"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
He has to explain why those analogies are false, and what's wrong with those visions. And I have the feeling he can't.
Perhaps the FBI did step over the line here, but from reading the Patriot Act...one can see that the FBI is simply using the tools they've been given to bust the bad guys (the ranks of which this gentleman belongs to).
When people first started warning that USA-PATRIOT granted the government absurdly broad powers, its supporters replied, "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just to go after terrorists -- they won't use it in other kinds of cases." Now that it's being used as a blunt instrument against people who are not terrorists by any reasonable definition of the word, we're being told, "Well, what can you do, it's the law." Great.
If you feel that the Patriot Act is a bad thing, write your congressman. Join the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But don't sit here on Slashdot and bitch, you're not changing anything.
Talking about these things, getting the word out, does have an effect -- in the long run, more of an effect than any single letter or donation. FWIW, I was an ACLU member before/. existed, but I had never even heard of the EFF before I started reading/., and I joined them largely because I was impressed by other posters' positive reports about their activities. Electronic forums like/. and K5 are, to some degree, the modern equivalent of the Green Dragon.
So your professor fed you a line of dogma which happened to agree nicely with your existing prejudices, and you swallowed it. Congratulations on exposing your lack of original thought for all the world to see.
I like Python too, but the main point is consistency. Python uses indentation to mark blocks of code; everyone who uses Python knows this (or figures it out damn fast [g]). C, C++, Perl, etc. use { and }, and ; to end lines, and everyone who uses these languages knows that. What fault-tolerant Web browsers do is the equivalent of letting you write code like:
As a fan of all of Whedon's shows to date, all I can say is that I got the same things out of Firefly that I did out of Buffy and Angel: great dialogue, interesting worldbuilding, neat twisty plots, and perhaps most important of all, a talented ensemble cast playing characters I genuinely liked. Likable characters is a big one for me -- I find the characters in many (most?) movies and TV shows so irritating that I quickly cease to care what happens to them. Whedon's characters are almost universally people you'd like to sit down and have a beer with.
Even ignoring the IP realm, capitalism has been just as concerned with services as with products for quite some time.
The thing is that IP is neither a product nor a service; it's some third thing, that we have (obviously) not quite figured out how to deal with yet.
Products and services are both non-reproducible, is the key thing. Product: I make a car, you pay me money for the car; end result is that I have one less car, but more money, than I did before, while you have one more car but less money. Service: you pay me to wash your car; end result is that I have given up an hour of my life (assuming you had a fairly dirty car <g>) but have more money than I did before, while you have a clean car and less money. Neither of those transactions can be repeated unless we're both willing to make the same bargain we did before, with the same gains and losses.
IP: I write an app, post the code on my Web site, you download it. Maybe you pay me, maybe you don't, depending on how things are set up -- but the key point is that you and everyone you know can download that code as often as you like, and I still have what I had before. Neither the product nor the service model really applies.
Dean's angry-liberal rhetoric had a direct and energizing effect on the Democrats' willingness to challenge Bush, whom they had previously (and inexplicably to me, as a Dean type) treated with kid gloves. One of my favorite sound bites after the Dean campaign ended was, "At least the doctor gave the Democrats a spine transplant."
Re:Similarities between democrat party, communists
on
Joe Trippi Interviewed
·
· Score: 1
Like the Republicans don't do the same thing when their anointed ones are in political danger. Do the words "illegitimate black child," "John McCain," and "South Carolina" mean anything to you?
And I lump the campaign newsletter/blog in the same group as the press and broadcast media.
And Trippi's point, of course, is that you shouldn't. Whether he was right or not remains to be seen. It is undeniable, however, that blogs and newsletters have much, much faster turnaround times than any for of traditional mass media.
Remember the Czechoslovakian "Velvet Revolution?" (And, for that matter, the not-so-velvet one in Romania?) It wasn't the traditional tools of revolution -- armed mobs in the street, seizing control of the capitol and the state-owned media outlets -- that pulled that one off. It was fax machines.
Think of Dean as the Democratic party's RMS if you will. Now, it's easy to bitch about how RMS, with his long hair and ideological purity and general bitter-old-hippie vibe, scares away the PHB's who might otherwise be receptive to open source, and that may even be true. But it is also true that people like RMS provide the energy and determination to keep things moving; I can almost guarantee you that IBM would not be running ads for Linux servers today if RMS, or someone very like him, weren't around. OTOH, IBM isn't going to go with a wild-haired old hippie as their corporate spokesman, either.
I think this makes Kerry into Linus... okay, this is getting too weird. I'll stop now.
1. Actuslly, a Linux (or OS X, or BSD) monoculture would be more secure than a Windows monoculture, because Unix (any flavor) is provably more secure than Windows. Anyone who denies this is an ass.
2. The chances of creating a Unix monoculture of any kind any time in the near future are so near zero that bringing it up as an argument is straw-man bullshit of the purest ray serene.
Congratulations, citizen! You have correctly answered the question: the sole purpose of education is to train everyone to do what everyone else is doing, exactly the way they've always done it, forever! Your cooperation is appreciated.
Yep. For the first time in living memory, I can call myself a "states' rights Democrat" and people know that doesn't mean I'm a racist asshole. Kinda cool.
The thing is, Vietnam crippled the US financially for a generation or more; we would have been much, much more likely to keep going with Apollo (or its successor programs, which were quite well planned out at the time -- my Dad worked for NASA at the time, and talks quite bitterly about all the development that got done and then canceled because the war kept eating up all the available money) if it hadn't been for that giant fiscal sinkhole. And it wasn't just the space program that got crippled, of course, but all kinds of other ambitious ideas -- it is probably not too hyperbolic to say that the Great Society drowned in the Mekong.
Yep, Microsoft partners with other companies like the mafia partners with your friendly neighborhood drug dealer. Given that every single company that has ever entered into any kind of major deal with Microsoft has eventually ended up getting screwed, you'd think that the rest of the tech world would have realized this a long time ago.
First, it is scientists themselves who know that every answer brings with it more questions -- to put it bluntly, that's why there are professional scientists, because they know they've got job security. "Dismiss[ing] what you do not understand" is much more characteristic of religion than it is of science. And true believers may be "in utter amazement at the number of questions," but their usual M.O. is to use this number of questions to attack science, because it's so inimical to their worldview. Religion abhors questioning past a certain point; science not only encourages but requires it.
And this leads to your second mistake: religion simply does not admit the existence of questions, in a true scientific sense, because the root level of every answer to every question is "God did it." Theologians expend a remarkable amount of energy examining questions arising from the implications of their beliefs, but at the beginning and the end of their questions is one unquestioned truth -- God, literally as well as figuratively the alpha and the omega, the originator and answerer of all things.
No one individual spam is worth killing over. But the sheer volume of spam, honestly, I think is. If a few gory public murders would mean that I and every person I know could stop losing several hours per day of our lives deleting spam, talking about spam, dealing with the fallout from missed legitimate messages that got deleted as spam, et bloody cetera -- well, I'm for it.
All of the "not a sport" competitions you listed are considered sports by society at large, and therefore they are sports. "I know it when I see it" is as good a definition as we're going to get.
That's silly. Running is not only a sport, it's probably the oldest sport there is. (You can bet that cavemen Og and Thag were competing to see who could reach the big tree at the far end of the meadow first a long time before anyone thought about setting up goalposts and kicking a ball around.) I agree that sports with and without the concepts of offense and defense are fundamentally different, but to say that this is the difference between sport and non-sport is to ignore the whole history of athletics.
You have the first clear answer I've seen in this thread as to why math isn't a sport -- it doesn't rely on physical reflexes. Any competition in which a quadriplegic could do just as well as someone with four functioning limbs is, let's face it, not a sport.
OTOH, you can ask the residents of Hiroshima if math has something to do with war. <1/2 g>
True enough; I started programming a bit later than a lot of the folks here on/. (late 20's, in my mid 30's now) and I've seen people both older and younger than me follow the same path of "oh wow, this is cool" --> "yeah, it's a job" --> burnout. I'm not burned out yet, but I can feel it starting to happen, and it's probably a good thing that I'm going to be getting a PhD in another field and hopefully find an academic/research position which, while it may require me to do some programming, won't be the run-of-the-mill DBA work I do now.
But there really is a certain amount of energy -- for everything, not just marathon coding sessions -- that youth brings to the table, and some of it is purely as function of age. All other things being equal, a 25 y/o with five years of experience is going to be much more energetic than a 40 y/o with the same experience. Young people also really do tend to have more imagination than their elders, and are more likely to see a novel way of solving a problem that their older counterparts would just never think of.
On the other side of the coin, you get programmers like my father, who has been doing it since the mid-Sixties, and has worked on a wide variety of both business and technical problems in just about every industry you can name. He flat-out refuses to do the marathons -- hell, he's earned it -- but then, he doesn't have a reason for them; he's seen it all, doesn't ever have to reinvent the wheel, and is at least as productive in 8 hours as a twentysomething whiz kid is in 12. (I consider myself squarely between the two extremes, obviously.) But he does like working with younger programmers who keep him sharp.
Like I said, a mix works best. I'm currently the project lead for a group ranging in age from 18 to 44, so I have a pretty good idea of how this works...
Slashdot Mirror
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
He has to explain why those analogies are false, and what's wrong with those visions. And I have the feeling he can't.
Perhaps the FBI did step over the line here, but from reading the Patriot Act ...one can see that the FBI is simply using the tools they've been given to bust the bad guys (the ranks of which this gentleman belongs to).
/. existed, but I had never even heard of the EFF before I started reading /., and I joined them largely because I was impressed by other posters' positive reports about their activities. Electronic forums like /. and K5 are, to some degree, the modern equivalent of the Green Dragon.
When people first started warning that USA-PATRIOT granted the government absurdly broad powers, its supporters replied, "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just to go after terrorists -- they won't use it in other kinds of cases." Now that it's being used as a blunt instrument against people who are not terrorists by any reasonable definition of the word, we're being told, "Well, what can you do, it's the law." Great.
If you feel that the Patriot Act is a bad thing, write your congressman. Join the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But don't sit here on Slashdot and bitch, you're not changing anything.
Talking about these things, getting the word out, does have an effect -- in the long run, more of an effect than any single letter or donation. FWIW, I was an ACLU member before
So your professor fed you a line of dogma which happened to agree nicely with your existing prejudices, and you swallowed it. Congratulations on exposing your lack of original thought for all the world to see.
but it's just not going to happen in the US
...
Notice interesting features of the article such as the word "tyres" and the £ symbol
I think that would be what a fly gets when it goes in for Lasik surgery.
As a fan of all of Whedon's shows to date, all I can say is that I got the same things out of Firefly that I did out of Buffy and Angel: great dialogue, interesting worldbuilding, neat twisty plots, and perhaps most important of all, a talented ensemble cast playing characters I genuinely liked. Likable characters is a big one for me -- I find the characters in many (most?) movies and TV shows so irritating that I quickly cease to care what happens to them. Whedon's characters are almost universally people you'd like to sit down and have a beer with.
Even ignoring the IP realm, capitalism has been just as concerned with services as with products for quite some time.
The thing is that IP is neither a product nor a service; it's some third thing, that we have (obviously) not quite figured out how to deal with yet.
Products and services are both non-reproducible, is the key thing. Product: I make a car, you pay me money for the car; end result is that I have one less car, but more money, than I did before, while you have one more car but less money. Service: you pay me to wash your car; end result is that I have given up an hour of my life (assuming you had a fairly dirty car <g>) but have more money than I did before, while you have a clean car and less money. Neither of those transactions can be repeated unless we're both willing to make the same bargain we did before, with the same gains and losses.
IP: I write an app, post the code on my Web site, you download it. Maybe you pay me, maybe you don't, depending on how things are set up -- but the key point is that you and everyone you know can download that code as often as you like, and I still have what I had before. Neither the product nor the service model really applies.
Dean's angry-liberal rhetoric had a direct and energizing effect on the Democrats' willingness to challenge Bush, whom they had previously (and inexplicably to me, as a Dean type) treated with kid gloves. One of my favorite sound bites after the Dean campaign ended was, "At least the doctor gave the Democrats a spine transplant."
Like the Republicans don't do the same thing when their anointed ones are in political danger. Do the words "illegitimate black child," "John McCain," and "South Carolina" mean anything to you?
And I lump the campaign newsletter/blog in the same group as the press and broadcast media.
And Trippi's point, of course, is that you shouldn't. Whether he was right or not remains to be seen. It is undeniable, however, that blogs and newsletters have much, much faster turnaround times than any for of traditional mass media.
Remember the Czechoslovakian "Velvet Revolution?" (And, for that matter, the not-so-velvet one in Romania?) It wasn't the traditional tools of revolution -- armed mobs in the street, seizing control of the capitol and the state-owned media outlets -- that pulled that one off. It was fax machines.
Think of Dean as the Democratic party's RMS if you will. Now, it's easy to bitch about how RMS, with his long hair and ideological purity and general bitter-old-hippie vibe, scares away the PHB's who might otherwise be receptive to open source, and that may even be true. But it is also true that people like RMS provide the energy and determination to keep things moving; I can almost guarantee you that IBM would not be running ads for Linux servers today if RMS, or someone very like him, weren't around. OTOH, IBM isn't going to go with a wild-haired old hippie as their corporate spokesman, either.
... okay, this is getting too weird. I'll stop now.
I think this makes Kerry into Linus
1. Actuslly, a Linux (or OS X, or BSD) monoculture would be more secure than a Windows monoculture, because Unix (any flavor) is provably more secure than Windows. Anyone who denies this is an ass.
2. The chances of creating a Unix monoculture of any kind any time in the near future are so near zero that bringing it up as an argument is straw-man bullshit of the purest ray serene.
Congratulations, citizen! You have correctly answered the question: the sole purpose of education is to train everyone to do what everyone else is doing, exactly the way they've always done it, forever! Your cooperation is appreciated.
When other tech companies start doing as much stuff worth noticing as Apple does, let us know.
Yep. For the first time in living memory, I can call myself a "states' rights Democrat" and people know that doesn't mean I'm a racist asshole. Kinda cool.
Based on the evidence so far, I'd have to say that if Osama bin Laden is guarding the Martian oil reserves, he's perfectly safe.
Actually, he appears to be pretty safe even in Afghanistan.
The thing is, Vietnam crippled the US financially for a generation or more; we would have been much, much more likely to keep going with Apollo (or its successor programs, which were quite well planned out at the time -- my Dad worked for NASA at the time, and talks quite bitterly about all the development that got done and then canceled because the war kept eating up all the available money) if it hadn't been for that giant fiscal sinkhole. And it wasn't just the space program that got crippled, of course, but all kinds of other ambitious ideas -- it is probably not too hyperbolic to say that the Great Society drowned in the Mekong.
Yep, Microsoft partners with other companies like the mafia partners with your friendly neighborhood drug dealer. Given that every single company that has ever entered into any kind of major deal with Microsoft has eventually ended up getting screwed, you'd think that the rest of the tech world would have realized this a long time ago.
You are doubly wrong.
First, it is scientists themselves who know that every answer brings with it more questions -- to put it bluntly, that's why there are professional scientists, because they know they've got job security. "Dismiss[ing] what you do not understand" is much more characteristic of religion than it is of science. And true believers may be "in utter amazement at the number of questions," but their usual M.O. is to use this number of questions to attack science, because it's so inimical to their worldview. Religion abhors questioning past a certain point; science not only encourages but requires it.
And this leads to your second mistake: religion simply does not admit the existence of questions, in a true scientific sense, because the root level of every answer to every question is "God did it." Theologians expend a remarkable amount of energy examining questions arising from the implications of their beliefs, but at the beginning and the end of their questions is one unquestioned truth -- God, literally as well as figuratively the alpha and the omega, the originator and answerer of all things.
No one individual spam is worth killing over. But the sheer volume of spam, honestly, I think is. If a few gory public murders would mean that I and every person I know could stop losing several hours per day of our lives deleting spam, talking about spam, dealing with the fallout from missed legitimate messages that got deleted as spam, et bloody cetera -- well, I'm for it.
Get the picture?
Yes. But you're still wrong.
All of the "not a sport" competitions you listed are considered sports by society at large, and therefore they are sports. "I know it when I see it" is as good a definition as we're going to get.
That's silly. Running is not only a sport, it's probably the oldest sport there is. (You can bet that cavemen Og and Thag were competing to see who could reach the big tree at the far end of the meadow first a long time before anyone thought about setting up goalposts and kicking a ball around.) I agree that sports with and without the concepts of offense and defense are fundamentally different, but to say that this is the difference between sport and non-sport is to ignore the whole history of athletics.
You have the first clear answer I've seen in this thread as to why math isn't a sport -- it doesn't rely on physical reflexes. Any competition in which a quadriplegic could do just as well as someone with four functioning limbs is, let's face it, not a sport.
OTOH, you can ask the residents of Hiroshima if math has something to do with war. <1/2 g>
True enough; I started programming a bit later than a lot of the folks here on /. (late 20's, in my mid 30's now) and I've seen people both older and younger than me follow the same path of "oh wow, this is cool" --> "yeah, it's a job" --> burnout. I'm not burned out yet, but I can feel it starting to happen, and it's probably a good thing that I'm going to be getting a PhD in another field and hopefully find an academic/research position which, while it may require me to do some programming, won't be the run-of-the-mill DBA work I do now.
...
But there really is a certain amount of energy -- for everything, not just marathon coding sessions -- that youth brings to the table, and some of it is purely as function of age. All other things being equal, a 25 y/o with five years of experience is going to be much more energetic than a 40 y/o with the same experience. Young people also really do tend to have more imagination than their elders, and are more likely to see a novel way of solving a problem that their older counterparts would just never think of.
On the other side of the coin, you get programmers like my father, who has been doing it since the mid-Sixties, and has worked on a wide variety of both business and technical problems in just about every industry you can name. He flat-out refuses to do the marathons -- hell, he's earned it -- but then, he doesn't have a reason for them; he's seen it all, doesn't ever have to reinvent the wheel, and is at least as productive in 8 hours as a twentysomething whiz kid is in 12. (I consider myself squarely between the two extremes, obviously.) But he does like working with younger programmers who keep him sharp.
Like I said, a mix works best. I'm currently the project lead for a group ranging in age from 18 to 44, so I have a pretty good idea of how this works