which provide the hosting space, if even one of those postings contains a dirty word or risque picture. It doesn't mean they'll break down your door in the middle of the night -- but it means they can, if you piss them off enough. And you'll never know what constitutes "enough" until you're in handcuffs.
Apparently you would prefer that no one on Slashdot ever have an opinion about anything, ever, but simply leave it to our Wise And Good Leaders, Who Know What Is Best For All Of Us.
Feh.
Thanks for the non-kneejerk reply. :)
Honestly, I'm a pretty decent guy. I get along well with the people I work with, and for the most part always have, in a number of different settings (the military, corporate IT, and now academia.) And although of course I've had to do things I disagreed with, for the most part, when I felt strongly about an issue, I was able to bring management around to my point of view through reasoned discussion.
My original post, as only one other poster seems to have noticed, was directed at a specific type of manager -- the type who automatically dismisses people who don't dress the way he does, who refuses to recognize that for the most part (not always, certainly, but that's the way to bet) casual dress is just as much a mark of the competent techie as a sharp suit is of the competent businessman, who honestly believes that Microsoft is better than F/OSS because Bill Gates wears a suit and Richard Stallman doesn't. And who, not incidentally, inevitably ends up driving competent tech people away from his organizations because smart people refuse to put up with his crap.
People like that are really just as lacking in social skills as the stereotypical smelly geek; but (as with smelly geeks, come to think of it) there are a lot of them, and they congregate in groups where their antisocial behavior is not only accepted but encouraged, and they reinforce each other. Unfortunately, because they are primarily interested in telling people what to do rather than actually doing anything useful themselves, they tend to acquire enough power to make other people's lives miserable.
Believe it or not, I don't prejudge people in suits; I deal with them exactly as I do everyone else, and that's pretty well. However, I refuse to deal nicely with anyone who does not extend me the same courtesy.
(Oh yeah -- I'm obviously not a full-time writer, and never have been except for a brief period a number of years ago. The truth is, making a living from writing is damned rare. Which is too bad, but so it goes.)
To every suit who doesn't take me seriously because of my appearance (and yes, I do bathe regularly, and my clothes, casual as they may be, are clean and good repair):
Deal with it. I'm smarter than you. I could do your job in my sleep; you couldn't do mine in a million years. You need the product I, and people like me, provide; and good luck finding someone who dresses like you who can provide it. If you prefer to buy crap from other suits, go for it. Your competitors, who are also smarter than you, will happily deal with us long-haired freaks to get the good stuff.
At 37, I haven't suffered any harm from this attitude yet.
Bingo.
A few years ago I remember someone telling me about a Sears Roebuck catalog he'd seen from the early 1900's. One of the more expensive items was an electric motor which came with a variety of specialized tools and adapters. The idea was you would take a drill, saw, whatever, plug it into this motor to draw power (mechanical power, I mean; probably incredibly dangerous, to judge by similar setups on modern farm equipment, but presumably it worked), do the job, unhook the tool, and then fit the next weird adapter to the next tool.
And in those days, when electric motors were fairly expensive all by themselves and had a low power-to-weight ratio, it probably made sense. These days, of course, every power tool has its own motor, and that's how people prefer it.
Considering that most TV's and DVD players and stereos and, hell, microwave ovens now have more computational power than the average user had on his desktop a couple of decades ago, I see no reason to assume that the trend toward divergence isn't continuing into the present day.
I can think of a number of possible opponents with significant naval capability -- i.e., WW2-style naval air-vs.-air and air-vs.-ship battles, with lots of casualties on both sides -- for France, the UK, or both over the next 50 years. So, you can be sure, can their respective governments.
You can turn a lot of that off; play around with the Dock (and vaarious other) settings in System Preferences. Personally I like the "Genie Effect," but I can certainly see where not everyone would.
Your username is uniquely well suited to your post.
I see you flunked civics in high school.
I see you pay way too little attention to how things actually work.
Believe it or not, there are those of us who, regardless of party affiliation, think the principle of checks and balances is more important than the politics and personalities of the moment.
All I'm saying is that private companies CANNOT do whatever they want just because they are private.
/. notwithstanding) while Google didn't. There is simply no comparison between Google's behavior as the leading search engine and Microsoft's behavior as the leading OS provider. Google does what successful business are supposed to do: offer a good, popular product or service which people choose to use based on its merits.
In principle, of course, you're absolutely right -- but the difference is that Microsoft broke the law (and mostly got away with it, grumblings on
Whether Google actually constitutes a search engine monopoly is an interesting question; given Yahoo's position as a pretty strong number two, I'm inclined to say not, but it might be worthy of a court test one of these days. I really doubt Kinderstart are going to be the ones to make this happen, though.
They aren't suing because of bad rankings. They are suing because Google wont say why it ranks some sites hight and bans other sites. There is more merit in this case than most would think.
Google chooses not to reveal its pagerank algorithms precisely to prevent the kind of link-bombing in which Kinderstart was almost certainly engaged. And why should they? This is one of the few cases where "security through obscurity" kinda works -- unlike with, say, encryption algorithms, which depend for security on a secret number, and which generally get stronger when they're open for public scrutiny, the security of Google's page rankings depends on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. They have no obligation to reveal their algorithm to Kinderstart or anyone else.
Now, as a generally pro-F/OSS guy, I personally think it would be great if Google came up with "public key pagerank" -- i.e., a pagerank algorithm that could be released as open source without compromising its effectiveness for a specific application -- but apparently that hasn't happened yet.
If anyone has a case here, it's Google; they could sue Kinderstart and everyone else who tries to manipulate the rankings, and probably under the DMCA they could press criminal charges as well. They don't, for two reasons: it would interfere with the warm'n'fuzzy "don't be evil" vibe they're still trying to project, and it would be a waste of time and money, in that they'd probably spend a lot more trying to track down the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?) of sites that try to do this crap than they would collect in damages. But personally I hope they turn around and grind Kinderstart.com into the dust.
BTW, the first search result that comes up on Google when you search for "Kinderstart" now is this, which seems like a legitimate business rather than a badly designed wannabe portal. How is this a bad thing?
Well, people are free to believe whatever they want, of course, and they do, including many beliefs which are lacking in any evidence whatsoever. But that's not really the point. "Proof" in the sense that most people use the word is impossible in science; all we have is "preponderance of evidence" and "lack of disproof." This is, of course, good enough -- the main reason scientists fight so hard against the use of the word "proof" is because impossible-to-meet demands for proof tend to be used by anti-science types to attack the very well-supported theories which constitute our entire understanding of the natural world.
The most useful business skill a technical person can develop is the ability to look someone in the eye and lie to them with a straight face. As far as I can tell, that's what separates the good business people from the ones who will work 25 years in the same job and never make more than $40k.
Depending on your definition of "good," apparently. "Proficient," yes.
Out of all developers, almost certainly all *good* developers, the number that wish to work for free (beer if you wish, or whatever), is small.
.sig line, and I have to say, I'm not surprised that someone who would link to such a site thinks the way you do. Fortunately for the rest of the world, there are enough of us who are more interested in turning out good code than we are in "changing the paradigm" with get-rich-quick schemes. And you and people like you will keep on enjoying the benefits of our labor without paying us a single red cent. You're welcome.
You are, perhaps deliberately, confusing proportion with raw numbers. You may be right (or you may not; I really have no idea) that the proportion of developers (good or otherwise) who want to let others benefit from their work without demanding payment is small -- but there are a hell of a lot of developers in the world, and obviously enough of them are willing to share their work to make F/OSS a going proposition.
I just checked out the hucksterish link in your
Prove that you had a perfect vacuum in the chamber before you put the water in. (Good luck on this one.)
Prove that your sample was pure water. (Ditto; water is really, really hard to purify.)
Prove that your "electrical process" did not somehow introduce new material into the chamber.
Prove that your instruments are reading the elements in the chamber, and their proportions, correctly.
And after you're done proving all those things, prove that the techniques you used to prove them are correct.
Etc. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Now, in practice, we tend to accept that our lab equipment is pretty much doing what it's supposed to (after calibration and testing, of course) because this approach seems to work. But this is not the same thing as proof.