That's actually not a bad idea (not for the reasons you've mentioned).
All of your reasons are valid, but being able to kick the bullies' asses is a valid one as well. The martial arts are the martial arts; they may have developed a layer of philosophy over the years, but at the root they're about fighting. And that's not a bad thing, at all.
I was a punching bag all the way through elementary school and junior high. I started studying Tae Kwon Do -- from an instructor who had been a Marine stationed in Korea, and taught the art as a survival skill rather than a sport -- the summer before my freshman year of high school. I spent my freshman and sophomore years getting in a lot of fights. By my junior year, I had a reputation as a "psycho" (apparently when the jocks were pounding the hell out of me, that was perfectly normal, but fighting back was crazy). It wasn't quite the reputation I was looking for, but it was a hell of a lot better than going to school every day in literal terror.
And by my senior year, once people realized that I wasn't a psycho, it paid off. I could still be a geek, still be really really good at math and science, still spend most of my time with my nose buried in a book... and I also had friends, and a girlfriend, and invitations to parties, and, you know, a life. It wasn't something I had to work at, directly. It just kind of happened, because I had the self-confidence to live my life in a way that made me happy --
-- and I trace that confidence back, quite directly, to the day I first felt a football player's nose crunch under my heel. Because sometimes, standing and fighting and winning is the best thing you can do.
Actually, I believe that Australia does have compulsory voting (some Australian please correct me if I'm wrong) -- and apparently, their politics are no better or worse than ours, and not even all that different.
My hypothesis is that for "every bigoted/ignorant/stupid/closed-minded person who currently does not vote being forced to do so", there would be some reasonable person -- who currently doesn't vote for a variety of reasons, be it as a form of protest against the system, because they're jaded and cynical and don't believe their vote counts, because they feel like they just don't have the time, etc. -- who would cancel that person's vote out. Or maybe my hypothetical pool of non-voters is just as bigoted, ignorant, etc. as yours, just in the other direction. Anyway. It certainly hasn't turned Australia into a cautionary tale of mob rule.
I agree. I love OS X for its power and stability, but on the rare occasions I find myself looking at a Mac running OS 9 or previous, I remember how much better it looked. At those who discount aesthetics in OSs are idiots; when you're staring at a screen all day, you'd better hope it's easy on the eyes.
Any iteration of the Mac OS, of course, is better-looking than anything that's ever come out of Redmond.;)
Note that I didn't say "all," I said "enough." And my belief -- one that I think is well borne out by the numbers involved -- is that we will never be able to stop enough incoming ICBM's and/or SLBM's launched by any other major power to keep a significant portion of America's population from being killed in a nuclear war. "Outspend them until the fail" is an interesting proposition (and the collapse of the USSR is much, much more complicated than that) but the simple fact is that missiles are cheap and ABM is expensive.
You know, in some other countries, this might not be the case -- consider the great conventional battles of the past, in young men's lives were spent like pennies for a mile or two of ground. But Americans don't fight that way, and never have. (Gettysburg pales in comparision to the Somme, or Stalingrad.) There are governments which would probably regard the loss of a Chicago-size metropolitan center or two, or ten, as an acceptable risk. But traditionally, we don't think that way, and that's a Good Thing. I will be very saddened, and rather disturbed, if this changes.
M: No one else can match our arsenal, but who gives a shit? China, Russia, and probably France and the UK have enough nukes to kill off tens of millions of Americans in one strike. That's really all anyone needs for an effective deterrent.
A: We will never, ever have an anti-missile system that can stop enough incoming ICBM's and/or SLBM's to fend off a massive strike. Period. And if we ever go to war on the assumption that we can, odds are decent that you and everyone you know will die.
And is moving really an answer? Dont' you think that virus writers will move too?
Extending the analogy: no, they won't, because one of the main reasons the new neighborhood is safer is because it has better cops (i.e., security protocols.) Criminals who try to operate in the presence of good cops get arrested; script kiddies who find their hacked-together w4r3z bouncing off Linux/BSD/OS X will probably just give up in disgust.
Well, the original post was meant as a joke, but quite seriously: "loose," along with "rediculous" and "ammendment," is endemic on Slashdot to a degree I haven't seen anywhere else. When I see it elsewhere, I figure it's a typo; when I see it on Slashdot, because I see it here so often, I have to assume that a lot of people here really think that's the way it's spelled.
If being the victim of a Microsoft worm is like being caught in the crossfire of a gang war, there's a simple solution: stay out of the line of fire. If you had a choice between one house in a safe neighborhood, and another house of roughly the same price in a neighborhood where bullets from the local crack dealers were coming through your walls at three in the morning, where would you choose to live?
Most of the comments tucked inside the latest bugs are brief, unprintable and poorly spelled. "Bagle -- you are a looser!!!" opined the author of the sixth version of Netsky.
Hmmm, where have I seen that misspelling before? Let me think...
Because the vast bulk of paid software development is done in-house to solve specific business problems, IMO free software creates more jobs than it destroys. My company can afford to pay me a decent salary in large part because they don't have to pay Oracle or Microsoft a fortune for proprietary tools that offer little if any advantage over the free tools I use.
You're right, if you "wrote an open-source implementation of the core software in your company," I'd be SOL. But that's unlikely, because the software we sell is very specialized, requiring a great deal of technical knowledge to create, sell, and maintain. (And, for that matter, use.) It's a hell of a lot easier to find OSS developers for a DBMS, OS, general-purpose programming language, or Web server than for image processing and management software specific to microscopic images. This, IMO, is the future of proprietary software: niche-market apps which require specialized knowledge to produce will continue to command a premium, while general-purpose apps such as OS's and DBMS's will increasingly tend to be free.
The problem is when people start using words like "all." Does all software need to be free? Of course not. Does all software need to be proprietary? Again, of course not. Stallman on one end and Gates on the other are both fanatics. (It's a pity that we live in a society that categorizes the former as a fanatic but gives the latter a free pass, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) In between are those of us who recognize that a mix of distribution models is both possible and desirable.
I work for a small company that makes money by selling proprietary software. I'm the DBA, and get my work done using primarily free tools (MySQL, PHP, Perl, Apache, Linux, BSD.) I also write open-source software on my own time. Everybody wins.
The difference, I think, is that at the time those stories weren't considered "fantasy stories;" they were just stories. The modern segregation of genres is just that, a modern phenomenon.
Not to mention that at least in the case of the earlier two, they were told at a time when people believed the events described might actually have happened. The Odyssey, in particular, was presented as history, not fiction.
Well, of course, if they're old enough, records of daily life can be fascinating to regular (okay, kinda geeky) people as well as historians. E.g., my grandmother has been translating my great-great-nth-great grandmother's diary out of rather archaic French for several years now. She was a young bride (sixteen years old, something like that) whose merchant husband brought her to Haiti in the 1700's. Most of her writing is, "It's hot here, there are lots of mosquitoes, I want to go home" -- stuff that would seem pretty boring and banal at the time, but now it seems fascinating simply because of its age.
Of course, it seems rather unlikely that anyone's LJ is going to be available for their remote descendants to read. Which is kind of a pity.
So, I've got to ask -- where do you think programmers should come from, if not from CS? Yeah, it's possible to teach any b-school monkey to throw together Visual Basic widgets, but that's the kind of "programming" that leads to so many real-world applications being bloated and buggy. We need computer scientists writing code to ensure high-quality products.
Trust me, no matter how bad SBC's service...... Qwest is worse. I'm glad they're doing this, but as a Denverite (who well remembers the days of Mountain Bell, and then USWest, and now Qwest, and nothing's changed) I have to say that they have a looong way to go before anyone thinks well of them.
Grandparent poster didn't say "they can't learn to use another OS," he said, "this way they can use the OS that's easiest to use." I'm a CS grad student. I'm competent with several OS's including Linux, BSD, Solaris, and [sigh] Windows. I still prefer using a Mac, because even though I can get work done in other OS's, my work goes faster when I'm using OS X.
The key is realizing that the first Q/A pair doesn't really have anything to do with the way evolution actually works. A better way to put it is, "Some survive, some don't, and we designate the former group as 'fit'." IOW, "fitness" can be defined (exclusively) as that collection of traits which leads to survival and reproduction.
It's tempting for us, as humans, to believe that we represent the peak of evolutionary fitness. We don't; no organism does, because fitness isn't static. What traits are useful for survival can change over the course of a single day.
To be more explicit: attempts to make natural reality conform to ideology are doomed to fail. The refusal to realize this was a large part of what doomed the USSR... and if the US keeps going down its current road, the same thing will happen to us.
Slashdot Mirror
That's actually not a bad idea (not for the reasons you've mentioned).
... and I also had friends, and a girlfriend, and invitations to parties, and, you know, a life. It wasn't something I had to work at, directly. It just kind of happened, because I had the self-confidence to live my life in a way that made me happy --
All of your reasons are valid, but being able to kick the bullies' asses is a valid one as well. The martial arts are the martial arts; they may have developed a layer of philosophy over the years, but at the root they're about fighting. And that's not a bad thing, at all.
I was a punching bag all the way through elementary school and junior high. I started studying Tae Kwon Do -- from an instructor who had been a Marine stationed in Korea, and taught the art as a survival skill rather than a sport -- the summer before my freshman year of high school. I spent my freshman and sophomore years getting in a lot of fights. By my junior year, I had a reputation as a "psycho" (apparently when the jocks were pounding the hell out of me, that was perfectly normal, but fighting back was crazy). It wasn't quite the reputation I was looking for, but it was a hell of a lot better than going to school every day in literal terror.
And by my senior year, once people realized that I wasn't a psycho, it paid off. I could still be a geek, still be really really good at math and science, still spend most of my time with my nose buried in a book
-- and I trace that confidence back, quite directly, to the day I first felt a football player's nose crunch under my heel. Because sometimes, standing and fighting and winning is the best thing you can do.
Actually, I believe that Australia does have compulsory voting (some Australian please correct me if I'm wrong) -- and apparently, their politics are no better or worse than ours, and not even all that different.
My hypothesis is that for "every bigoted/ignorant/stupid/closed-minded person who currently does not vote being forced to do so", there would be some reasonable person -- who currently doesn't vote for a variety of reasons, be it as a form of protest against the system, because they're jaded and cynical and don't believe their vote counts, because they feel like they just don't have the time, etc. -- who would cancel that person's vote out. Or maybe my hypothetical pool of non-voters is just as bigoted, ignorant, etc. as yours, just in the other direction. Anyway. It certainly hasn't turned Australia into a cautionary tale of mob rule.
I agree. I love OS X for its power and stability, but on the rare occasions I find myself looking at a Mac running OS 9 or previous, I remember how much better it looked. At those who discount aesthetics in OSs are idiots; when you're staring at a screen all day, you'd better hope it's easy on the eyes.
;)
Any iteration of the Mac OS, of course, is better-looking than anything that's ever come out of Redmond.
Note that I didn't say "all," I said "enough." And my belief -- one that I think is well borne out by the numbers involved -- is that we will never be able to stop enough incoming ICBM's and/or SLBM's launched by any other major power to keep a significant portion of America's population from being killed in a nuclear war. "Outspend them until the fail" is an interesting proposition (and the collapse of the USSR is much, much more complicated than that) but the simple fact is that missiles are cheap and ABM is expensive.
You know, in some other countries, this might not be the case -- consider the great conventional battles of the past, in young men's lives were spent like pennies for a mile or two of ground. But Americans don't fight that way, and never have. (Gettysburg pales in comparision to the Somme, or Stalingrad.) There are governments which would probably regard the loss of a Chicago-size metropolitan center or two, or ten, as an acceptable risk. But traditionally, we don't think that way, and that's a Good Thing. I will be very saddened, and rather disturbed, if this changes.
M: No one else can match our arsenal, but who gives a shit? China, Russia, and probably France and the UK have enough nukes to kill off tens of millions of Americans in one strike. That's really all anyone needs for an effective deterrent.
A: We will never, ever have an anti-missile system that can stop enough incoming ICBM's and/or SLBM's to fend off a massive strike. Period. And if we ever go to war on the assumption that we can, odds are decent that you and everyone you know will die.
And is moving really an answer? Dont' you think that virus writers will move too?
Extending the analogy: no, they won't, because one of the main reasons the new neighborhood is safer is because it has better cops (i.e., security protocols.) Criminals who try to operate in the presence of good cops get arrested; script kiddies who find their hacked-together w4r3z bouncing off Linux/BSD/OS X will probably just give up in disgust.
Well, the original post was meant as a joke, but quite seriously: "loose," along with "rediculous" and "ammendment," is endemic on Slashdot to a degree I haven't seen anywhere else. When I see it elsewhere, I figure it's a typo; when I see it on Slashdot, because I see it here so often, I have to assume that a lot of people here really think that's the way it's spelled.
You didn't read my post very carefully, did you, AC? And whoever marked this "insightful" obviously didn't either.
If being the victim of a Microsoft worm is like being caught in the crossfire of a gang war, there's a simple solution: stay out of the line of fire. If you had a choice between one house in a safe neighborhood, and another house of roughly the same price in a neighborhood where bullets from the local crack dealers were coming through your walls at three in the morning, where would you choose to live?
From the article:
...
Most of the comments tucked inside the latest bugs are brief, unprintable and poorly spelled. "Bagle -- you are a looser!!!" opined the author of the sixth version of Netsky.
Hmmm, where have I seen that misspelling before? Let me think
Because the Firefly theme is a good song, perhaps?
Actually, one of the many sad parts is that every vote isn't counted equally.
Because the vast bulk of paid software development is done in-house to solve specific business problems, IMO free software creates more jobs than it destroys. My company can afford to pay me a decent salary in large part because they don't have to pay Oracle or Microsoft a fortune for proprietary tools that offer little if any advantage over the free tools I use.
You're right, if you "wrote an open-source implementation of the core software in your company," I'd be SOL. But that's unlikely, because the software we sell is very specialized, requiring a great deal of technical knowledge to create, sell, and maintain. (And, for that matter, use.) It's a hell of a lot easier to find OSS developers for a DBMS, OS, general-purpose programming language, or Web server than for image processing and management software specific to microscopic images. This, IMO, is the future of proprietary software: niche-market apps which require specialized knowledge to produce will continue to command a premium, while general-purpose apps such as OS's and DBMS's will increasingly tend to be free.
The problem is when people start using words like "all." Does all software need to be free? Of course not. Does all software need to be proprietary? Again, of course not. Stallman on one end and Gates on the other are both fanatics. (It's a pity that we live in a society that categorizes the former as a fanatic but gives the latter a free pass, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) In between are those of us who recognize that a mix of distribution models is both possible and desirable.
I work for a small company that makes money by selling proprietary software. I'm the DBA, and get my work done using primarily free tools (MySQL, PHP, Perl, Apache, Linux, BSD.) I also write open-source software on my own time. Everybody wins.
The difference, I think, is that at the time those stories weren't considered "fantasy stories;" they were just stories. The modern segregation of genres is just that, a modern phenomenon.
Not to mention that at least in the case of the earlier two, they were told at a time when people believed the events described might actually have happened. The Odyssey, in particular, was presented as history, not fiction.
Well, of course, if they're old enough, records of daily life can be fascinating to regular (okay, kinda geeky) people as well as historians. E.g., my grandmother has been translating my great-great-nth-great grandmother's diary out of rather archaic French for several years now. She was a young bride (sixteen years old, something like that) whose merchant husband brought her to Haiti in the 1700's. Most of her writing is, "It's hot here, there are lots of mosquitoes, I want to go home" -- stuff that would seem pretty boring and banal at the time, but now it seems fascinating simply because of its age.
Of course, it seems rather unlikely that anyone's LJ is going to be available for their remote descendants to read. Which is kind of a pity.
So, I've got to ask -- where do you think programmers should come from, if not from CS? Yeah, it's possible to teach any b-school monkey to throw together Visual Basic widgets, but that's the kind of "programming" that leads to so many real-world applications being bloated and buggy. We need computer scientists writing code to ensure high-quality products.
No, it's a European probe. Probably a good thing, too.
Trust me, no matter how bad SBC's service ... ... Qwest is worse. I'm glad they're doing this, but as a Denverite (who well remembers the days of Mountain Bell, and then USWest, and now Qwest, and nothing's changed) I have to say that they have a looong way to go before anyone thinks well of them.
Grandparent poster didn't say "they can't learn to use another OS," he said, "this way they can use the OS that's easiest to use." I'm a CS grad student. I'm competent with several OS's including Linux, BSD, Solaris, and [sigh] Windows. I still prefer using a Mac, because even though I can get work done in other OS's, my work goes faster when I'm using OS X.
The school that I goto
I suggest you gosub school instead of goto. That way you can return when you're done.
Yep. Asimov was all about the sex. An inspiration to horny geeks everywhere.
The key is realizing that the first Q/A pair doesn't really have anything to do with the way evolution actually works. A better way to put it is, "Some survive, some don't, and we designate the former group as 'fit'." IOW, "fitness" can be defined (exclusively) as that collection of traits which leads to survival and reproduction.
It's tempting for us, as humans, to believe that we represent the peak of evolutionary fitness. We don't; no organism does, because fitness isn't static. What traits are useful for survival can change over the course of a single day.
I have considered it. That was kind of my point.
... and if the US keeps going down its current road, the same thing will happen to us.
To be more explicit: attempts to make natural reality conform to ideology are doomed to fail. The refusal to realize this was a large part of what doomed the USSR
Please, oh please, "easily" prove to me that Bush completed his term of service.