Saddam was indeed a tin-pot (not "tin-pan") dictator, and presented no credible threat to the US. Liberals tend to pay more attention to real threats like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao -- or did you just happen to miss the fact that it was under Democratic Presidents that the US held the line against the three most murderous regimes in history?
"Conservatives fight for their country, liberals just bitch about it." Oh, really? I did fight for my country (I was a medic in Desert Storm.) When have you, or that pathetic chickenhawk deserter George W. Bush, done the same?
Being a member of several different groups that get stereotyped a lot, I always find it sad when I hear members of one group repeating vicious stereotypes about another. The various types of "outcasts" all have a lot more in common with each other than most of them realize.
A big part of the answer to this is "maintainability." I'm currently the project lead on a massive revision of a project I first did solo a couple of years ago. At the time, the attitude was, "Don't worry about the quality of the code, just get it working and out the door." Now, we're essentially rewriting from scratch a lot of code which could probably have been reused with minor tweaks if I'd taken the time to do everything right, one step at a time. And in fact, a lot of that "theory and all that jazz" I learned in school is turning out to be vital to making things work right.
It also has to do with the size of the project. When I was doing it alone, it was okay to use obscure hacks, because I knew how everything worked. But when other people are building modules that depend on my code, things have to be structured in a way that's consistent and understandable.
Sure it will. All religions believe and have explained that God created everything, they don't explain how He did it. And if He did create everything, then you would expect everything to be related in some kind of an organized hierarchy. All they are doing is using the computers to determine that hierarchy.
Um, actually, lots of religions do claim to explain how God created everything -- ever heard of something called Genesis? Which is the problem, and why Gould's "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" idea, as nice a solution as it should be to the creationism issue, will never work. Religion and science could be completely separate, but religion insists on making assertions about the nature of reality which contradict scientific observations.
I used to believe that the best way to deal with creationists was to try to understand their point of view, to make compromises, to explain things in a way that wouldn't cause controversy. Now I've come to realize that it's not worth it. Creationists should be mocked at every opportunity. Anyone who believes literally in any creation myth is a fool; anyone who believes in fake compromises like "Intelligent Design" is an empty-headed sophist. Their beliefs are no more worthy of respect than those of flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers, and alleged alien abductees.
I was with you right up until the last paragraph. "Eggheads"? It's because of "eggheads" that you have cars, computers, and airplanes (and, incidentally, because of "pork-barrel projects" costing considerably more than $1 million, that these things are useful tools instead of interesting toys). Until you learn not to slur people based on their intelligence, don't expect intelligent people to take seriously anything you have to say.
Oh, most -- actually, make that all -- news outlets subtly distort their reporting to meet someone's propaganda agenda. Fox is just the one out of the big ones (Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Reuters, AP, Time, Newsweek, etc.) that seems to be consistently the farthest from reality.
And if you think liberals have no idea of what evil is, or hesitate to call it when they see it, then you know very little about liberalism. Liberals have done more to stand up against evil both at home and abroad than most conservatives ever have or will.
Um... believe it or not, when a certain group of people does something evil, saying "that group of people is doing something evil" does not constitute "bias" against that group of people. It constitutes telling the truth.
Ahhh, fuck it, why am I even bothering? Just go and watch Fox News and be happy.
The US military wants to make sure that all the GI's who have been sent into a pointless overseas quagmire can still be shown to "vote" for the Chickenhawk-in-Chief, who is even now conspiring to cut their benefits. A truly secure online voting system would defeat this purpose.
Yes, I'm a vet. Yes, I'm cynical as hell about this.
I used to think that breaking MS up would have been a bad idea... now I'm wondering if it was the only feasible situation.
Resisting... must... resist...
Oh, hell with it.
I told you so.;)
Seriously, it was blindingly obvious to me that a breakup was the only way to change Microsoft's behavior, and I had to assume that anyone who felt otherwise was either technologically illiterate or a M$ shill. Apparently I was wrong. Could you explain to me why you thought a breakup was a bad idea then, and why you think it would be a good idea now? I'd really like to understand.
"Decimation of the european continent" would imply that 10% of Europeans died. And actually, it was more like 30%. But the confusion here is between the mortality rate and the infection rate -- with the black plague, IIRC, slightly less than half the population was infected, and somewhat more than half of those infected died, leading to the 30% figure. If the plague had killed off 90% of Europeans alive at the time, we'd all be speaking Arabic now, a la The Years of Rice and Salt.
There's a good argument that Europe was terribly overpopulated, and the plague killed just the right number to reduce the strain on available resources and spark the Renaissance. Of course, that's easy for us to say, blithely, looking back across the centuries. Sucked at the time. <1/2 g>
... unless you have enough lawyers, in which case you can patent anything. Any SF author who tried to patent the idea of pressing a single button to buy a bunch of stuff would have been laughed out of the patent office. A big corporation gets, "Oh yes sir, right away."
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You're misusing the phrase "natural monopoly." Normally, it's used to refer to something exactly like the phone company -- a company that is granted exclusive use of a (theoretically) limited resource, in this case the space for phone lines. The idea is that we can't have everyone stringing their own lines all over the place, so the government has to pick one company, or a small number of companies, to use the available space. Other examples include railroads and TV and radio broadcasters.
I think the key lies in your second-to-last paragraph: "There is no perfect programming language." Yes, exactly -- and moreover, some languages are more nearly perfect (not that I think any existing language is anywhere near perfect) than others, and how close a given language comes to perfection very often depends on the task you're trying to accomplish.
I used to write image-processing software. I wrote it in C, because writing it in a higher-level language would have been absurd. These days, I write database and Web interfaces, and I use the "P" languages (PHP, Perl, and Python) because writing it in C, while certainly possible, would be a huge pain in the ass. I like all of these languages, but it's indisputable that each of them is the right tool for some tasks but not for others.
The same is true of computers in general -- processors, architectures, OS's, etc. It would be great if you could set up one system that was clearly better than all others, or even equally good, for all tasks you might want to use it for. But you can't. The difference might not be quite as dramatic as that between pliers and an axe, but it's real.
I'm very happy with my iBook. It does many things I want to do very very well, and everything else I want to do at least passably. But I'm well aware of its limitations, and chafe at them fairly often. And this would be true of any system -- laptop, desktop, handheld, whatever -- I could possibly buy. I chose it because overall it offered the best fit for what I want to do. If my requirements change, well, then, so will my computer.
There's a pretty deep irony here. As you note, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet -- but the hysterical right-wing press claimed he did, and repeated the lie so often that people believed it. Similarly, I suspect that Apple's claims are in fact much more honest than the author of the article claims -- but he's clearly hoping that if he's loud and shrill enough, people will believe him.
I think you misunderstood what I meant with my "scaaary command line" crack. My point isn't that I think CLI's are bad -- I think they're just fine for a lot of things, and in fact are clearly the best choice for a lot of applications. (Not that I'm a CLI bigot; the same is also true of GUI's, for different applications. I don't want to run a database server with my mouse, and I don't want to do image processing with my keyboard.) My point is that a lot of PHB types think a GUI is always the way to go, even when it clearly isn't, because they themselves are scared of the command line, and assume everyone who works for them is too.
Yep. Companies rush buggy bloatware out the door because, within certain limits, that's what sells. Granted, there is a limit; apparently Oracle exceeded it with 11i, and even fairly small bugs can be big problems if they get publicized and the company responsible handles PR poorly. (It's hardware, not software, but the floating-point bug in the original Pentium comes to mind here.) But those limits are, all in all, extraordinarily loose.
PHB's love to buy "all-in-one" and "easy-to-use" solutions that can be used by morons, instead of hiring people who know what they're doing to assemble a solution out of reliable, well-tested components (which often are used from that scaaary command line.) Often they're seduced by the idea that such products will keep them from having to hire those weird, long-haired, jeans-and-t-shirts people to administer everything, because companies make absurd promises about how easy the products are to use. In the end, of course, these products end up costing more, because things fall apart at the worst possible time and someone (or a bunch of someones) has to be brought in now to fix things. But the PHB's never learn.
I opened the gallery in a tab, and it decided to resize my whole browser window... I *really* hate that...
And of course, I read your post about half a second after I clicked to open the gallery link in a tab instead of a new window. Aaaaagh! Too late! Too late!;)
... "sling" != "slingshot". They're two completely different things. Conflating the two is kind of like calling a canvas-sided trailer with some rusty tanks and piping a "weapon of mass destruction."
Heh. Given the Feds' aggressive approach to high-profile insider trading (granted, none of these people are famous in their own right, as Martha Stewart is, but they've made themselves famous, or at least infamous, by going after IBM) that seems like a pretty clear-cut method of counterattack for Big Blue. "Your honor, we move for dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiffs are currently under FTC investigation..."
Yep. And for that reason, I predict, free market fundamentalists (Randoids et al.) are going to reject this research out of hand. "The market will take care of it" makes sense if and only if people act rationally. But because they do make decisions based on their guts instead of their heads, giant companies with shitty products and great P.R. end up ruling the day -- which the FMF's take as proof that the market is working! (Yes, kids, that's right. Britney Spears is the greatest singer ever. You need $300.00 shoes or you won't be able to walk. And you can't use a computer without Windows. Trust us.) In the current political climate, this research will be buried.
Yep. My father, who also worked on Apollo (yes, Daddy really did send men to the Moon -- decades later, I still get a little-kid jolt out of that idea), Skylab, and Viking, left the aerospace industry in disgust during the early stages of the Shuttle program. He said it was heartbreaking how things kept getting scaled down; the engineers knew the administration was being penny-wise and pound-foolish, but they couldn't do anything about it.
It's a false dichotomy; money not spent on program X does not necessarily get spent on program Y. Instead, it goes back into the general fund, where it tends to get parceled out into bunches of little special-interest projects that usually have little if anything to do with what you personally might want.
In any case, space is one of the very few areas of spending which has consistently returned more money to the government than is spent, because of its overall economic effects. I'll skip the usual arguments about spinoff technology -- as important, and valid, as those arguments are -- and focus on the environmental angle. Look closely, and you'll see that most of what we know about planet-wide environmental conditions comes from space imaging. If we want to have any hope of dealing with humanity's effects on the planet down here on the ground, we have to get high enough up to get the big picture.
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Saddam was indeed a tin-pot (not "tin-pan") dictator, and presented no credible threat to the US. Liberals tend to pay more attention to real threats like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao -- or did you just happen to miss the fact that it was under Democratic Presidents that the US held the line against the three most murderous regimes in history?
"Conservatives fight for their country, liberals just bitch about it." Oh, really? I did fight for my country (I was a medic in Desert Storm.) When have you, or that pathetic chickenhawk deserter George W. Bush, done the same?
... and most bikers aren't abusive jerks.
Being a member of several different groups that get stereotyped a lot, I always find it sad when I hear members of one group repeating vicious stereotypes about another. The various types of "outcasts" all have a lot more in common with each other than most of them realize.
A big part of the answer to this is "maintainability." I'm currently the project lead on a massive revision of a project I first did solo a couple of years ago. At the time, the attitude was, "Don't worry about the quality of the code, just get it working and out the door." Now, we're essentially rewriting from scratch a lot of code which could probably have been reused with minor tweaks if I'd taken the time to do everything right, one step at a time. And in fact, a lot of that "theory and all that jazz" I learned in school is turning out to be vital to making things work right.
It also has to do with the size of the project. When I was doing it alone, it was okay to use obscure hacks, because I knew how everything worked. But when other people are building modules that depend on my code, things have to be structured in a way that's consistent and understandable.
I used to believe that the best way to deal with creationists was to try to understand their point of view, to make compromises, to explain things in a way that wouldn't cause controversy. Now I've come to realize that it's not worth it. Creationists should be mocked at every opportunity. Anyone who believes literally in any creation myth is a fool; anyone who believes in fake compromises like "Intelligent Design" is an empty-headed sophist. Their beliefs are no more worthy of respect than those of flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers, and alleged alien abductees.
I was with you right up until the last paragraph. "Eggheads"? It's because of "eggheads" that you have cars, computers, and airplanes (and, incidentally, because of "pork-barrel projects" costing considerably more than $1 million, that these things are useful tools instead of interesting toys). Until you learn not to slur people based on their intelligence, don't expect intelligent people to take seriously anything you have to say.
Oh, most -- actually, make that all -- news outlets subtly distort their reporting to meet someone's propaganda agenda. Fox is just the one out of the big ones (Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Reuters, AP, Time, Newsweek, etc.) that seems to be consistently the farthest from reality.
And if you think liberals have no idea of what evil is, or hesitate to call it when they see it, then you know very little about liberalism. Liberals have done more to stand up against evil both at home and abroad than most conservatives ever have or will.
Um ... believe it or not, when a certain group of people does something evil, saying "that group of people is doing something evil" does not constitute "bias" against that group of people. It constitutes telling the truth.
Ahhh, fuck it, why am I even bothering? Just go and watch Fox News and be happy.
The US military wants to make sure that all the GI's who have been sent into a pointless overseas quagmire can still be shown to "vote" for the Chickenhawk-in-Chief, who is even now conspiring to cut their benefits. A truly secure online voting system would defeat this purpose.
Yes, I'm a vet. Yes, I'm cynical as hell about this.
Oh, hell with it.
I told you so.
Seriously, it was blindingly obvious to me that a breakup was the only way to change Microsoft's behavior, and I had to assume that anyone who felt otherwise was either technologically illiterate or a M$ shill. Apparently I was wrong. Could you explain to me why you thought a breakup was a bad idea then, and why you think it would be a good idea now? I'd really like to understand.
"Decimation of the european continent" would imply that 10% of Europeans died. And actually, it was more like 30%. But the confusion here is between the mortality rate and the infection rate -- with the black plague, IIRC, slightly less than half the population was infected, and somewhat more than half of those infected died, leading to the 30% figure. If the plague had killed off 90% of Europeans alive at the time, we'd all be speaking Arabic now, a la The Years of Rice and Salt.
There's a good argument that Europe was terribly overpopulated, and the plague killed just the right number to reduce the strain on available resources and spark the Renaissance. Of course, that's easy for us to say, blithely, looking back across the centuries. Sucked at the time. <1/2 g>
You're misusing the phrase "natural monopoly." Normally, it's used to refer to something exactly like the phone company -- a company that is granted exclusive use of a (theoretically) limited resource, in this case the space for phone lines. The idea is that we can't have everyone stringing their own lines all over the place, so the government has to pick one company, or a small number of companies, to use the available space. Other examples include railroads and TV and radio broadcasters.
I think the key lies in your second-to-last paragraph: "There is no perfect programming language." Yes, exactly -- and moreover, some languages are more nearly perfect (not that I think any existing language is anywhere near perfect) than others, and how close a given language comes to perfection very often depends on the task you're trying to accomplish.
I used to write image-processing software. I wrote it in C, because writing it in a higher-level language would have been absurd. These days, I write database and Web interfaces, and I use the "P" languages (PHP, Perl, and Python) because writing it in C, while certainly possible, would be a huge pain in the ass. I like all of these languages, but it's indisputable that each of them is the right tool for some tasks but not for others.
The same is true of computers in general -- processors, architectures, OS's, etc. It would be great if you could set up one system that was clearly better than all others, or even equally good, for all tasks you might want to use it for. But you can't. The difference might not be quite as dramatic as that between pliers and an axe, but it's real.
I'm very happy with my iBook. It does many things I want to do very very well, and everything else I want to do at least passably. But I'm well aware of its limitations, and chafe at them fairly often. And this would be true of any system -- laptop, desktop, handheld, whatever -- I could possibly buy. I chose it because overall it offered the best fit for what I want to do. If my requirements change, well, then, so will my computer.
There's a pretty deep irony here. As you note, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet -- but the hysterical right-wing press claimed he did, and repeated the lie so often that people believed it. Similarly, I suspect that Apple's claims are in fact much more honest than the author of the article claims -- but he's clearly hoping that if he's loud and shrill enough, people will believe him.
I think you misunderstood what I meant with my "scaaary command line" crack. My point isn't that I think CLI's are bad -- I think they're just fine for a lot of things, and in fact are clearly the best choice for a lot of applications. (Not that I'm a CLI bigot; the same is also true of GUI's, for different applications. I don't want to run a database server with my mouse, and I don't want to do image processing with my keyboard.) My point is that a lot of PHB types think a GUI is always the way to go, even when it clearly isn't, because they themselves are scared of the command line, and assume everyone who works for them is too.
Yep. Companies rush buggy bloatware out the door because, within certain limits, that's what sells. Granted, there is a limit; apparently Oracle exceeded it with 11i, and even fairly small bugs can be big problems if they get publicized and the company responsible handles PR poorly. (It's hardware, not software, but the floating-point bug in the original Pentium comes to mind here.) But those limits are, all in all, extraordinarily loose.
PHB's love to buy "all-in-one" and "easy-to-use" solutions that can be used by morons, instead of hiring people who know what they're doing to assemble a solution out of reliable, well-tested components (which often are used from that scaaary command line.) Often they're seduced by the idea that such products will keep them from having to hire those weird, long-haired, jeans-and-t-shirts people to administer everything, because companies make absurd promises about how easy the products are to use. In the end, of course, these products end up costing more, because things fall apart at the worst possible time and someone (or a bunch of someones) has to be brought in now to fix things. But the PHB's never learn.
... "sling" != "slingshot". They're two completely different things. Conflating the two is kind of like calling a canvas-sided trailer with some rusty tanks and piping a "weapon of mass destruction."
Heh. Given the Feds' aggressive approach to high-profile insider trading (granted, none of these people are famous in their own right, as Martha Stewart is, but they've made themselves famous, or at least infamous, by going after IBM) that seems like a pretty clear-cut method of counterattack for Big Blue. "Your honor, we move for dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiffs are currently under FTC investigation ..."
Yep. And for that reason, I predict, free market fundamentalists (Randoids et al.) are going to reject this research out of hand. "The market will take care of it" makes sense if and only if people act rationally. But because they do make decisions based on their guts instead of their heads, giant companies with shitty products and great P.R. end up ruling the day -- which the FMF's take as proof that the market is working! (Yes, kids, that's right. Britney Spears is the greatest singer ever. You need $300.00 shoes or you won't be able to walk. And you can't use a computer without Windows. Trust us.) In the current political climate, this research will be buried.
I think Entomology, I think "the study of big talking trees." But maybe that's just me.
Yep. My father, who also worked on Apollo (yes, Daddy really did send men to the Moon -- decades later, I still get a little-kid jolt out of that idea), Skylab, and Viking, left the aerospace industry in disgust during the early stages of the Shuttle program. He said it was heartbreaking how things kept getting scaled down; the engineers knew the administration was being penny-wise and pound-foolish, but they couldn't do anything about it.
It's a false dichotomy; money not spent on program X does not necessarily get spent on program Y. Instead, it goes back into the general fund, where it tends to get parceled out into bunches of little special-interest projects that usually have little if anything to do with what you personally might want.
In any case, space is one of the very few areas of spending which has consistently returned more money to the government than is spent, because of its overall economic effects. I'll skip the usual arguments about spinoff technology -- as important, and valid, as those arguments are -- and focus on the environmental angle. Look closely, and you'll see that most of what we know about planet-wide environmental conditions comes from space imaging. If we want to have any hope of dealing with humanity's effects on the planet down here on the ground, we have to get high enough up to get the big picture.