An interesting read, but this telling comment was on the last page:
Yes, the June conversation was dazzlingly candid, and we were looking forward to an equally blunt follow-up meeting--a scheduled late-July on-the-record interview with Erik Lustig, a senior product manager responsible for Windows Fundamentals. But then the universe as we know it returned to normal, and Microsoft became Microsoft again. Our interview with Lustig was overseen by a PR representative and was filled with the type of carefully measured language that we've come to expect from Microsoft when discussing "challenges." A "challenge" is Microsoftese for anything that isn't going according to the company's carefully choreographed plans. In the text that follows, we've combined the information conveyed during the mid-June background conversation with decoded translations of the "on the record" conversation we had in July. The contrast between the two interviews is stunning.
The part where Microsoft was open to admit mistakes - even if done with back-handed compliments to Apple and slaps to other developers - began to sound like a breath of fresh air.
But the article itself is highly qualitative and lacks coherence, as if we're missing the director's cut. (Yes, I am comparing a bad movie as superior to this written word - knowingly.)
We paid under US$10 for ours, can't recall exact figure. Surprised to see them at US$30 on amazon.com, but it's whatever a market bears. I was basing the stun guns on that price - and also, basing the stun guns as silly, something a tennis-racquet-fly-zapper is decidedly not.
Going out on a limb here - I think pohl's and my comments stand from general experience and aren't intended as personal attacks.
In my non-slashdot, non-work time, I live a lot of hours on YouTube. My mileage varies, as I avoid using Windows for any web-surfing unless a site absolutely requires me to, and I absolutely need to go to that site. Safari/Tiger/YouTube is just not a problem for me. Our difference in mileage underscores Pohl's point.
You raise an interesting question about crash reports sent to Microsoft - perhaps several. I stopped doing that some years ago when I couldn't find any documentation on what the process is for Microsoft's use of that info - unless it was a Word or Powerpoint or Excel crash; then I could see Microsoft having some use of the info.
However, while I cringe at sounding like a whack-job conspiracy theorist, given that Microsoft and Apple are erstwhile competitors, I wonder if Apple is picking those reports up, or if they're just becoming grist for the MS mill.
Obviously there are a lot of factors in fixing bugs, and the obvious factors may be corporate will or easily-blamed programmer quality. But believe it or not, nothing frustrates software engineers trying to fix bugs as much as an inability to reproduce widely known bugs or an inability to find cause once the bugs are reproduced - or to find cause once a bug is reproduced, but discovering that it is a design flaw and not an implementation flaw. Implementation fixes tend to have positive side-effects. Design fixes are almost guaranteed to have negative side-effects unless very carefully - read: usually very expensively - tackled.
Corporations are all about butt-covering, so Joe Consumer is basically screwed trying to report, track or understand the fix cycle of any bug.
But I won't say open source is one iota better, due to all sorts of egos. Here's an anecdote for you. Years ago, a new Mozilla release came out and for me it was an incredible step backwards from all previous releases. Things were actually disappearing from the UI. Thinking it was high time that I contributed back, I lurked around Mozilla devel area, then wrote in that I was interesting in helping, noticed this bad behavior, commented that I knew that this must be a known problem due to its obviousness and asked where to start.
The reply that I received - in multiple copies - was that I was a fucking moron, that I wasn't starting at the right place, and that I had to prove that I could follow procedure (exactly part of what I was asking about) for "quite some time" to become vetted to the point of having my bug reports believed. I didn't respond further, as they probably didn't want to know that I was at the time the system test manager for the largest software project in the US Department of Energy, had launched the first web server ever at one of the National Labs, and had been distributing Mozilla ever since receiving its original source and modding it as needed to run on our DEC Ultrix systems. (Hell, for all I can remember, I might have gotten it by gopher. (OK, prolly not, but I hope I make the point.))
My friend, I don't know about you, but after trying in vain to communicate defects to Apple, Microsoft and the Mozilla gang, I will never again go out of my way to try to invite corporate condescension or juvenile flaming. My only solution to browser defects (or any open source defects) is study the source code where available, try to ascertain a fix, and privately email it to whatever author is presented in the source, with a friendly note like, "Sorry if I'm off base, but I've noticed... and I was just wondering if this might...."
I've since worked in the private sector for over a decade - maybe a dozen years. And if I've heard this once from customers, I've heard it a dozen times - "Tell me why it's my job to tell you that your software has a bug."
That you've sent any crash reports to anyone puts you in the minority. That you've done it about 25 times makes you a 3 sigma case.
But your Safari crashing and mine not - which is the norm, which is the outlyer? How would we know? How can the programmers? As Dr. Demming was fond of saying, "How could they know?"
Boookay, many thanks. I've 5 Macs in the house, ranging from a G3 through a Core 2 Duo, all running Tiger or Leopard. For me, the errant crash problem disappeared with Tiger, and I'm evidently distributing bad advice. I'll check around further - thanks again.
Pray tell, exactly what Taiwanese crap are you referring to? The system on chip stuff from UMC? The award-winning diagonal street technologies of TSMC? Do you even know who those companies are, what they produce, or how they've made your cell phone, computing and online life *better* and *cheaper*?
Some of things I picked up on my last visit to Taiwan: a lion-dragon marionette, definitely not crap. Two thyristor-based fly swatters. That's right, electronic fly swatters. They look like little tennis rackets. Have a little push to zap button on the handle. The racket part is a matrix of wiring. Push the button, move the dingus casually through the air, and the little beasties are zapped. It's labeled the Superhigh Voltage Bug Zapper.
Which is a lot more than I can say for your racist remark and the jackasses that modded you as interesting.
In other words, I'm using my Superhigh Voltage Bug Zapper right now - to kill the flies your post has drawn.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
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Chrome Vs. IE 8
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Does there really have to be one browser to rule them all?
You bet. And for me, it has to be the one that page loads slashdot (especially when I'm burrowing down into lower rated comments) much, much, much more rapidly.
As Patsy would say, "Cheers. Thanks a lot."
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
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Chrome Vs. IE 8
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I am at a complete fucking loss for words to describe the irony - and coming from a pre-www graybeard, I think that that's really something.
I'd seen a lot in alt.flame and alt.alien.visitors (back in the days) - but - I am not making this up - the post I'm replying to has the following key point:
A word to the wise : ignore trolls . They are not a correct representation of a user group.
And for this *highly inflamatory* remark, the poster was modded 1, Troll.
Unbemotherfuckinglybelievable.
Hey kdemetter - don't take the abuse too hard - remember, a troll is a small creature that lives under TCP/IP bridges.
Whenever I see "survey" in a summary, I RTFA. Here's the relevant quote:
The Speak Up data is collected through online surveys and verified through a series of focus groups and interviews with representative groups of students, educators and parents. To participate, districts register their schools and schedule time for their students and staff to take the 15 minute online surveys, and promote the survey to parents in their community. The survey is a convenience sampling with schools and districts (not generally individuals) self-selecting for participation. To minimize bias in the survey data, significant outreach is done to ensure adequate regional, socio-economic and racial/ethnic/cultural distribution. (emphasis mine) from: http://www.tomorrow.org/docs/National%20Findings%20Speak%20Up%202007.pdf
And when I see what the basis of the conclusions are, topped off by the title of this submission, I want to reach for my revolver.
I, for one, am moving neither too quick nor too slow to dismiss this survey as essentially meaningless. In addition, it was conducted online so I haven't found the actual survey questions yet, but the naysayers here - count me in - are right in this sense: if the claims in the pdf are an indication of actual questions, then non-biased this survey was not.
I'm all for the debate of whether this is a good idea or not - I only ask that we remember that we're debating whole-cloth.
Here's where I come down on this idea, as a parent who has had to deal with a stream of bad teachers (for my kids) and as a former child with a stream of bad teachers: While the idea is great in principle, it has the following drawbacks:
1. What positive outcomes do you expect for that subset of lazy teachers? My experience is that the computer becomes a classroom babysitter - and educational software won't help without the education part.
2. Has no one been saddled with a teacher that disliked computers or was intimidated by them - in a classroom full of computers?
3. Must everything be crammed into the schools? How many here learned beginning strategy and seat-of-the-pants probability playing kiddie poker and kiddie blackjack? Quite a few, I'd wager. I had a high school math teacher that had the entire class playing pinocle on a regular - and scheduled - basis. School is intended to be the primary structured source for learning - but not the only one. Games are great for learning - but how about the idea that maybe they're more effective OUTSIDE the classroom - because they stay games, not assignments.
For the record - I've had a stream of great teachers, too. I'm not a teacher hater - my first degree was in post-secondary education and I have a lot of teaching hours under my belt - and family full of teachers. Teaching is a most noble profession - but I don't have my head in the sand about the nobility of many teachers - that's all.
Anything that engages and teaches is a good thing.
Read any K-12 textbooks lately? Lame and weak are understatements. Now, as to those games - add the steering committee to appoint the focus group to make recommendations to the state and local boards, toss in a few lobbyists, then go to the public hearings on this topic at the school board meetings, add in the feedback from the Learn-First-Play-Later PTA committee - and tell me exactly how this is going to work out to be good for the kids.
BTW - I think you're flirting with me. Or - I was being light-hearted so you could see how I mean neither to offend nor to be Mr. Know-It-All.
If you simply accept me to believe it, then I'll say what I always say - of course I believe it. Language is textured. I can make the above claim without sarcasm, cynicism or lying - because sometimes what's being asked to be believed is in the meta-information as well as the information.
I didn't really mean to call you a liar, but you did make quite a strong statement. I didn't take it as being called a liar - and yepper, it was a strong statement.
Actually, interestingly, I have noticed a class of behaviour in myself which is very akin to flirting, but with men, in whom I have no sexual interest. I googled this and discovered that the technical term for it is Pal-ing Around.
Rather important PS -
Do you think I have some reason to be lying to you? Or do you think I am mistaken? Either way, why? I have no reason to think of you as lying, didn't think it, don't think it.
Mistaken? Never gave it a thought. I think we sheared on the subject - hope the previous response clarifies.
Mistaken? We all mistake ourselves, sometimes. Psychologists find the JoHari Window quite trite, but I find it quite illuminating.
Make a four-square window as view into yourself. The panes are 1) what you and others see; 2) what you see but others do not; 3) what others see but you do not; 4) what neither you nor others see - your Mystery.
I wasn't saying I was looking through the third pane - I hardly know you well enough for that, no? I thought we were discussing what's to be seen through the first pane - but if your third pane is large, it just gives you something to do.
I don't understand why you have arrived at the position you occupy: that you think you know better than me about my own mind. I don't understand it either. I really wasn't trying to say or imply that in the least.
I know that I have exhibited behaviour that I would later categorize as flirtatious without being conscious of it at the time. This is not behavior to which I referred. I thought - and still do - that the discussion was about the class of behavior, and class of response. Nonetheless, your stated example illustrates my point - later, for whatever reason, you could see and admit that the behavior would fit the flirt category. You do understand that there are people who claim this later never happens, yes? That they never flirt, or never flirt with so and so, or never flirt because x-y-z?
We're not robots. Consciousness aside, let's make allowances for a) busy mind, b) outlyer behavioral responses, and c) stuff happens.
Given that, are you saying that your not-conscious flirting comprises more than a miniscule percentage of flirtatious behavior, or it just a once-in-a-while thing - or is a high percentage?
If you say it's a high percentage - and actually believe that - then I do know your mind very well. If you simply accept me to believe it, then I'll say what I always say - of course I believe it.
As for knowing the mind of another - there's knowing and then there's knowing. Without knowing a lot of our own minds and minds of others, we'd be unable to function as a society. So the puzzle isn't as difficult as it would be if focused knowing to the root-only case. You spend a lifetime getting to know just your own mind and self. You spend very little time to know the thieves or the compassionate because the class models are quite clear - and valid.
Flirt. Do it often, do it always. Do it with the intention of making friends of girls. Ask them to set you up. Friends like this are priceless. Plus, you become a nicer guy.
BTW - if they don't want to set you up, then you made one of three probable mistakes: 1. Lesbians will help you, but not the hard core ones. The hard core ones' girlfriends will most probably help you, for a lot of reasons. 2. She was interested in you and you blew it. Take it as the opportunity to learn recovery techniques. 3. You're still a dweeb. Keep fishing - it's a BIG ocean and practice does make perfect so long as you're not bent on always practicing the same thing. There's nothing wrong with being a dweeb if you like yourself and you're a decent person. (But try harder anyway, boookay?)
A lot of people think baseball is boring - today it is, but take it from a geezer, not always so.
I blame television. I can no longer watch a ball game on TV. Might as well be Entertainment tonight. They used to have a camera behind the backstop so you could see the pitch, the swing (from behind) and the infield. Another camera to go to the outfield, and maybe one for the infield. They game has strategy. It has finesse. It even has - to use a term no longer apparently known in the software world - elegance.
Now, it's unshaven bums (I'm an unshaven bum today, so OK) close-up, on the mound, with bad hair cuts curling from under the caps, with their follicles in high def while they spit and scratch. High res, high def and no sense of a team at work - if there still are any!
Baseball is a noble game of strategy, ruined by Madison Avenue's need to sell multi-hundred dollar sneakers to our kids.
Compadre - we're the exact same age. I'm a four times grandfather. I'm just having a good day, and enjoying the theory, as I often wonder - on so many subjects - what life would have been like if I knew then what I know now. Better for the easier triumphs, or worse for easier triumphs. I suspect you understand completely.
FWIW - I thought you were the young one with too much anthropomorphizing.:)
The commonality is prolly why we've been able to talk. If they could mod down pontificating geezers, we'd be looking at minus fives bout now.
BTW - don't ever stop playing the game unless it's boring or you've bought that 6 foot real estate.
Replied to part of your other one somewhere else in the thread, cuz that's where I got inspired. But anyway... Yeah, I jumped back here because someone took exception misunderstanding the spirit of my criticism for some of the examples you used to make your point.
See, I don't think that flirting works the same in humans as dogs. Dogs don't get boobjobs or pull down paychecks. Course, that depends on how you're meaning the word "works" to operate in this context. You're right, it's the same in that the goal is to get laid, and flirting is all part of the chicken dance to do it.
But to ascribe to instinct to women not knowing they're flirting - I just don't buy it. I drive my car without thinking - in my mind, that's how I'd describe it. But I'm thinking all the way. It's not instinct, it's learned, and learned so well that I might claim I didn't know this or that about the last drive I took - but at the time I swerved, I certainly did know what I did in response to the road.
That's the difference I'm arguing. I'm not saying that flirting is bad, I'm not saying girls denying it is bad, I'm not saying they're liars for saying they don't know when they do know. I'm saying they're very nuanced creatures, they do know. They may have moments of tactical confusion during the flirting itself (as do we all), they may be driven by uncontrollable desire to flirt and find themselves doing it without planning (knowing) (as do we all), but that's no different than swerving to miss an obstacale "without knowing" - we're human, we know.
Dog breeder. I like you more and more - and I liked your web site. Best hunting pal I ever had was a yellow dog.
Back to topic. Here's a quip from a personal acquaintance:
I am a biologist and I would never ascribe human emotions or thinking to non-human critters. I do not think dogs are neurotic (although their humans can be). And, unlike a lot of dog owners, I never thought my dog was "happy" to see me, because I knew that the wagging tail was simply a canine system to spread the scent from the gland at the base of the anus, to bring attention to the dog for the purpose of eating. You see my quandary. No way you wouldn't convince me that my dog wasn't happy to see me. No way I'd argue biology with a biologist, especially one that's a pal and smarter than me. I won't argue if you've seen dog flirting - my friend would - just as I can't deny my dog's happiness. Tough call for some of us.
But you do make my point very precisely:
Barely-pubescent girls in Belize flirt with grown men, because it's socially acceptable there, and a good way to catch a sugar-daddy. The same behaviour in the U.S. would get the girl's ass tanned by both her parents. I think your (or my) dogs would behave the same with respect to that which you describe as flirting if they were raised by you, me, or a South American.
But people do not flirt the same, species wide, world wide. It was your idea that women (in our culture) can do so without knowing it that I disagree with you on.
Let's try it with what I know. That yellow dog would wait until we were all in bed (he thought), then he'd climb up on the comfy couch. I surprise him with the lights on - he's chagrinned, he knows what he's done, and gets down - often with a friendly paw or lick first. (The comfy couch was a problem for the ex-wife, not me.)
So - and I certainly am not intending to put words into your mouth - if dogs know about the comfy couch (and they do) are you saying that dogs don't realize they're doing what you call flirting? I'd be surprised if you answered in the affirmative - I think dogs do know their so-called flirting.
And I therefore submit that women are at least as smart as dogs. QED
(BTW - don't be offended by the "so-called" part of dog flirting. I'm not a dog expert, I'm not a biologist and I have enough quandaries for one day, bookay?)
Corner case anecdotes are just fine when you're arguing against someone that says "here is a rule without a single exception". Excellent point, perhaps I'm guilty as charged.
However, I cannot find the corner case anecdote to my life experience of hitting pavement due to gravity when I fall, any more than I could for the cases I mentioned in flirting.
I did correct that in another post to Ser Reziac, but based on my personal mileage, I had to attribute it to something akin to brane damage. Probably not sufficient to your charge, but there it is.
There are plenty of rules without single exceptions - in our own experiences.
What we've learned is that -- sit down, this may come as a shock -- we're animals, and that a large part of our sexual & relationship mechanism was in place prior to the birth of culture. A bit of my differentiation on the subject is in this comment, please see the phrase "BPB" as operative - http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=504424&cid=22914564
No disrespect perceived or given, hence the alphabet-licking modifier, BTW.
I do think that the bird's mating dance is a biologically primitive behavior. Had you compared the bird to us, you'd be anthropomorphizing. Comparing us to the bird does the opposite, although I don't know the name.
Don't get me wrong - and thank god I'm sitting down or I'd mistype this and you would - but I have no trouble with us being animals. To self-creditialize, I fully subscribe to the ideas in Sagan's Dragons of Eden - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragons_of_Eden - and I'm a big fan of the neocortex - so much so that I use mine all of the time!
But I think it's easy to oversimplify and overextend examples of animal behaviors and end up attributing to biology that which should be correctly attributed to societal norms. I want to work in a comment about cosmetic treatment - in ancient Greece, men shaved their legs, women did not - but that doesn't fit here, so I won't mention it. But much of modern flirting, with the behaviors of note discussed here, are cosmetic, in deed and in language, not biological. That was sort of my point.
Male animals puff out their chest to deal with predators and competitors. Human males, no exception. Female animals respond to the strong provider and protector. Human females, no exception. Your YouTube analogy applies to that.
But to add subtlety of not conscious of the chest puffing, or not conscious of the reciprocal response, or conscious (on either or both sides) but adding layers of language (either within the brain to assuage the subconscious or externally spoken to assuage societal norms) - strictly cosmetic, strictly human, strictly not animalistic.
Amazingly, scientists can do this without using time machines to go back and lick the alphabet on some prehistoric vulva -- don't ask me how. I think they do use time machines. I can't find patents for them, so I can't figure out how they work, but I've heard through the jungle drums that they power them with something called car bone fourteen.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting read, but this telling comment was on the last page:
Yes, the June conversation was dazzlingly candid, and we were looking forward to an equally blunt follow-up meeting--a scheduled late-July on-the-record interview with Erik Lustig, a senior product manager responsible for Windows Fundamentals. But then the universe as we know it returned to normal, and Microsoft became Microsoft again. Our interview with Lustig was overseen by a PR representative and was filled with the type of carefully measured language that we've come to expect from Microsoft when discussing "challenges." A "challenge" is Microsoftese for anything that isn't going according to the company's carefully choreographed plans. In the text that follows, we've combined the information conveyed during the mid-June background conversation with decoded translations of the "on the record" conversation we had in July. The contrast between the two interviews is stunning.
The part where Microsoft was open to admit mistakes - even if done with back-handed compliments to Apple and slaps to other developers - began to sound like a breath of fresh air.
But the article itself is highly qualitative and lacks coherence, as if we're missing the director's cut. (Yes, I am comparing a bad movie as superior to this written word - knowingly.)
Nothing to see here, move along.
We paid under US$10 for ours, can't recall exact figure. Surprised to see them at US$30 on amazon.com, but it's whatever a market bears. I was basing the stun guns on that price - and also, basing the stun guns as silly, something a tennis-racquet-fly-zapper is decidedly not.
No, I paid money for TWO tennis-racquet-shaped electronic fly swatters!
Fly zapper too valuable to break - try some of these instead, and save money: http://www.stungunscheaper.com/~Stun_Guns.php?ref=che25
Having now read your journal entries, I see how everything you post makes perfect sense.
Weak.
Our top story tonight, Blu-Ray to be superseded in five years, and right after the break, stay tuned to learn how Samsung is backing OLED.
What do I win?
Going out on a limb here - I think pohl's and my comments stand from general experience and aren't intended as personal attacks.
In my non-slashdot, non-work time, I live a lot of hours on YouTube. My mileage varies, as I avoid using Windows for any web-surfing unless a site absolutely requires me to, and I absolutely need to go to that site. Safari/Tiger/YouTube is just not a problem for me. Our difference in mileage underscores Pohl's point.
You raise an interesting question about crash reports sent to Microsoft - perhaps several. I stopped doing that some years ago when I couldn't find any documentation on what the process is for Microsoft's use of that info - unless it was a Word or Powerpoint or Excel crash; then I could see Microsoft having some use of the info.
However, while I cringe at sounding like a whack-job conspiracy theorist, given that Microsoft and Apple are erstwhile competitors, I wonder if Apple is picking those reports up, or if they're just becoming grist for the MS mill.
Obviously there are a lot of factors in fixing bugs, and the obvious factors may be corporate will or easily-blamed programmer quality. But believe it or not, nothing frustrates software engineers trying to fix bugs as much as an inability to reproduce widely known bugs or an inability to find cause once the bugs are reproduced - or to find cause once a bug is reproduced, but discovering that it is a design flaw and not an implementation flaw. Implementation fixes tend to have positive side-effects. Design fixes are almost guaranteed to have negative side-effects unless very carefully - read: usually very expensively - tackled.
Corporations are all about butt-covering, so Joe Consumer is basically screwed trying to report, track or understand the fix cycle of any bug.
But I won't say open source is one iota better, due to all sorts of egos. Here's an anecdote for you. Years ago, a new Mozilla release came out and for me it was an incredible step backwards from all previous releases. Things were actually disappearing from the UI. Thinking it was high time that I contributed back, I lurked around Mozilla devel area, then wrote in that I was interesting in helping, noticed this bad behavior, commented that I knew that this must be a known problem due to its obviousness and asked where to start.
The reply that I received - in multiple copies - was that I was a fucking moron, that I wasn't starting at the right place, and that I had to prove that I could follow procedure (exactly part of what I was asking about) for "quite some time" to become vetted to the point of having my bug reports believed. I didn't respond further, as they probably didn't want to know that I was at the time the system test manager for the largest software project in the US Department of Energy, had launched the first web server ever at one of the National Labs, and had been distributing Mozilla ever since receiving its original source and modding it as needed to run on our DEC Ultrix systems. (Hell, for all I can remember, I might have gotten it by gopher. (OK, prolly not, but I hope I make the point.))
My friend, I don't know about you, but after trying in vain to communicate defects to Apple, Microsoft and the Mozilla gang, I will never again go out of my way to try to invite corporate condescension or juvenile flaming. My only solution to browser defects (or any open source defects) is study the source code where available, try to ascertain a fix, and privately email it to whatever author is presented in the source, with a friendly note like, "Sorry if I'm off base, but I've noticed... and I was just wondering if this might...."
I've since worked in the private sector for over a decade - maybe a dozen years. And if I've heard this once from customers, I've heard it a dozen times - "Tell me why it's my job to tell you that your software has a bug."
That you've sent any crash reports to anyone puts you in the minority. That you've done it about 25 times makes you a 3 sigma case.
But your Safari crashing and mine not - which is the norm, which is the outlyer? How would we know? How can the programmers? As Dr. Demming was fond of saying, "How could they know?"
Boookay, many thanks. I've 5 Macs in the house, ranging from a G3 through a Core 2 Duo, all running Tiger or Leopard. For me, the errant crash problem disappeared with Tiger, and I'm evidently distributing bad advice. I'll check around further - thanks again.
Pray tell, exactly what Taiwanese crap are you referring to? The system on chip stuff from UMC? The award-winning diagonal street technologies of TSMC? Do you even know who those companies are, what they produce, or how they've made your cell phone, computing and online life *better* and *cheaper*?
Some of things I picked up on my last visit to Taiwan: a lion-dragon marionette, definitely not crap. Two thyristor-based fly swatters. That's right, electronic fly swatters. They look like little tennis rackets. Have a little push to zap button on the handle. The racket part is a matrix of wiring. Push the button, move the dingus casually through the air, and the little beasties are zapped. It's labeled the Superhigh Voltage Bug Zapper.
I suggest that you buy one right here: http://www.amazon.com/Electric-Fly-Swatter-Bug-Zapper/dp/B000PKIW4G
It's definitely not crap.
Which is a lot more than I can say for your racist remark and the jackasses that modded you as interesting.
In other words, I'm using my Superhigh Voltage Bug Zapper right now - to kill the flies your post has drawn.
Does there really have to be one browser to rule them all?
You bet. And for me, it has to be the one that page loads slashdot (especially when I'm burrowing down into lower rated comments) much, much, much more rapidly.
As Patsy would say, "Cheers. Thanks a lot."
I am at a complete fucking loss for words to describe the irony - and coming from a pre-www graybeard, I think that that's really something.
I'd seen a lot in alt.flame and alt.alien.visitors (back in the days) - but - I am not making this up - the post I'm replying to has the following key point:
A word to the wise : ignore trolls . They are not a correct representation of a user group .
And for this *highly inflamatory* remark, the poster was modded 1, Troll.
Unbemotherfuckinglybelievable.
Hey kdemetter - don't take the abuse too hard - remember, a troll is a small creature that lives under TCP/IP bridges.
Right, because - as every software engineer knows - all people encounter all bugs equally, and all bugs are trivially reproducible.
And my favorite - all people report all bugs encountered, never once assuming that the errant behavior must be known a priori to the evil SE.
Not trolling and not curious for curiosity's sake.
I'm very interested in knowing what rev of OS X, what hardware, and what rev of Safari is giving you crash problems on a Mac.
Kindly elaborate as your time permits, TIA.
And when I see what the basis of the conclusions are, topped off by the title of this submission, I want to reach for my revolver.
I, for one, am moving neither too quick nor too slow to dismiss this survey as essentially meaningless. In addition, it was conducted online so I haven't found the actual survey questions yet, but the naysayers here - count me in - are right in this sense: if the claims in the pdf are an indication of actual questions, then non-biased this survey was not.
I'm all for the debate of whether this is a good idea or not - I only ask that we remember that we're debating whole-cloth.
Here's where I come down on this idea, as a parent who has had to deal with a stream of bad teachers (for my kids) and as a former child with a stream of bad teachers: While the idea is great in principle, it has the following drawbacks:
1. What positive outcomes do you expect for that subset of lazy teachers? My experience is that the computer becomes a classroom babysitter - and educational software won't help without the education part.
2. Has no one been saddled with a teacher that disliked computers or was intimidated by them - in a classroom full of computers?
3. Must everything be crammed into the schools? How many here learned beginning strategy and seat-of-the-pants probability playing kiddie poker and kiddie blackjack? Quite a few, I'd wager. I had a high school math teacher that had the entire class playing pinocle on a regular - and scheduled - basis. School is intended to be the primary structured source for learning - but not the only one. Games are great for learning - but how about the idea that maybe they're more effective OUTSIDE the classroom - because they stay games, not assignments.
For the record - I've had a stream of great teachers, too. I'm not a teacher hater - my first degree was in post-secondary education and I have a lot of teaching hours under my belt - and family full of teachers. Teaching is a most noble profession - but I don't have my head in the sand about the nobility of many teachers - that's all.
Anything that engages and teaches is a good thing.
Read any K-12 textbooks lately? Lame and weak are understatements. Now, as to those games - add the steering committee to appoint the focus group to make recommendations to the state and local boards, toss in a few lobbyists, then go to the public hearings on this topic at the school board meetings, add in the feedback from the Learn-First-Play-Later PTA committee - and tell me exactly how this is going to work out to be good for the kids.
Mistaken? Never gave it a thought. I think we sheared on the subject - hope the previous response clarifies.
Mistaken? We all mistake ourselves, sometimes. Psychologists find the JoHari Window quite trite, but I find it quite illuminating.
Make a four-square window as view into yourself. The panes are 1) what you and others see; 2) what you see but others do not; 3) what others see but you do not; 4) what neither you nor others see - your Mystery.
I wasn't saying I was looking through the third pane - I hardly know you well enough for that, no? I thought we were discussing what's to be seen through the first pane - but if your third pane is large, it just gives you something to do.
Hope this clarifies.
We're not robots. Consciousness aside, let's make allowances for a) busy mind, b) outlyer behavioral responses, and c) stuff happens.
Given that, are you saying that your not-conscious flirting comprises more than a miniscule percentage of flirtatious behavior, or it just a once-in-a-while thing - or is a high percentage?
If you say it's a high percentage - and actually believe that - then I do know your mind very well. If you simply accept me to believe it, then I'll say what I always say - of course I believe it.
As for knowing the mind of another - there's knowing and then there's knowing. Without knowing a lot of our own minds and minds of others, we'd be unable to function as a society. So the puzzle isn't as difficult as it would be if focused knowing to the root-only case. You spend a lifetime getting to know just your own mind and self. You spend very little time to know the thieves or the compassionate because the class models are quite clear - and valid.
BTW - I think you're flirting with me.
Flirt. Do it often, do it always. Do it with the intention of making friends of girls. Ask them to set you up. Friends like this are priceless. Plus, you become a nicer guy.
BTW - if they don't want to set you up, then you made one of three probable mistakes:
1. Lesbians will help you, but not the hard core ones. The hard core ones' girlfriends will most probably help you, for a lot of reasons.
2. She was interested in you and you blew it. Take it as the opportunity to learn recovery techniques.
3. You're still a dweeb. Keep fishing - it's a BIG ocean and practice does make perfect so long as you're not bent on always practicing the same thing. There's nothing wrong with being a dweeb if you like yourself and you're a decent person. (But try harder anyway, boookay?)
A lot of people think baseball is boring - today it is, but take it from a geezer, not always so.
/. - and this covers the alternate universe part as well.
I blame television. I can no longer watch a ball game on TV. Might as well be Entertainment tonight. They used to have a camera behind the backstop so you could see the pitch, the swing (from behind) and the infield. Another camera to go to the outfield, and maybe one for the infield. They game has strategy. It has finesse. It even has - to use a term no longer apparently known in the software world - elegance.
Now, it's unshaven bums (I'm an unshaven bum today, so OK) close-up, on the mound, with bad hair cuts curling from under the caps, with their follicles in high def while they spit and scratch. High res, high def and no sense of a team at work - if there still are any!
Baseball is a noble game of strategy, ruined by Madison Avenue's need to sell multi-hundred dollar sneakers to our kids.
Want to check out a good ball game? Here you go - http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/DS9/episode/103565.html
So, if baseball's good enough for Klingons and Vulcans and Ferengi, it's good enough for
Now - get off my lawn!
Compadre - we're the exact same age. I'm a four times grandfather. I'm just having a good day, and enjoying the theory, as I often wonder - on so many subjects - what life would have been like if I knew then what I know now. Better for the easier triumphs, or worse for easier triumphs. I suspect you understand completely.
:)
FWIW - I thought you were the young one with too much anthropomorphizing.
The commonality is prolly why we've been able to talk. If they could mod down pontificating geezers, we'd be looking at minus fives bout now.
BTW - don't ever stop playing the game unless it's boring or you've bought that 6 foot real estate.
Cheers,
Teh EarlyMon
See, I don't think that flirting works the same in humans as dogs. Dogs don't get boobjobs or pull down paychecks. Course, that depends on how you're meaning the word "works" to operate in this context. You're right, it's the same in that the goal is to get laid, and flirting is all part of the chicken dance to do it.
But to ascribe to instinct to women not knowing they're flirting - I just don't buy it. I drive my car without thinking - in my mind, that's how I'd describe it. But I'm thinking all the way. It's not instinct, it's learned, and learned so well that I might claim I didn't know this or that about the last drive I took - but at the time I swerved, I certainly did know what I did in response to the road.
That's the difference I'm arguing. I'm not saying that flirting is bad, I'm not saying girls denying it is bad, I'm not saying they're liars for saying they don't know when they do know. I'm saying they're very nuanced creatures, they do know. They may have moments of tactical confusion during the flirting itself (as do we all), they may be driven by uncontrollable desire to flirt and find themselves doing it without planning (knowing) (as do we all), but that's no different than swerving to miss an obstacale "without knowing" - we're human, we know.
Back to topic. Here's a quip from a personal acquaintance: I am a biologist and I would never ascribe human emotions or thinking to non-human critters. I do not think dogs are neurotic (although their humans can be). And, unlike a lot of dog owners, I never thought my dog was "happy" to see me, because I knew that the wagging tail was simply a canine system to spread the scent from the gland at the base of the anus, to bring attention to the dog for the purpose of eating. You see my quandary. No way you wouldn't convince me that my dog wasn't happy to see me. No way I'd argue biology with a biologist, especially one that's a pal and smarter than me. I won't argue if you've seen dog flirting - my friend would - just as I can't deny my dog's happiness. Tough call for some of us.
But you do make my point very precisely: Barely-pubescent girls in Belize flirt with grown men, because it's socially acceptable there, and a good way to catch a sugar-daddy. The same behaviour in the U.S. would get the girl's ass tanned by both her parents. I think your (or my) dogs would behave the same with respect to that which you describe as flirting if they were raised by you, me, or a South American.
But people do not flirt the same, species wide, world wide. It was your idea that women (in our culture) can do so without knowing it that I disagree with you on.
Let's try it with what I know. That yellow dog would wait until we were all in bed (he thought), then he'd climb up on the comfy couch. I surprise him with the lights on - he's chagrinned, he knows what he's done, and gets down - often with a friendly paw or lick first. (The comfy couch was a problem for the ex-wife, not me.)
So - and I certainly am not intending to put words into your mouth - if dogs know about the comfy couch (and they do) are you saying that dogs don't realize they're doing what you call flirting? I'd be surprised if you answered in the affirmative - I think dogs do know their so-called flirting.
And I therefore submit that women are at least as smart as dogs. QED
(BTW - don't be offended by the "so-called" part of dog flirting. I'm not a dog expert, I'm not a biologist and I have enough quandaries for one day, bookay?)
However, I cannot find the corner case anecdote to my life experience of hitting pavement due to gravity when I fall, any more than I could for the cases I mentioned in flirting.
I did correct that in another post to Ser Reziac, but based on my personal mileage, I had to attribute it to something akin to brane damage. Probably not sufficient to your charge, but there it is.
There are plenty of rules without single exceptions - in our own experiences.
Cheers
No disrespect perceived or given, hence the alphabet-licking modifier, BTW.
I do think that the bird's mating dance is a biologically primitive behavior. Had you compared the bird to us, you'd be anthropomorphizing. Comparing us to the bird does the opposite, although I don't know the name.
Don't get me wrong - and thank god I'm sitting down or I'd mistype this and you would - but I have no trouble with us being animals. To self-creditialize, I fully subscribe to the ideas in Sagan's Dragons of Eden - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragons_of_Eden - and I'm a big fan of the neocortex - so much so that I use mine all of the time!
But I think it's easy to oversimplify and overextend examples of animal behaviors and end up attributing to biology that which should be correctly attributed to societal norms. I want to work in a comment about cosmetic treatment - in ancient Greece, men shaved their legs, women did not - but that doesn't fit here, so I won't mention it. But much of modern flirting, with the behaviors of note discussed here, are cosmetic, in deed and in language, not biological. That was sort of my point.
Male animals puff out their chest to deal with predators and competitors. Human males, no exception. Female animals respond to the strong provider and protector. Human females, no exception. Your YouTube analogy applies to that.
But to add subtlety of not conscious of the chest puffing, or not conscious of the reciprocal response, or conscious (on either or both sides) but adding layers of language (either within the brain to assuage the subconscious or externally spoken to assuage societal norms) - strictly cosmetic, strictly human, strictly not animalistic. Amazingly, scientists can do this without using time machines to go back and lick the alphabet on some prehistoric vulva -- don't ask me how. I think they do use time machines. I can't find patents for them, so I can't figure out how they work, but I've heard through the jungle drums that they power them with something called car bone fourteen.