"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
In an abstract sense, no, it's not "ok" for poor people to steal. But it is the reality. If people perceive a need for something, and it's not available at a what they perceive as a fair price, they will steal it. And the greater the perceived need and/or unfairness of the price, the more theft there will be. When theft is rampant (please let's not get into the argument about whether or not IP copying is "theft" in the same sense as stealing a car) that's a sign that either the need or the price, or both, is seriously out of whack.
I mean, fine, it's not true 3D. But it's still a hell of an advance in display technology. True, open-air, walk-around 3D projection would be very very cool, but for most of the applications that people want 3D display for right now, this is a big step in the right direction.
Obviously there's plenty of room for improvement. You should be able to "tilt your head to see it from different angle," I agree. I'd say a reasonable standard is that the illusion of depth should be maintainable anywhere from 1 to 3 feet away from the screen, and with the viewer's head positioned directly in front of any part of the screen including the edges. If they can get that down... well, as far as I'm concerned, they've pulled off a miracle.
Yes, it is offensive, but it's hardly surprising. Corporate suits are the grown-up version of jock bullies in high school. In fact, a lot of them are the exact same people -- business degrees are the favored choice of people who want to get "an education" but don't have the brains to study something that takes an effort to learn.
No, I don't think it's a conspiracy between the Republicans and the DLC. I just think that both groups dislike him and find "another McGovern" to be a convenient smear.
And the DLC's strategy was successful in the Clinton years, but since then it's led to nothing but losses. Actually, even during the Clinton years, it was successful for the Presidency but nowhere else. Recall that after the Democrats winning both houses of Congress by solid margins in 1992, the Republicans came roaring back only two years later -- and they didn't do it by saying, "Oh, we have a popular Democratic President, so we'd better try to be more like the Democrats." They did it by being committed, passionate, and unafraid to go on the attack against one of the most popular sitting Presidents in recent history.
(Granted, they then overreached themselves with the whole absurd Whitewater/Lewinsky thing; had they kept their politics aboveboard, IMO Newt Gingrich would still be running the House.)
There's a lesson here. Lieberman would get some of the moderates but nobody else. Kerry would get some of the moderates and most mainstream Democrats. But the genuine center-left moderation of Dean's politics (no matter how much his opponents try to paint him as to the left of Vladimir Lenin) combined with his willingness to fight the good fight in a public forum represents, IMO, the Democrats' best chance for victory.
The ironic thing about Goldwater is that he turned into quite the libertarian in his later years...
It doesn't work that way, as familiarity does not erase contempt. The Serbs have lived alongside the Bosnians and others for centuries, and still they have tried to exterminate them at different times. Same with Germans and Jews, or Muslims and Jews.
For many, it is just a change to get closer to their enemy.
The thing is, that in all the cases you cited, these groups lived together for centuries and didn't try to exterminate each other -- until small groups of fanatics whipped up ancient hatreds to further their own political ends. Hatred of "The Other" may be a natural human emotion, but it's not inevitable. When you get right down to it, most people, in most times and places, really just want to live in peace so they can get on with their business. Look at almost any example of internecine war in history, and you'll find a few whackos and a bunch of sheep, not genuine mass movements.
No, that's not the consensus. That's the label the Republican propaganda machine, and the DLC hacks who are jealous of his early success, are trying to stick on him. Whether or not it works remains to be seen.
But his record as governor of Vermont does indicate that, at least on occasion, he's willing to take unpopular stands when he feels it's the right thing to do. And his policy statements -- whether or not he intends to live up to them -- are more in accordance with my personal beliefs than those of any other politician, of any party, at any level, I can remember. He might be just another sellout schmuck with good PR. He might also, just possibly, be another Lincoln or Roosevelt (either one) or Truman. And given that the rest of the field that has any chance of winning is composed of people I know to be sellout schmucks with good PR... well, Dean's the horse I'm putting my money on.
Don't assume that everyone who disagrees with you, or doesn't share your reflexive cynicism about all politicians, is ill-informed. Skepticism is valuable; so is hope. Dean gives me at least some hope, and considering the direction the country's headed right now, that's a precious thing. If he wins, and turns out to be a letdown... well, what the hell, that's happened before. And even if that does happen, odds are he'll still be better for the country I love -- and served proudly for most of my adult life to date, and for which I am now desperately afraid -- than any of the alternatives.
I tend to trust Dean more than the others. It may be naive of me -- he may just have a really good image consultant -- but he gives the impression, at least, that he talks straight and takes shit from nobody. That doesn't mean he's turning down anyone's money (he'd be stupid if he did) but he may be slightly less easy to out-and-out bribe than your average politician of either major party.
The only states' right the South cared enough about to actually tear apart the Union for was the "right" to hold human property in the form of slaves. That's what I meant by "sole cause." IOW, IMO, slavery and the threat of abolition alone would have caused them to secede, without any of the other issues being present; without that issue, none of the other issues would have been sufficient to bring about the war.
This is an old argument, and probably about as pointless as those over gun control or abortion. But I'm going to try...
The Union went to war for the primary purpose of keeping the Union intact, true. But the Confederate states seceded because they believed (rightly or wrongly -- there's no way to know, of course, what would have happened had the war not been fought) that Lincoln intended to enact Abolition. Any other arguments for secession (tariff issues, etc.) were tacked on after the fact. An analysis of the writings of the time clearly shows that slavery and slavery alone was the cause of the war.
And by the end of the war, the Union felt this way too. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free..."
Agreed. The only caveat I'd add is that it does seem that the ideas of the slaveholding culture -- weakened over time, to be sure, mutated and distorted, but still recognizable as such -- are currently in the political ascendant. And understandably, a lot of people are pretty pissed off about that. The American Revolution began in 1776, and seemed to have been won in 1865... but the current goings-on in Washington sure do bring "a new breed of glittering men" to mind.
The unfortunate who used the word "niggardly" was not, I think, trying to be racist; he simply chose to use an archaic word for "stingy". (I have no idea why; maybe he reads a lot of old novels?) Similarly, someone might just as innocently used the word "fagot" without trying to be homophobic. In either case, it's a legitimate use of the language, but still a bad idea. Is all I'm saying.
I'm not hypothesizing that someone in the latter case would actually be proposing to burn gay people to heat the room.
For millions of Americans, the "master-slave" relationship means one thing and one thing only: over 200 years of institutionalized, legal American slavery.
Then those Americans are ignorant.
Slavery -- human slavery, I mean, not the machine kind -- is a curse that has afflicted humanity throughout its existence, and continues to do so today. To limit one's viewpoint of the word to a specific period in the history of a young nation is to pretend that the suffering of the (at a guess) tens of millions of slaves throughout history who were not black Americans has no meaning... and to pretend that slavery is a solved problem, when in fact, there are probably more slaves worldwide today than at any previous time in history.
Two-thirds of my father's family died in the Holocaust, but you don't see me acting as though genocide is something that only happens to Jews.
The infamous "niggardly" case is a bit different, IMO. Yes, it's a perfectly good word, and yes, it has nothing to do with race -- but it's also a rather archaic word (I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone use it in a sentence, except to discuss the case) and, obviously, has a lot of potential to be misunderstood. As I said at the time, using "niggardly" in a room full of black people is kind of like being in a room full of homosexuals and saying, "It's cold in here -- throw another fagot in the fire."
All that being said, the person who complained about "master/slave" on racial grounds is not only an idiot, but also a racist. Slavery is not and never has been confined to any one group of people based on the color of their skin. There have always been, and unfortunately still are, slaves of every race.
Yes, Microsoft employees depend on their jobs. But their jobs depend on the ill-gotten gains of a convicted monopolist. Complaining that you're hurting them by pirating Microsoft software is like complaining about all those wiseguys who will lose their jobs when the cops bust a Mafia operation.
And as a practical matter, Microsoft can afford it. $40 billion in the bank will soak up a lot of losses. I'm more interested in what the guy said a line earlier in the interview: that if what he's doing is wrong, it's because he's helping to distribute Microsoft software. The truth of the matter is that pirated copies of Windows and Office are one of Bill Gates' best marketing tools.
There are five people on my project, including my boss (who doesn't really run the project on a day-to-day basis, since he's also the president of the company -- we're a small business, about 30 employees total.) My boss, I, and the other senior programmer on the project each have our own office. The two junior programmers share a very spacious office which is right next to mine. The other senior guy is down a short hall. My boss is down one flight of stairs.
We all communicate just fine. The doors to all the offices are almost always open, unless things are noisy outside (e.g., my office is right next to the engineering area.) It takes less than a minute to walk from any office to any other office. If someone has a question, he gets up, walks over, and asks the question. Any of us is usually happy to answer anyone else's question. If we need to meet as a group, we IM each other to that effect, walk down to hall to the conference room, sit down, talk about whatever we need to talk about, and then get back to work.
And when we're working, we can sit there in our space, with our stuff, at our machines, and we get our work done. It's a beautiful thing. You may feel it's "shitty for [my] company," but apparently my company -- having experimented with cubicles and open-plan workspaces in the past, BTW -- disagrees. Thank God.
But they're still chasing their own tail, IMO. They may be able to predict the next Hit That Sounds Like All The Other Current Hits, but they'll completely miss the hits that are successful because they remind people of something they liked a long time ago, or even -- gasp! -- because they're actually original.
Like I said, I can believe that there's a common thread running through all great music. I just can't believe that the majority of currently successful pop music (not a slam on current pop music per se -- most Top 40 has always been disposable crap) embodies it.
You bring up an interesting point, about caring about sales vs. quality. The thing is -- and this an issue for book publishers as well as music publishers -- that it's worth thinking in the long term. Flash-in-the-pan teenybopper pop can make lots of money, true. But the artists whose stuff keeps selling, year after year, who are the true greats, can make the publishers more money in the long run. The calculated death of the midlist is IMO one of the major reasons for a lot of publishers' current financial woes, and they Just Don't Get It.*
I think that in the context of tech jobs, the key here is "think in quiet". Any decent programmer spends a lot more time thinking than actually coding. And yeah, a lot of that thinking involves looking things up in manuals (and no, damn it, online references are not a substitute for dead trees!), doodling diagrams on convenient pieces of paper, etc.
Programming is not assembly-line work. The more PHB's try to turn it into an assembly line, the more they get crappy, bloated, buggy code.
Historically, what is pleasing to the human ear has not changed since man began writing music. What has changed are styles, performances, the instruments used and the way music is produced and recorded, but a compelling melody is still compelling...
Okay, so far, so good; it sounds like they're saying "good music is good music, and here's a tool for telling whether something is good or not." I'm still skeptical at this point, but it's certainly an interesting idea, and one worthy of study.
But then they completely lose me with this one:
A high score means that a song is mathematically similar to recent hit songs and a low score means it is dissimilar. These scores have meaning when it comes to success potential in today's market but is not meant to mean a song is good or bad. For example, when tested for today's market some really great classic hits from the 60's 70's and 80's score very low and would most likely not become hits today with their original production or chord progression. That does not mean that they are not good songs and it is quite possible that if produced more in line with today's sounds they could score much higher.
IOW, our algorithm says music is good if it sounds like everything else people think is good right now, and if it's different from current Top 40, it's crap.
They make a high-flown reference to the 36 Plots and other serious attempts at artistic analysis, but that's not what they're actually doing. I do believe that good music is good music, good stories are good stories, etc. I can at least consider seriously the hypothesis that all good art has certain qualities in common, and that by analyzing those qualities we can evaluate a new work's chance of lasting success. But the idea that musicians (or writers, or whatever) can keep pumping out stuff exactly like What's Hot Now and be guaranteed a blockbuster is just stupid.
... the way using nothing but Microsoft software "promotes choice."
I'm incredibly lucky to work at a company where I -- not as a manager, but as a regular ol' code monkey -- have my own office. Cubicles suck. Open space environments suck even worse. I know; I've done both in the past, and never will again if I can help it. The "old paradigm" of the office became the standard for corporate work because, guess what, it works. Just about every change since then has served to increase worker stress and decrease productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey, Top, looks like we've got a lot of mud here. How about I dig some holes in it?"
"That's a great idea, Private!"
;)
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
In an abstract sense, no, it's not "ok" for poor people to steal. But it is the reality. If people perceive a need for something, and it's not available at a what they perceive as a fair price, they will steal it. And the greater the perceived need and/or unfairness of the price, the more theft there will be. When theft is rampant (please let's not get into the argument about whether or not IP copying is "theft" in the same sense as stealing a car) that's a sign that either the need or the price, or both, is seriously out of whack.
BTW, grandparent poster is Polish, not Chinese.
[shrug] 2.5D, maybe?
... well, as far as I'm concerned, they've pulled off a miracle.
I mean, fine, it's not true 3D. But it's still a hell of an advance in display technology. True, open-air, walk-around 3D projection would be very very cool, but for most of the applications that people want 3D display for right now, this is a big step in the right direction.
Obviously there's plenty of room for improvement. You should be able to "tilt your head to see it from different angle," I agree. I'd say a reasonable standard is that the illusion of depth should be maintainable anywhere from 1 to 3 feet away from the screen, and with the viewer's head positioned directly in front of any part of the screen including the edges. If they can get that down
Yes, it is offensive, but it's hardly surprising. Corporate suits are the grown-up version of jock bullies in high school. In fact, a lot of them are the exact same people -- business degrees are the favored choice of people who want to get "an education" but don't have the brains to study something that takes an effort to learn.
No, I don't think it's a conspiracy between the Republicans and the DLC. I just think that both groups dislike him and find "another McGovern" to be a convenient smear.
...
And the DLC's strategy was successful in the Clinton years, but since then it's led to nothing but losses. Actually, even during the Clinton years, it was successful for the Presidency but nowhere else. Recall that after the Democrats winning both houses of Congress by solid margins in 1992, the Republicans came roaring back only two years later -- and they didn't do it by saying, "Oh, we have a popular Democratic President, so we'd better try to be more like the Democrats." They did it by being committed, passionate, and unafraid to go on the attack against one of the most popular sitting Presidents in recent history.
(Granted, they then overreached themselves with the whole absurd Whitewater/Lewinsky thing; had they kept their politics aboveboard, IMO Newt Gingrich would still be running the House.)
There's a lesson here. Lieberman would get some of the moderates but nobody else. Kerry would get some of the moderates and most mainstream Democrats. But the genuine center-left moderation of Dean's politics (no matter how much his opponents try to paint him as to the left of Vladimir Lenin) combined with his willingness to fight the good fight in a public forum represents, IMO, the Democrats' best chance for victory.
The ironic thing about Goldwater is that he turned into quite the libertarian in his later years
The thing is, that in all the cases you cited, these groups lived together for centuries and didn't try to exterminate each other -- until small groups of fanatics whipped up ancient hatreds to further their own political ends. Hatred of "The Other" may be a natural human emotion, but it's not inevitable. When you get right down to it, most people, in most times and places, really just want to live in peace so they can get on with their business. Look at almost any example of internecine war in history, and you'll find a few whackos and a bunch of sheep, not genuine mass movements.
No, that's not the consensus. That's the label the Republican propaganda machine, and the DLC hacks who are jealous of his early success, are trying to stick on him. Whether or not it works remains to be seen.
I'm sure they did.
... well, Dean's the horse I'm putting my money on.
... well, what the hell, that's happened before. And even if that does happen, odds are he'll still be better for the country I love -- and served proudly for most of my adult life to date, and for which I am now desperately afraid -- than any of the alternatives.
But his record as governor of Vermont does indicate that, at least on occasion, he's willing to take unpopular stands when he feels it's the right thing to do. And his policy statements -- whether or not he intends to live up to them -- are more in accordance with my personal beliefs than those of any other politician, of any party, at any level, I can remember. He might be just another sellout schmuck with good PR. He might also, just possibly, be another Lincoln or Roosevelt (either one) or Truman. And given that the rest of the field that has any chance of winning is composed of people I know to be sellout schmucks with good PR
Don't assume that everyone who disagrees with you, or doesn't share your reflexive cynicism about all politicians, is ill-informed. Skepticism is valuable; so is hope. Dean gives me at least some hope, and considering the direction the country's headed right now, that's a precious thing. If he wins, and turns out to be a letdown
LOL! "Unemployed migrant orator" is a great line.
I tend to trust Dean more than the others. It may be naive of me -- he may just have a really good image consultant -- but he gives the impression, at least, that he talks straight and takes shit from nobody. That doesn't mean he's turning down anyone's money (he'd be stupid if he did) but he may be slightly less easy to out-and-out bribe than your average politician of either major party.
Okay, perhaps I should have said "American blacks" and "American homosexuals" to be a little more clear. But I think you see what I was getting at.
The only states' right the South cared enough about to actually tear apart the Union for was the "right" to hold human property in the form of slaves. That's what I meant by "sole cause." IOW, IMO, slavery and the threat of abolition alone would have caused them to secede, without any of the other issues being present; without that issue, none of the other issues would have been sufficient to bring about the war.
Get married? ;)
This is an old argument, and probably about as pointless as those over gun control or abortion. But I'm going to try ...
..."
The Union went to war for the primary purpose of keeping the Union intact, true. But the Confederate states seceded because they believed (rightly or wrongly -- there's no way to know, of course, what would have happened had the war not been fought) that Lincoln intended to enact Abolition. Any other arguments for secession (tariff issues, etc.) were tacked on after the fact. An analysis of the writings of the time clearly shows that slavery and slavery alone was the cause of the war.
And by the end of the war, the Union felt this way too. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
Oops. Sorry.
Agreed. The only caveat I'd add is that it does seem that the ideas of the slaveholding culture -- weakened over time, to be sure, mutated and distorted, but still recognizable as such -- are currently in the political ascendant. And understandably, a lot of people are pretty pissed off about that. The American Revolution began in 1776, and seemed to have been won in 1865 ... but the current goings-on in Washington sure do bring "a new breed of glittering men" to mind.
Aaargh. I think we're talking past each other.
The unfortunate who used the word "niggardly" was not, I think, trying to be racist; he simply chose to use an archaic word for "stingy". (I have no idea why; maybe he reads a lot of old novels?) Similarly, someone might just as innocently used the word "fagot" without trying to be homophobic. In either case, it's a legitimate use of the language, but still a bad idea. Is all I'm saying.
I'm not hypothesizing that someone in the latter case would actually be proposing to burn gay people to heat the room.
Or are you making a joke I'm not getting?
Um ... that was kind of my point.
Then those Americans are ignorant.
Slavery -- human slavery, I mean, not the machine kind -- is a curse that has afflicted humanity throughout its existence, and continues to do so today. To limit one's viewpoint of the word to a specific period in the history of a young nation is to pretend that the suffering of the (at a guess) tens of millions of slaves throughout history who were not black Americans has no meaning
Two-thirds of my father's family died in the Holocaust, but you don't see me acting as though genocide is something that only happens to Jews.
The infamous "niggardly" case is a bit different, IMO. Yes, it's a perfectly good word, and yes, it has nothing to do with race -- but it's also a rather archaic word (I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone use it in a sentence, except to discuss the case) and, obviously, has a lot of potential to be misunderstood. As I said at the time, using "niggardly" in a room full of black people is kind of like being in a room full of homosexuals and saying, "It's cold in here -- throw another fagot in the fire."
All that being said, the person who complained about "master/slave" on racial grounds is not only an idiot, but also a racist. Slavery is not and never has been confined to any one group of people based on the color of their skin. There have always been, and unfortunately still are, slaves of every race.
Yes, Microsoft employees depend on their jobs. But their jobs depend on the ill-gotten gains of a convicted monopolist. Complaining that you're hurting them by pirating Microsoft software is like complaining about all those wiseguys who will lose their jobs when the cops bust a Mafia operation.
And as a practical matter, Microsoft can afford it. $40 billion in the bank will soak up a lot of losses. I'm more interested in what the guy said a line earlier in the interview: that if what he's doing is wrong, it's because he's helping to distribute Microsoft software. The truth of the matter is that pirated copies of Windows and Office are one of Bill Gates' best marketing tools.
There are five people on my project, including my boss (who doesn't really run the project on a day-to-day basis, since he's also the president of the company -- we're a small business, about 30 employees total.) My boss, I, and the other senior programmer on the project each have our own office. The two junior programmers share a very spacious office which is right next to mine. The other senior guy is down a short hall. My boss is down one flight of stairs.
We all communicate just fine. The doors to all the offices are almost always open, unless things are noisy outside (e.g., my office is right next to the engineering area.) It takes less than a minute to walk from any office to any other office. If someone has a question, he gets up, walks over, and asks the question. Any of us is usually happy to answer anyone else's question. If we need to meet as a group, we IM each other to that effect, walk down to hall to the conference room, sit down, talk about whatever we need to talk about, and then get back to work.
And when we're working, we can sit there in our space, with our stuff, at our machines, and we get our work done. It's a beautiful thing. You may feel it's "shitty for [my] company," but apparently my company -- having experimented with cubicles and open-plan workspaces in the past, BTW -- disagrees. Thank God.
But they're still chasing their own tail, IMO. They may be able to predict the next Hit That Sounds Like All The Other Current Hits, but they'll completely miss the hits that are successful because they remind people of something they liked a long time ago, or even -- gasp! -- because they're actually original.
Like I said, I can believe that there's a common thread running through all great music. I just can't believe that the majority of currently successful pop music (not a slam on current pop music per se -- most Top 40 has always been disposable crap) embodies it.
You bring up an interesting point, about caring about sales vs. quality. The thing is -- and this an issue for book publishers as well as music publishers -- that it's worth thinking in the long term. Flash-in-the-pan teenybopper pop can make lots of money, true. But the artists whose stuff keeps selling, year after year, who are the true greats, can make the publishers more money in the long run. The calculated death of the midlist is IMO one of the major reasons for a lot of publishers' current financial woes, and they Just Don't Get It.*
---
* Disposable pop culture reference 101
Yes.
I think that in the context of tech jobs, the key here is "think in quiet". Any decent programmer spends a lot more time thinking than actually coding. And yeah, a lot of that thinking involves looking things up in manuals (and no, damn it, online references are not a substitute for dead trees!), doodling diagrams on convenient pieces of paper, etc.
Programming is not assembly-line work. The more PHB's try to turn it into an assembly line, the more they get crappy, bloated, buggy code.
Okay, so far, so good; it sounds like they're saying "good music is good music, and here's a tool for telling whether something is good or not." I'm still skeptical at this point, but it's certainly an interesting idea, and one worthy of study.
But then they completely lose me with this one:
IOW, our algorithm says music is good if it sounds like everything else people think is good right now, and if it's different from current Top 40, it's crap.
They make a high-flown reference to the 36 Plots and other serious attempts at artistic analysis, but that's not what they're actually doing. I do believe that good music is good music, good stories are good stories, etc. I can at least consider seriously the hypothesis that all good art has certain qualities in common, and that by analyzing those qualities we can evaluate a new work's chance of lasting success. But the idea that musicians (or writers, or whatever) can keep pumping out stuff exactly like What's Hot Now and be guaranteed a blockbuster is just stupid.
... the way using nothing but Microsoft software "promotes choice."
I'm incredibly lucky to work at a company where I -- not as a manager, but as a regular ol' code monkey -- have my own office. Cubicles suck. Open space environments suck even worse. I know; I've done both in the past, and never will again if I can help it. The "old paradigm" of the office became the standard for corporate work because, guess what, it works. Just about every change since then has served to increase worker stress and decrease productivity.