Yep. Just like it's okay to post doctored photos of John Kerry with Jane Fonda*, but questioning Bush's desertion from the National Guard is somehow inappropriate, and perhaps unpatriotic, and an insult to all our brave Guardsmen currently fighting in Iraq, and -- oooh, shiny!
This is a pet peeve of mine, because I'm a vet (fought in Daddy Bush's war) and if there is one thing I hate, it's chickenhawks wrapping themselves in the flag.
* Even if he did want to hang out with her, remember that the guy fought heroically in Vietnam, and none of his critics ever came close.
Well, you know, Stalin was really good at reaching out to, and coming to an understanding with, Soviet scientists whose work cast doubt on the inevitable glorious triumph of New Socialist Man over not only the imperialistic forces of bourgeoise capitalism, but also nature itself. And there was nothing touchy-feely about it. <1/2 g>
It is a characteristic of zealots that they want to believe that a) everyone is either with them or against them, and b) both sides hold easily categorized sets of beliefs. The idea that there are ideologies orthogonal to their own just doesn't fit into their worldview.
Me, I'm a patriotic liberal anti-war pro-gun atheist evolution-believing veteran. The grandparent poster probably has never even imagined that people like me exist.;)
Micro- vs. macro-evolution is a distinction without a difference. Enough small changes add up to a big change. Biologists have long ago realized that there's no difference between the two except time. Only anti-science religious zealots masquerading as "intelligent design theorists" or whatever they're calling themselves this week still pretend that it's a meaningful distinction.
All the theological apologism you can throw at the matter doesn't disguise the fact that bulk of the body of religious literature which eventually became "the Bible" was written by people who believed in its literal truth as the word of God. As science learns more about our world, the amount of religious belief that any intelligent, educated person can hold diminishes -- which is why so many very intelligent people spend so much time coming up with ever-more-elaborate justifications for beliefs based on ancient superstitions. But it doesn't work. Those stories weren't meant as allegory. They were told by people who believed every word of them. If modern, sophisticated believers have trouble dealing with that fact, then that's their problem.
In the WB's case, I think it's not so much "the next big thing" they want as "the next big teenage thing." We went through the same thing with Buffy -- I remember a bunch of people saying on various forums something along the lines of, "They're crazy! I'm a 42-year-old soccer mom with lots of money and I watch Buffy religiously! I'm going to write them and tell them they're getting rid of their best demographic!" And then someone would point out that the WB doesn't give a shit about 42-year-old soccer moms; they care, with a kind of exclusiveness that borders on monomania, only about those soccer moms' kids.
In other words: Buffy, despite its considerable appeal to teenagers, quickly became a grown-up show, and the WB doesn't want grown-up shows. Now Angel's done the same. So clearly, it has to go.
It will continue to be funny, in a bitter way, as long as Bush and Blair continue to lie about WMD's. So, er, don't expect to stop seeing the joke, and the accompanying "funny" moderations, any time soon.
Funny, what really pisses me off is people who write bloated, inefficient, buggy code while they're bitching and whining about all those smarty-pants egghead ivory-tower perfesser types who don't know how things work in the Real World(tm).
Here's a newsflash for you: most CS professors worth their salt have many, many more years of practical programming under their belts than you do, and the theoretical stuff is in any decent CS curriculum for a reason. Anyone can learn to hack together a program that kinda sorta does what it's supposed to do, eventually, most of the time. But until you learn the math that underlies all programming, you will be a lousy programmer. End of story.
The odd thing is, if your standard is "good looks and charm and political skill," it's hard to explain what's going on in the current Democratic race. Good looks? I'd say Dean is better-looking than Kerry; none of the contenders is especially handsome by most people's standards, except maybe Edwards. Charm? Kerry is an incredibly boring speaker; Dean and Clark may not be exactly charming, but their straight-up speaking style is a hell of a lot more listenable than Kerry's repertoire of Stupid Politician Tricks. Political skill? Dean was elected Governor of Vermont five times, and had to navigate some exceedingly tricky political waters while in office; Edwards is a less-than-one-term Senator, and Clark has never been elected to anything. And yet, right now, it's clearly Kerry 1st, Edwards a distant 2nd, Clark 3rd, and Dean 4th. There's more going on here than your formula.
For that matter, why is Bush President? Now, I'm one of those who will believe to my dying day that Gore won the 2000 election, and the main reason Bush is in the White House is a Supreme Court full of his Daddy's friends -- but even I have to admit that a hell of a lot of people voted for monkey-boy. If they hadn't, even a stacked Supreme Court and a swing state run by his brother wouldn't have been enough to put him over the top. So here's someone who's ugly, charmless, and demonstrably not skilled at anything getting the highest office in the land.
Floating in the womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid considerably denser than water, is as close as most humans ever come to living in 0-g. I suspect that of all portions of the human life cycle, fetal development would be the least impacted by taking place in low gravity. (And pregnancy, and delivery, would probably be a lot less unpleasant for the mother, too.) OTOH, once the babies are born, we're going to have to figure out how to get them lots of exercise so their muscles and skeletons develop somewhere near normally. Adults can always spend more time in the gym to compensate; it's hard to persuade an infant to hit the bench.;)
Every once in a while I feel a twinge of guilt over using an OS (Mac OS X) that, while based on an open-source foundation, isn't truly free the way Linux is. I believe strongly in the F/OSS model and would love to see it take over the software world, so shouldn't I be doing my part?
And then I look at the current state of the Linux desktop: it's pretty much caught up to Windows, but it's got a long way to go before it matches the Mac. I switched from M$ to Apple when I realized how much Windows sucked in comparison to the MacOS, and I've never really regretted that decision, so why would I want to take a step backwards? At the end of the day, I'm a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Use what works, not what someone else tells you that you should use because it's morally superior (Linux) or what everyone else is using (Windows).
Right here, right now, OS X lets me get my work done faster, more efficiently, and more enjoyably than any other OS. If that changes, maybe my choice of OS will too. It hasn't happened yet, and honestly I don't expect that it will any time soon.
But overall, we must admit, that patents generally are a good thing.
Overall, we must admit no such thing -- when it comes to "business method" patents, anyway. I'm all for patenting actual, physical, mechanical inventions; and I'm willing to let chemical (including drug) patents slide by on the edges. But patenting ways of doing things (which includes forms of payment and also... hmmm... software algorithms) is an absurd perversion of the intended purposes of the patent system. If the suits who think this kind of thing is a good idea had their way, we'd have one enormously rich company that had a patent on "a method of selling goods at a higher cost than that involved in producing said goods in order to realize a profit," and everyone else would starve.
Mandrake has one very important resource that SuSE no longer has: it's a wholly European company. And no, in a better world that wouldn't matter -- but in a world where European markets are justifiably nervous about the implications of US control of their critical software, it matters a great deal.
If it were truly cheaper to maintain in the long run it would be in much wider use, ESPECIALLY in command economies like China. Welcome to the world of Economics.
Uh, right. I present the following parable:
So, this economics professor and his student are walking along the street, and the student spots a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. Being a starving student, he says, "Look, there's a twenty! We should pick it up and buy some lunch."
And the professor, being an economist, shakes his gray-bearded head and says sagaciously, "No, no, that's impossible."
"What are you talking about?" asks the student. "It's right there!"
"Well, you see," says the professor with a chuckle, "if there were really money lying on the sidewalk, someone would have picked it up already."
It;s just typical breathless pop-tech reporting, acting as though the analogy is some brilliant new idea nobody has ever thought of before!!! when in fact, as you say, people have been using these analogies -- not just general terms like "viruses" (and "cellular automata" and "genetic algorithms" and so on) but also the specific comparison of Microsoft equipment to a monoculture crop -- for years. Pop-tech and pop-sci journalism pretty much always do this, and I have to conclude that's what their audience expects.
Silliness. No one is saying, "Make everything different from everything else." They're saying, "Have a few different types of major [crops|systems] so that if something bad happens to one, you can still keep going." Your "thousands of... designs for the same wheel" world is a straw man.
... and I'm looking forward to seeing the higher-res pictures that he says will be coming. But honestly, the main reason everyone is focusing on Mars right now is because there really doesn't seem to be that much to find on Venus. We know it's an acidic pressure cooker covered with bare rock; the odds of there ever having been any kind of life there that we could detect seem vanishingly small, and we're not going to be living there any time soon either. Mars seems potentially a lot more promising for both exploration and colonization.
It's a matter of velocity. Space is curved in the area of Earth's orbit just enough for it to maintain its current orbit at its current velocity. (Otherwise we'd be in a different orbit.) Light, obviously, is traveling much, much faster than we are; its path does, in fact, curve in the vicinity of the sun (and in the vicinity of everything else, from supermassive black holes down to grains of dust) but not enough for us to see ourselves coming and going.
I think that the event horizon of a black hole can be defined as the point at which light traveling perpendicular to the singularity would enter a stable orbit, but I don't claim to be sure.
Fink does indeed rock, but you don't need it (and I don't recommend it) to get DOSBox. Click this link to download a binary. (And if you're wondering where that link came from, and are justifiably nervous about downloading a binary because some dude on/. said so, I got the link from here, a comprehensive list of PC emulators for Mac. The DOSBox entry is most of the way down the page.) No fuss involved in installation; it Just Works, the way all the best Mac software does.
What-fuckin-ever. I'm really sick of Slashdotters, of all people, perpetuating this stereotype. Maybe that's the kind of geek you choose to be (and yes, it is a choice) but there are plenty of the rest of us who enjoy physical activity that doesn't involve a mouse, keyboard, or joystick.
Re:Okokrim is NOT the equivalent of the RIAA!
on
DVD-Jon Completely Clear
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Unlike the US counterparts, the Norwegian Okokrim suffers from low-to non-existant computer skills, equipment and insight, and rely heavily on using consultants. Which usually are no better than the police boss that picks the consultants.
Don't assume this is "unlike the US" at all. The level of ignorance, Luddism, and outright hysteria on the part of the US legal system toward any kind of high-tech problem is really shocking. I don't think that I'm exaggerating when I say that most of what most cops, prosecutors, and politicians know about what what might broadly be called "computer crime" comes from watching War Games nigh on twenty years ago and thinking it was a documentary.
Exactly. It is entirely true that Linux, as an OS (kernel, whatever; it's a pointless argument) need not show the kind of year-over-year growth that proprietary software vendors like to see from their products -- there's no Linux accounting department that will axe the project if its ROI fails to meet expectations. But: there is a difference between Linux, the cool open-source geek OS, and Linux, the business-computing phenomenon that is the best chance of toppling Microsoft from its throne. The first will survive, in some form, whatever else happens. The second is in a very delicate place right now. What I hope to see happen is that with backing from Big Blue, Linux continues to gain mainstream acceptance and eventually becomes one of the default choices for corporate use everywhere from the desktop to the mainframe. But that won't happen unless it makes a few more major steps in the propaganda war. Right now it's seen as a respectable alternative... but "respectable alternative" and "mainstream" are not the same thing.
Yes, exactly. I've got to say I'm skeptical of any economic prediction that goes out as far as 12 years in the future, especially dealing with the tech world. I mean, think about where we were 12 years ago, in 1991: the Internet was a curiosity of interest mostly to government and academic researchers, home computing was still largely the domain of geeks, the application market was dominated by companies that don't exist any more (WordPerfect, anyone?), Compuserve dominated the online service world, Windows existed but no one who wanted to get any real work done used it, Linux didn't exist yet (or was just barely coming into existence; don't remember exactly), etc. There is simply no way to tell what the tech market, in any of its aspects, will look like in a decade or more.
Also in 1991, we had a Bush in the White House, a recession, and a war in Iraq. And a charismatic outsider whom the Republicans loved to deride as a "failed governor of a small state" was tearing up the Democratic nomination process. Hmmm...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Just like it's okay to post doctored photos of John Kerry with Jane Fonda*, but questioning Bush's desertion from the National Guard is somehow inappropriate, and perhaps unpatriotic, and an insult to all our brave Guardsmen currently fighting in Iraq, and -- oooh, shiny!
This is a pet peeve of mine, because I'm a vet (fought in Daddy Bush's war) and if there is one thing I hate, it's chickenhawks wrapping themselves in the flag.
* Even if he did want to hang out with her, remember that the guy fought heroically in Vietnam, and none of his critics ever came close.
Well, you know, Stalin was really good at reaching out to, and coming to an understanding with, Soviet scientists whose work cast doubt on the inevitable glorious triumph of New Socialist Man over not only the imperialistic forces of bourgeoise capitalism, but also nature itself. And there was nothing touchy-feely about it. <1/2 g>
It is a characteristic of zealots that they want to believe that a) everyone is either with them or against them, and b) both sides hold easily categorized sets of beliefs. The idea that there are ideologies orthogonal to their own just doesn't fit into their worldview.
;)
Me, I'm a patriotic liberal anti-war pro-gun atheist evolution-believing veteran. The grandparent poster probably has never even imagined that people like me exist.
Micro- vs. macro-evolution is a distinction without a difference. Enough small changes add up to a big change. Biologists have long ago realized that there's no difference between the two except time. Only anti-science religious zealots masquerading as "intelligent design theorists" or whatever they're calling themselves this week still pretend that it's a meaningful distinction.
All the theological apologism you can throw at the matter doesn't disguise the fact that bulk of the body of religious literature which eventually became "the Bible" was written by people who believed in its literal truth as the word of God. As science learns more about our world, the amount of religious belief that any intelligent, educated person can hold diminishes -- which is why so many very intelligent people spend so much time coming up with ever-more-elaborate justifications for beliefs based on ancient superstitions. But it doesn't work. Those stories weren't meant as allegory. They were told by people who believed every word of them. If modern, sophisticated believers have trouble dealing with that fact, then that's their problem.
In the WB's case, I think it's not so much "the next big thing" they want as "the next big teenage thing." We went through the same thing with Buffy -- I remember a bunch of people saying on various forums something along the lines of, "They're crazy! I'm a 42-year-old soccer mom with lots of money and I watch Buffy religiously! I'm going to write them and tell them they're getting rid of their best demographic!" And then someone would point out that the WB doesn't give a shit about 42-year-old soccer moms; they care, with a kind of exclusiveness that borders on monomania, only about those soccer moms' kids.
In other words: Buffy, despite its considerable appeal to teenagers, quickly became a grown-up show, and the WB doesn't want grown-up shows. Now Angel's done the same. So clearly, it has to go.
It will continue to be funny, in a bitter way, as long as Bush and Blair continue to lie about WMD's. So, er, don't expect to stop seeing the joke, and the accompanying "funny" moderations, any time soon.
Funny, what really pisses me off is people who write bloated, inefficient, buggy code while they're bitching and whining about all those smarty-pants egghead ivory-tower perfesser types who don't know how things work in the Real World(tm).
Here's a newsflash for you: most CS professors worth their salt have many, many more years of practical programming under their belts than you do, and the theoretical stuff is in any decent CS curriculum for a reason. Anyone can learn to hack together a program that kinda sorta does what it's supposed to do, eventually, most of the time. But until you learn the math that underlies all programming, you will be a lousy programmer. End of story.
The odd thing is, if your standard is "good looks and charm and political skill," it's hard to explain what's going on in the current Democratic race. Good looks? I'd say Dean is better-looking than Kerry; none of the contenders is especially handsome by most people's standards, except maybe Edwards. Charm? Kerry is an incredibly boring speaker; Dean and Clark may not be exactly charming, but their straight-up speaking style is a hell of a lot more listenable than Kerry's repertoire of Stupid Politician Tricks. Political skill? Dean was elected Governor of Vermont five times, and had to navigate some exceedingly tricky political waters while in office; Edwards is a less-than-one-term Senator, and Clark has never been elected to anything. And yet, right now, it's clearly Kerry 1st, Edwards a distant 2nd, Clark 3rd, and Dean 4th. There's more going on here than your formula.
For that matter, why is Bush President? Now, I'm one of those who will believe to my dying day that Gore won the 2000 election, and the main reason Bush is in the White House is a Supreme Court full of his Daddy's friends -- but even I have to admit that a hell of a lot of people voted for monkey-boy. If they hadn't, even a stacked Supreme Court and a swing state run by his brother wouldn't have been enough to put him over the top. So here's someone who's ugly, charmless, and demonstrably not skilled at anything getting the highest office in the land.
Floating in the womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid considerably denser than water, is as close as most humans ever come to living in 0-g. I suspect that of all portions of the human life cycle, fetal development would be the least impacted by taking place in low gravity. (And pregnancy, and delivery, would probably be a lot less unpleasant for the mother, too.) OTOH, once the babies are born, we're going to have to figure out how to get them lots of exercise so their muscles and skeletons develop somewhere near normally. Adults can always spend more time in the gym to compensate; it's hard to persuade an infant to hit the bench. ;)
Every once in a while I feel a twinge of guilt over using an OS (Mac OS X) that, while based on an open-source foundation, isn't truly free the way Linux is. I believe strongly in the F/OSS model and would love to see it take over the software world, so shouldn't I be doing my part?
And then I look at the current state of the Linux desktop: it's pretty much caught up to Windows, but it's got a long way to go before it matches the Mac. I switched from M$ to Apple when I realized how much Windows sucked in comparison to the MacOS, and I've never really regretted that decision, so why would I want to take a step backwards? At the end of the day, I'm a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Use what works, not what someone else tells you that you should use because it's morally superior (Linux) or what everyone else is using (Windows).
Right here, right now, OS X lets me get my work done faster, more efficiently, and more enjoyably than any other OS. If that changes, maybe my choice of OS will too. It hasn't happened yet, and honestly I don't expect that it will any time soon.
But overall, we must admit, that patents generally are a good thing.
... hmmm ... software algorithms) is an absurd perversion of the intended purposes of the patent system. If the suits who think this kind of thing is a good idea had their way, we'd have one enormously rich company that had a patent on "a method of selling goods at a higher cost than that involved in producing said goods in order to realize a profit," and everyone else would starve.
Overall, we must admit no such thing -- when it comes to "business method" patents, anyway. I'm all for patenting actual, physical, mechanical inventions; and I'm willing to let chemical (including drug) patents slide by on the edges. But patenting ways of doing things (which includes forms of payment and also
Mandrake has one very important resource that SuSE no longer has: it's a wholly European company. And no, in a better world that wouldn't matter -- but in a world where European markets are justifiably nervous about the implications of US control of their critical software, it matters a great deal.
As a journalist, surely you make some effort to evaluate the credibility of your sources?
If it were truly cheaper to maintain in the long run it would be in much wider use, ESPECIALLY in command economies like China. Welcome to the world of Economics.
Uh, right. I present the following parable:
So, this economics professor and his student are walking along the street, and the student spots a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. Being a starving student, he says, "Look, there's a twenty! We should pick it up and buy some lunch."
And the professor, being an economist, shakes his gray-bearded head and says sagaciously, "No, no, that's impossible."
"What are you talking about?" asks the student. "It's right there!"
"Well, you see," says the professor with a chuckle, "if there were really money lying on the sidewalk, someone would have picked it up already."
It;s just typical breathless pop-tech reporting, acting as though the analogy is some brilliant new idea nobody has ever thought of before!!! when in fact, as you say, people have been using these analogies -- not just general terms like "viruses" (and "cellular automata" and "genetic algorithms" and so on) but also the specific comparison of Microsoft equipment to a monoculture crop -- for years. Pop-tech and pop-sci journalism pretty much always do this, and I have to conclude that's what their audience expects.
Silliness. No one is saying, "Make everything different from everything else." They're saying, "Have a few different types of major [crops|systems] so that if something bad happens to one, you can still keep going." Your "thousands of ... designs for the same wheel" world is a straw man.
... and I'm looking forward to seeing the higher-res pictures that he says will be coming. But honestly, the main reason everyone is focusing on Mars right now is because there really doesn't seem to be that much to find on Venus. We know it's an acidic pressure cooker covered with bare rock; the odds of there ever having been any kind of life there that we could detect seem vanishingly small, and we're not going to be living there any time soon either. Mars seems potentially a lot more promising for both exploration and colonization.
It's a matter of velocity. Space is curved in the area of Earth's orbit just enough for it to maintain its current orbit at its current velocity. (Otherwise we'd be in a different orbit.) Light, obviously, is traveling much, much faster than we are; its path does, in fact, curve in the vicinity of the sun (and in the vicinity of everything else, from supermassive black holes down to grains of dust) but not enough for us to see ourselves coming and going.
I think that the event horizon of a black hole can be defined as the point at which light traveling perpendicular to the singularity would enter a stable orbit, but I don't claim to be sure.
Fink does indeed rock, but you don't need it (and I don't recommend it) to get DOSBox. Click this link to download a binary. (And if you're wondering where that link came from, and are justifiably nervous about downloading a binary because some dude on /. said so, I got the link from here, a comprehensive list of PC emulators for Mac. The DOSBox entry is most of the way down the page.) No fuss involved in installation; it Just Works, the way all the best Mac software does.
Use DOSBox instead of Bochs, is my recommendation. I'm overjoyed to be able to play all my old DOS games on my iBook.
What-fuckin-ever. I'm really sick of Slashdotters, of all people, perpetuating this stereotype. Maybe that's the kind of geek you choose to be (and yes, it is a choice) but there are plenty of the rest of us who enjoy physical activity that doesn't involve a mouse, keyboard, or joystick.
Unlike the US counterparts, the Norwegian Okokrim suffers from low-to non-existant computer skills, equipment and insight, and rely heavily on using consultants. Which usually are no better than the police boss that picks the consultants.
Don't assume this is "unlike the US" at all. The level of ignorance, Luddism, and outright hysteria on the part of the US legal system toward any kind of high-tech problem is really shocking. I don't think that I'm exaggerating when I say that most of what most cops, prosecutors, and politicians know about what what might broadly be called "computer crime" comes from watching War Games nigh on twenty years ago and thinking it was a documentary.
Exactly. It is entirely true that Linux, as an OS (kernel, whatever; it's a pointless argument) need not show the kind of year-over-year growth that proprietary software vendors like to see from their products -- there's no Linux accounting department that will axe the project if its ROI fails to meet expectations. But: there is a difference between Linux, the cool open-source geek OS, and Linux, the business-computing phenomenon that is the best chance of toppling Microsoft from its throne. The first will survive, in some form, whatever else happens. The second is in a very delicate place right now. What I hope to see happen is that with backing from Big Blue, Linux continues to gain mainstream acceptance and eventually becomes one of the default choices for corporate use everywhere from the desktop to the mainframe. But that won't happen unless it makes a few more major steps in the propaganda war. Right now it's seen as a respectable alternative ... but "respectable alternative" and "mainstream" are not the same thing.
Yes, exactly. I've got to say I'm skeptical of any economic prediction that goes out as far as 12 years in the future, especially dealing with the tech world. I mean, think about where we were 12 years ago, in 1991: the Internet was a curiosity of interest mostly to government and academic researchers, home computing was still largely the domain of geeks, the application market was dominated by companies that don't exist any more (WordPerfect, anyone?), Compuserve dominated the online service world, Windows existed but no one who wanted to get any real work done used it, Linux didn't exist yet (or was just barely coming into existence; don't remember exactly), etc. There is simply no way to tell what the tech market, in any of its aspects, will look like in a decade or more.
...
Also in 1991, we had a Bush in the White House, a recession, and a war in Iraq. And a charismatic outsider whom the Republicans loved to deride as a "failed governor of a small state" was tearing up the Democratic nomination process. Hmmm