I was gonna say. Sure, if John Wayne had played a Linux user in a movie ("Well, now... pilgrim... looks like your kernel needs a recompilin'") he'd have played a Gentoo user. In real life, Mr. Marion Morrison wouldn't even have touched Linux; he'd have been Windows all the way.
Re:Have to disagree with this
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Mac may or may not be better; that's certaintly debatable. What's not debatable is that it's much, much, MUCH better that Microsoft won. If Apple had won, how long would we have been saddled with proprietary hardware with proprietary software? A LONG-ASS time, and Macs would have been far more expensive.
Or maybe -- and this seems far more likely -- we would have had a world of competing platforms (hardware, software, and assorted combinations thereof) some better, some worse, and none with Wintel Inc.'s innovation-crushing market dominance. It was only a matter of the merest luck that the Mac survived where pretty much all the other alternative platforms (the Amiga being the best known; I'd also mention OS/2) were crushed out of existence. Remember how in the Eighties you could go into an electronics store and see several different types -- not just brands -- of computer on sale, each with its own capabilities, and make a meaningful choice? Wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of choice with modern computing power?
Now that "Wintel" is no longer quite as meaningful a term, thanks largely to the success of AMD and Linux, I'm hopeful that we're finally moving into a truly competitive PC market. But it's long overdue, and without Microsoft on the scene, it might well have happened a lot sooner.
Re:apple tattoos
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No shit. There are several products (Macs, Toyotas, Badger Blades) that inspire in me a strong degree of brand loyalty, but I simply cannot envision being so devoted to any product that I'd get a tattoo representing it. My brand loyalty is based on experience -- I prize products that do the job, consistently and well, and hold up under hard use -- rather than any sense of mystical connection.
Then again, I can't imagine getting a tattoo representing a sports team, a band, a movie, a drink, or a drug, either, and I've seen all of them. [shrug] Seems to me that anything you're going to put on your body forever should represent a core part of your identity -- if someone else's manufacture product has that kind of significance to you, I guess that's your problem...
Notice that the period surveyed is exactly the period he's been running for President. Before the campaign began, Kerry's attendance record was somewhat better than average, IIRC.
Also be very, very careful when reading the short descriptions of the bills and amendments voted on. The content often has very little to do with the name or the summary. "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," anyone?
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Yep. For much of American political history, "Democrat" and "Republican" have been meaningless labels -- the Democrats were no more democratic, and the Republicans no more republican, than their opposite numbers, and often less so -- but lately the labels seem to be taking on real truth.
OTOH, maybe it's not such a recent phenomenon after all. Will Rogers, when asked whether he belonged to any organized political party, is supposed to have said, "Hell no, I'm a Democrat." This inherent chaos is both a weakness and a strength.
An MBA is an anti-degree; having one is an indication of lower intelligence on the part of the degree holder, not higher, than not having one is. That being said, I agree that any post which disparages someone's intelligence should be carefully proofread, or it loses its effect.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not to nit-pick, but wasn't the venue and the function a private one? As in any store or shop or movie or auditorium has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason?
It was a private function... to which they had bought tickets like everyone else there. If I go to a movie theater and they refuse to sell me tickets, that's their right. (Although it's my right to be pissed off about it and tell everyone I know not to go to that theater.) If I buy my ticket and am standing in line for popcorn and they decide to throw me out because they think I look like someone who might start talking during the movie -- which is the rough equivalent of what happened at the Bush rally -- they're on shaky ground.
I'm sure a Kerry event in the same circumstances would not allow a t-shirt worn inside that said "Support Our Second Amendment Rights" or even the *same* shirt the ladies tried to wear to Bush's event.
Are you sure of that? Why? I've seen no evidence to that effect. Please don't let the currently fashionable "all politicians are evil" cynicism blind you to the fact that there are real differences between the two. To my knowledge, no one has ever been thrown out of a Kerry rally for wearing a t-shirt; until it happens, you shouldn't tar Kerry with Bush's brush.
Such a philosophy doesn't sit well with a portion of the Slashdot crowd who think that society would be better off if artists and writers knew their place -- give away your stuff for free, and hope that you make money by playing live concerts or live book readings. If somebody violates your copyright, don't fight back too hard -- you should be lucky to get what you get. And a big hearty fuck-you if you're uppity enough to put copy protection or DRM on your work -- what's done with your work should be the choice of the Slashdotter, not you. If you have the same aspirations of being a millionaire that, say, a (insert typical Slashdotter profession here) has, check yourself -- you're an artist, and if wandering the countryside in search of scraps was good enough for artists of the 13th century, it's good enough for you. In short -- know your place. A farmer gets to leave a legacy for his children. You don't.
[wearily] The people who say this kind of thing are hardly ever artists or writers themselves. Very often they're parasites (like Rosen and Valenti) who want to get rich off artists' work, however.
I am a writer, among other things; I make a not-insignificant amount of money off writing, and you can be damn sure I want every penny my books earn. However -- I do not believe that my work is perpetually my property, or that of my heirs; perhaps more to the point, I do not believe that it is perpetually the property of my publisher, or any corporation, and most especially not of scumsuckers like the RIAA, the MPAA, or Disney (this last being mentioned because it's largely due to the Mouse's efforts that we have the absurdly extended copyright laws we do.) The government makes, or is supposed to make, a deal with the creators of original work: you put your work out there for people to enjoy (and hopefully buy) and in return, we will protect your right to profit from that work for a limited time. Period. If you don't like it, lobby to amend the Constitution.
My equivalent of a farmer's field is not my book. That would be my computer, which is unlikely to be of any use to my children by the time I die... My books are the equivalent of a farmer's crop. No rational person would argue that farmers should be paid in perpetuity for crops they harvest once.
A significant number of commentators are pretty immature, in that they assume bright people must be anti-Bush.
But the grandparent poster didn't say that. What he said (emphasis mine) was:
[T]he crowd that runs this site, as well as the majority of readers, are a pretty bright bunch that generally takes time to think, and it's hardly surprising that the tendency is anti-Bush.
Tendency != necessity. Are there bright Bush supporters? Sure; I even know a few. But the observation that more intelligent people tend to be anti-Bush is not invalidated by these exceptions.
Not all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are better, and appeal more to intelligent people, than others. The reflexive hip cynicism we're taught to apply to political arguments -- all politicians lie, they're no differ from each other, all we get to do is vote for the lesser of two evils, blah blah blah -- tends to obscure the fact that certain policies, and those certain politicians who espouse these policies, are better than others. Intelligent people recognize this, on the whole if not in every individual case.
The problem I have with the Predators -- and similar SFnal aliens such as the current Star Trek version of the Klingons -- is that "tribal warrior cultures" might be very good at conquering other planets, but they're unlikely to come up with the technology to do so in the first place. In our own history, warrior cultures have only enjoyed brief success at empire, and usually only when they ripped off useful technology from their more peacefully minded neighbors. Barbarian nomads may be tough, but always bet on the farmers in the long run.
Yep. It's particularly useful for showing creationists who make stupid arguments based on an incomplete understanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics how wrong they are. Or, er, it would be, if they could be bothered to get the education to understand the equation at all...
"While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP. "
Are the stupid anti-MS jabs ALWAYS required?
Jesus, you don't even have to RTFA for this one, just the story posting itself: Raskin specifically says that "there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine." Agree or disagree, it's certainly not a "stupid anti-MS jab" to express one's own opinion on the subject.
[shrug] I agree with you that the Electoral College needs to be done away with, but until that happens (if it ever does) vote trading seems to me like a perfectly moral way to deal with the system as it exists; definitely not cheating.
It goes deeper than that, though. Like I said, I think vote trading is a little strange -- my attitude is that my vote is one of the most precious things I possess, and not for sale at any price -- but ultimately your vote is your property until you decide how to use it. Would you trade your house for someone else's house in another state, sight unseen? I wouldn't, and you probably wouldn't either; but you could, and no one would claim it was immoral to do so.
I think the very idea of "trading votes" is wrong. WRONG in the way that cheating on your spouse is wrong, or shoplifting for whatever you want is wrong, or keying someone's car because you don't like them, their car, or their bumper stickers is wrong. It's just not right, nor is it ever justifiable.
Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on why? I mean, I think it's a little strange, but I really don't see a moral component to it.
Gattaca was a prophetic work on the future of genetic engineering like Frankenstein was a prophetic work the effect of electricity on living tissue.
You know what? I've shocked plenty of "dead" people back to life with massive jolts of electricity. And yet amazingly, not one of them has ever turned out to be a mad obscene creation bent on destroying me and everything I hold dear.
The fundamental problem with these and all the other "war" metaphors the government has thrown around at various times (poverty, cancer, etc., as other posters have pointed out) is that war is a lousy metaphor for anything except, well, war actually.
Governments are very very good at fighting wars; the US government has had a couple of centuries of experience, and government as a social institution has had several millennia of experience, at assembling armies to go fight other governments' armies. It sucks that this has to happen, but honestly I don't expect it to change any time soon. The problem is that people look at the undeniable achievements of armies in the field -- the organization, the power, the speed of action, the almost unique unity of huge numbers of people behind a single goal -- and think, "Hey, we could really use that to solve ____!"
Except, of course, in the real world, it doesn't look that way. Military problems are extraordinarily complex when looked at one way -- how to organize, train, equip, transport, and lead thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people under the most stressful circumstances imaginable -- but extraordinarily simple when looked at in terms of the overall goal, which is quite simply to kill, overrun, and/or scatter the opposing army. Drugs, terrorism, poverty, cancer, et al. may require similar levels of organization, but they do not have similar clear solutions. We could kill every single drug dealer currently operating on the streets of our cities, but people would still want to get high, and find ways to do so. There is no government of a country called Terror that can concede defeat and call for a cease-fire. Throwing poor people in POW camps would not make them less poor (quite the opposite) nor can cancer patients decide they don't want to be cancer patients any more and desert from the Cancer Army. Etc.
I've been a soldier, and I've fought, and I have a pretty good idea of what war can do. Now I'm a civilian, and much older and wiser than I was then, and I have a very good idea of what war can't do. Killing and dying is about the simplest thing in the world. Everything else is much more complicated. Next time anyone tells you that there's a military solution to a civilian problem, listen with skepticism at best.
electronic voting is no more vulnerable to tampering than paper ballot voting
Please explain to me in detail how one person, exerting no more effort than is necessary to write a line or two of code, could alter several thousand (or million!) paper ballots at once.
My point is, basically, this: C was designed by programmers who wanted to create a versatile, powerful language that would get the job done, while Pascal was designed by a theoretician who had a fanatically pure vision of what a programming language should be... and as you say, people like C, and it shows, which is why the bulk of programming today is done in C or one of its descendants, while Pascal is essentially a footnote in computing history at this point.
SQL vs. Tutorial D (or any of the other "more correct," i.e. closer to the relational calculus, DB languages that have come and gone) strikes me as much the same sort of thing. FWIW, I do like SQL, and in much the same way as I like C -- I may grumble at its limitations and weirdnesses, but by and large it gives me an intuitive, effective way to get the job done.
I'm a writer (see my.sig) although not, unfortunately, nearly as successful as N.S. Maybe he has some bit of wisdom on the subject that us midlisters don't, but honestly I doubt it. Based on my own experience and the experience of the many, many writers I know, at all levels of success, here's how you become a writer:
1. Write. 2. Submit your work to publishers. 3. Wait. 4. GOTO 3. 5. Profit if you're very very very lucky.
It helps if you keep doing steps 1 and 2 during the 3-4 loop.
The difference, I think, is that our technology does what it's supposed to do. I mean, I look at an abacus or slide rule and I don't think, "Oh, hah hah, those silly pre-computer people, what cute toys they had!" I think, "Wow, that's a really elegant solution to a difficult problem... but I'm glad I don't have to use that thing." Our cars and trains and ships and planes do move us around; our computers do crunch numbers; our space technology did (and hopefully someday will again) get us to the Moon. There's a difference between doing the best you can with what you've got, and flights of fancy.
Slashdot Mirror
I was gonna say. Sure, if John Wayne had played a Linux user in a movie ("Well, now ... pilgrim ... looks like your kernel needs a recompilin'") he'd have played a Gentoo user. In real life, Mr. Marion Morrison wouldn't even have touched Linux; he'd have been Windows all the way.
The Mac may or may not be better; that's certaintly debatable. What's not debatable is that it's much, much, MUCH better that Microsoft won. If Apple had won, how long would we have been saddled with proprietary hardware with proprietary software? A LONG-ASS time, and Macs would have been far more expensive.
Or maybe -- and this seems far more likely -- we would have had a world of competing platforms (hardware, software, and assorted combinations thereof) some better, some worse, and none with Wintel Inc.'s innovation-crushing market dominance. It was only a matter of the merest luck that the Mac survived where pretty much all the other alternative platforms (the Amiga being the best known; I'd also mention OS/2) were crushed out of existence. Remember how in the Eighties you could go into an electronics store and see several different types -- not just brands -- of computer on sale, each with its own capabilities, and make a meaningful choice? Wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of choice with modern computing power?
Now that "Wintel" is no longer quite as meaningful a term, thanks largely to the success of AMD and Linux, I'm hopeful that we're finally moving into a truly competitive PC market. But it's long overdue, and without Microsoft on the scene, it might well have happened a lot sooner.
No shit. There are several products (Macs, Toyotas, Badger Blades) that inspire in me a strong degree of brand loyalty, but I simply cannot envision being so devoted to any product that I'd get a tattoo representing it. My brand loyalty is based on experience -- I prize products that do the job, consistently and well, and hold up under hard use -- rather than any sense of mystical connection.
...
Then again, I can't imagine getting a tattoo representing a sports team, a band, a movie, a drink, or a drug, either, and I've seen all of them. [shrug] Seems to me that anything you're going to put on your body forever should represent a core part of your identity -- if someone else's manufacture product has that kind of significance to you, I guess that's your problem
Notice that the period surveyed is exactly the period he's been running for President. Before the campaign began, Kerry's attendance record was somewhat better than average, IIRC.
Also be very, very careful when reading the short descriptions of the bills and amendments voted on. The content often has very little to do with the name or the summary. "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," anyone?
Yep. For much of American political history, "Democrat" and "Republican" have been meaningless labels -- the Democrats were no more democratic, and the Republicans no more republican, than their opposite numbers, and often less so -- but lately the labels seem to be taking on real truth.
OTOH, maybe it's not such a recent phenomenon after all. Will Rogers, when asked whether he belonged to any organized political party, is supposed to have said, "Hell no, I'm a Democrat." This inherent chaos is both a weakness and a strength.
An MBA is an anti-degree; having one is an indication of lower intelligence on the part of the degree holder, not higher, than not having one is. That being said, I agree that any post which disparages someone's intelligence should be carefully proofread, or it loses its effect.
Not to nit-pick, but wasn't the venue and the function a private one? As in any store or shop or movie or auditorium has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason?
... to which they had bought tickets like everyone else there. If I go to a movie theater and they refuse to sell me tickets, that's their right. (Although it's my right to be pissed off about it and tell everyone I know not to go to that theater.) If I buy my ticket and am standing in line for popcorn and they decide to throw me out because they think I look like someone who might start talking during the movie -- which is the rough equivalent of what happened at the Bush rally -- they're on shaky ground.
It was a private function
I'm sure a Kerry event in the same circumstances would not allow a t-shirt worn inside that said "Support Our Second Amendment Rights" or even the *same* shirt the ladies tried to wear to Bush's event.
Are you sure of that? Why? I've seen no evidence to that effect. Please don't let the currently fashionable "all politicians are evil" cynicism blind you to the fact that there are real differences between the two. To my knowledge, no one has ever been thrown out of a Kerry rally for wearing a t-shirt; until it happens, you shouldn't tar Kerry with Bush's brush.
:)
My pleasure, and thanks!
Such a philosophy doesn't sit well with a portion of the Slashdot crowd who think that society would be better off if artists and writers knew their place -- give away your stuff for free, and hope that you make money by playing live concerts or live book readings. If somebody violates your copyright, don't fight back too hard -- you should be lucky to get what you get. And a big hearty fuck-you if you're uppity enough to put copy protection or DRM on your work -- what's done with your work should be the choice of the Slashdotter, not you. If you have the same aspirations of being a millionaire that, say, a (insert typical Slashdotter profession here) has, check yourself -- you're an artist, and if wandering the countryside in search of scraps was good enough for artists of the 13th century, it's good enough for you. In short -- know your place. A farmer gets to leave a legacy for his children. You don't.
... My books are the equivalent of a farmer's crop. No rational person would argue that farmers should be paid in perpetuity for crops they harvest once.
[wearily] The people who say this kind of thing are hardly ever artists or writers themselves. Very often they're parasites (like Rosen and Valenti) who want to get rich off artists' work, however.
I am a writer, among other things; I make a not-insignificant amount of money off writing, and you can be damn sure I want every penny my books earn. However -- I do not believe that my work is perpetually my property, or that of my heirs; perhaps more to the point, I do not believe that it is perpetually the property of my publisher, or any corporation, and most especially not of scumsuckers like the RIAA, the MPAA, or Disney (this last being mentioned because it's largely due to the Mouse's efforts that we have the absurdly extended copyright laws we do.) The government makes, or is supposed to make, a deal with the creators of original work: you put your work out there for people to enjoy (and hopefully buy) and in return, we will protect your right to profit from that work for a limited time. Period. If you don't like it, lobby to amend the Constitution.
My equivalent of a farmer's field is not my book. That would be my computer, which is unlikely to be of any use to my children by the time I die
If the facts favor one candidate over the other, then reporting those facts is not bias.
A significant number of commentators are pretty immature, in that they assume bright people must be anti-Bush.
But the grandparent poster didn't say that. What he said (emphasis mine) was:
[T]he crowd that runs this site, as well as the majority of readers, are a pretty bright bunch that generally takes time to think, and it's hardly surprising that the tendency is anti-Bush.
Tendency != necessity. Are there bright Bush supporters? Sure; I even know a few. But the observation that more intelligent people tend to be anti-Bush is not invalidated by these exceptions.
Not all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are better, and appeal more to intelligent people, than others. The reflexive hip cynicism we're taught to apply to political arguments -- all politicians lie, they're no differ from each other, all we get to do is vote for the lesser of two evils, blah blah blah -- tends to obscure the fact that certain policies, and those certain politicians who espouse these policies, are better than others. Intelligent people recognize this, on the whole if not in every individual case.
The problem I have with the Predators -- and similar SFnal aliens such as the current Star Trek version of the Klingons -- is that "tribal warrior cultures" might be very good at conquering other planets, but they're unlikely to come up with the technology to do so in the first place. In our own history, warrior cultures have only enjoyed brief success at empire, and usually only when they ripped off useful technology from their more peacefully minded neighbors. Barbarian nomads may be tough, but always bet on the farmers in the long run.
Yep. It's particularly useful for showing creationists who make stupid arguments based on an incomplete understanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics how wrong they are. Or, er, it would be, if they could be bothered to get the education to understand the equation at all ...
"While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP. "
Are the stupid anti-MS jabs ALWAYS required?
Jesus, you don't even have to RTFA for this one, just the story posting itself: Raskin specifically says that "there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine." Agree or disagree, it's certainly not a "stupid anti-MS jab" to express one's own opinion on the subject.
[shrug] I agree with you that the Electoral College needs to be done away with, but until that happens (if it ever does) vote trading seems to me like a perfectly moral way to deal with the system as it exists; definitely not cheating.
It goes deeper than that, though. Like I said, I think vote trading is a little strange -- my attitude is that my vote is one of the most precious things I possess, and not for sale at any price -- but ultimately your vote is your property until you decide how to use it. Would you trade your house for someone else's house in another state, sight unseen? I wouldn't, and you probably wouldn't either; but you could, and no one would claim it was immoral to do so.
Damn, I forgot that part! Thanks for reminding me.
I think the very idea of "trading votes" is wrong. WRONG in the way that cheating on your spouse is wrong, or shoplifting for whatever you want is wrong, or keying someone's car because you don't like them, their car, or their bumper stickers is wrong. It's just not right, nor is it ever justifiable.
Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on why? I mean, I think it's a little strange, but I really don't see a moral component to it.
Gattaca was a prophetic work on the future of genetic engineering like Frankenstein was a prophetic work the effect of electricity on living tissue.
You know what? I've shocked plenty of "dead" people back to life with massive jolts of electricity. And yet amazingly, not one of them has ever turned out to be a mad obscene creation bent on destroying me and everything I hold dear.
The fundamental problem with these and all the other "war" metaphors the government has thrown around at various times (poverty, cancer, etc., as other posters have pointed out) is that war is a lousy metaphor for anything except, well, war actually.
Governments are very very good at fighting wars; the US government has had a couple of centuries of experience, and government as a social institution has had several millennia of experience, at assembling armies to go fight other governments' armies. It sucks that this has to happen, but honestly I don't expect it to change any time soon. The problem is that people look at the undeniable achievements of armies in the field -- the organization, the power, the speed of action, the almost unique unity of huge numbers of people behind a single goal -- and think, "Hey, we could really use that to solve ____!"
Except, of course, in the real world, it doesn't look that way. Military problems are extraordinarily complex when looked at one way -- how to organize, train, equip, transport, and lead thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people under the most stressful circumstances imaginable -- but extraordinarily simple when looked at in terms of the overall goal, which is quite simply to kill, overrun, and/or scatter the opposing army. Drugs, terrorism, poverty, cancer, et al. may require similar levels of organization, but they do not have similar clear solutions. We could kill every single drug dealer currently operating on the streets of our cities, but people would still want to get high, and find ways to do so. There is no government of a country called Terror that can concede defeat and call for a cease-fire. Throwing poor people in POW camps would not make them less poor (quite the opposite) nor can cancer patients decide they don't want to be cancer patients any more and desert from the Cancer Army. Etc.
I've been a soldier, and I've fought, and I have a pretty good idea of what war can do. Now I'm a civilian, and much older and wiser than I was then, and I have a very good idea of what war can't do. Killing and dying is about the simplest thing in the world. Everything else is much more complicated. Next time anyone tells you that there's a military solution to a civilian problem, listen with skepticism at best.
electronic voting is no more vulnerable to tampering than paper ballot voting
Please explain to me in detail how one person, exerting no more effort than is necessary to write a line or two of code, could alter several thousand (or million!) paper ballots at once.
If you can find a case of such egregious registration fraud being committed by Democrats, let us know, okay?
My point is, basically, this: C was designed by programmers who wanted to create a versatile, powerful language that would get the job done, while Pascal was designed by a theoretician who had a fanatically pure vision of what a programming language should be ... and as you say, people like C, and it shows, which is why the bulk of programming today is done in C or one of its descendants, while Pascal is essentially a footnote in computing history at this point.
SQL vs. Tutorial D (or any of the other "more correct," i.e. closer to the relational calculus, DB languages that have come and gone) strikes me as much the same sort of thing. FWIW, I do like SQL, and in much the same way as I like C -- I may grumble at its limitations and weirdnesses, but by and large it gives me an intuitive, effective way to get the job done.
"SQL is sloppy and unpredictable; Tutorial D is a correct relational database language."
sounds a lot like
"C is sloppy and unpredictable; Pascal is a correct programming language."
I'm a writer (see my .sig) although not, unfortunately, nearly as successful as N.S. Maybe he has some bit of wisdom on the subject that us midlisters don't, but honestly I doubt it. Based on my own experience and the experience of the many, many writers I know, at all levels of success, here's how you become a writer:
1. Write.
2. Submit your work to publishers.
3. Wait.
4. GOTO 3.
5. Profit if you're very very very lucky.
It helps if you keep doing steps 1 and 2 during the 3-4 loop.
The difference, I think, is that our technology does what it's supposed to do. I mean, I look at an abacus or slide rule and I don't think, "Oh, hah hah, those silly pre-computer people, what cute toys they had!" I think, "Wow, that's a really elegant solution to a difficult problem ... but I'm glad I don't have to use that thing." Our cars and trains and ships and planes do move us around; our computers do crunch numbers; our space technology did (and hopefully someday will again) get us to the Moon. There's a difference between doing the best you can with what you've got, and flights of fancy.