Contesting : [...] To call into question. eg. "I am not [calling into question] that social skills are useful".
No, dear. That's not how the referential interrogative works.
"I am not arguing that he is a murderer." Does this say "the argument I am making is not that he is a murderer", or "his being a murderer is established and I am not questionning it?" What you said reads as "My argument is not that social skills are useful," hence my wanting to invert the appositive. Get a grammar book.
"I think it's sad that so many people are proud of being shut-ins." "people should try to go out a bit more but not force it upon themselves only because society says so"
"and then you top it off by accusing me of overreacting?" Yep. You're doing it again. If I say hermits aren't happy people, I'm psychoanalyzing them? And where, exactly, did I analyze you? Is it analysis to suggest you ask a professional about a misconception in their field? I mean, if you said "carbide steel is sharp enough to cut glass," would I be analyzing you to tell you to go to sears and ask if carbide without the common diamond coating can cut glass?
read all sorts of things that I did not write,
Oh, settle down. I didn't read anything you didn't write.
tell me what I am not, guess my profession (getting it wrong)
The only thing that even remotely fits these two seperate accusations is my saying "you're not a psychologist," and given that you are each flying off of the handle and repeating common mistakes about human nature, and given that you're misspelling simple frequently used psychologist words like "analyze," I stand by my evaluation: if you tell me you're a psychologist, I will believe you're lying.
And sure, maybe you're a gas-lamp laudanist from the Victorian era, but I've just got to retain my doubt. Real psychologists don't throw this big a fit over a simple ribbing. Real psychologists don't suggest that shut-ins are made happy by remaining shut-in. Real psychologists don't think that the stress from avoiding groups comes from social pressures. Real psychologists are critically aware of issues like equivocation and enthymemes, because they're primary tools in identifying and dissecting delusional systems.
I mean, look. If you show up in a public forum, and some guy starts talking about using gum to seal a leak, thinks the cracks have been there since the pipe was made, and is holding their monkey wrench upside down, wouldn't you say "listen, you're not a plumber, stop giving advice?"
Salaries are generally not negotiable. They are paid based on perceptions, not on supply-and-demand bidding.
Programmers are currently discovering that this is not true based on offshoring.
I bid real low once to get my foot into a new technology. It did not work.
Perhaps you ought to look for other explanations.
The BAR is a quota (protection) technique also.
The hell are you talking about? Anyone may take the bar whenever they want to. The results are scored by mail, and there is neither a limit on how many people pass, nor is passing graded or ratioed in any way. It's no more a quota technique than a driver's license is: it's just "this test says you know what you're talking about well enough to do this for a living."
Are you suggesting we let every Tom, Dick, and Hari in?
Given that that's the founding principle of this nation, yes, that's exactly what I suggest.
Why bother then to have "citizens"?
Just because they have to be recorded for purposes of taxation and census doesn't mean that we should start denying people entrance into the nation. There are many good reasons to have citizens. Maybe you didn't realize it, but you can live in this country, be born in this country, never leave this country, and still not be a citizen; certain classes of criminal, for example, are not citizens at all, once convicted, even once released from prison (many classes of felon cannot vote, lose many citizen's rights, and so on.)
What is the purpose of being a citizen in a democracy? In order be part of the system. This is what allows us to drive our government, rather than to be driven by it. It is statistically unlikely, not to mention based on your seeming failure to grasp legal immigration, that you're Native American in whole; as a result, oh ye of "why do they get this but we don't," just remember that you're two or three generations behind that Hari you just mentioned, and that chances are some Victorian Brit was asking whether your parents really needed to be here either.
Plus, other countries usually have very strict work visa systems.
Are you unable to read? As the post you just replied to clearly states, the US work visa system is quite a bit stricter than that of almost any other nation in the world. Before going off half-cocked stating things you dont' know as fact, go look it up.
They don't swing open their gates
Name two countries whose immigration or work restrictions are stricter than those of the US after 9/11, which don't have such reasons because of war.
so why should we do the same?
"Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" sound even remotely familiar? Who are you to rewrite what this country is based on?
"I don't believe people should do things for reasons they don't understand--things like looking healthy, eating spinach, or avoiding GO TO statements. Rules without reasons focus on the appearance of things, not the substance."
No, rules without reasons help a person develop healthy habits and to benefit from them before he learns the reasons for them. That can come in its own good time.
The mantra of indocrination everywhere.
It rarely does any good to try to explain to a child why he should eat his spinach
Don't confuse explanation with convincing. It's one thing to tell a child to eat his spinach because it's got vitamins and iron whether he wants to or not; entirely another to tell him to eat his spinach without telling him why.
By the time he understands why it's good for him he's in the habit of eating it
Honestly, if you have a hard time explaining "this has vitamins which you need to grow" to a five year old, you need a Doctor Spock book or three.
A novice programmer might not understand why GOTOs are to be reserved for a small number of special situations, but you impose standards enforced via peer review that makes him avoid them when unnecessary anyway.
Yes yes, and this seems like a perfectly rational viewpoint. The problem is, it's not; this is an exposition of bias, and whether or not there's a real underlying motive, at best it's nothing more than an enthymeme.
Besides, the fact of the matter is that people are just sometimes wrong. If you refuse to expose your reasoning, then you also deny the person being controlled their oppoirtunity and right to suggest counterpoints or alternatives. Consider for example the first game I wrote for a cellular phone development firm: they simply told me that I was not to use C++. It being a new job I simply rolled over. However, as time went on, as is typical, it became more and more obvious that the lack of proper encapsulation was helping certain of my coworkers retard my code up something proper. Eventually I took the employer, who'd set himself up in mch the same manner as you've set yourself up, to task on the issue; I got him to admit that the issue was supposedly efficiency, and proceeded on my own time to perform a proper code seperation. The application was actually very slightly (insignificantly) faster, presumably due to the compiler being able to make some obscure tiny optimization somewhere based on new knowledge.
In my admittedly limited experience, it has been the case that people which set limits without explaining them generally do not understand the limits, and as a corrolary effect have usually picked them up by hearing them repeated by other supposedly clueful people.
In fact, in my experience, frequently the people which repeat these mantras think that just being aware that there is such a principle is what creates clue. But, if you ask them to justify why gotos are bad, they tend to flounder: "because, well, it breaks the, uh, path of flow of the function, and, er, because they're just bad form, everybody knows it, god, just do your work." I've been aware of and annoyed by this principle for quite some time now; it's become my habit to attempt to catch people in it. Unfortunately, I only know how to catch people in conversation, and I don't feel like rereading this thread, so I'll just show you how it works.
Start by saying "GOTOs aren't really that bad, though. People just use them in broken ways." When the response is inevitably "yeah, GOTOs are bad because people use them wrong," say "No, no: I mean, people just write bugs with GOTO. It's hard to use it in a capital-B bad way which isn't just incorrect." When they insist that's not true, ask them for an example.
When they tell you they don't have time to write the code, then grab the GOTO fascicle from Dewhurst and ask them if they think th
But globalization has turned brains into a cheap commodity.
Briefly, sure. Engineers in California said the same thing after Promontory, when suddenly educated men from the eastern seaboard came flooding into an area which previously had been dominated by prospectors. Suddenly, Californian engineers weren't rare and precious, and in fact weren't even any longer the unquestionable best; nationalization had, in their eyes, made brains a commodity.
Thing is, it didn't last. That people could be shipped place to place didn't change the need for brains, nor did it change the commonality of brains among people; it just more evenly distributed the pressure difference between supply and demand.
An easier example was the inflow of Korean, Thai and Indonesian programmers into Japan in the late 80s, when it was chic for an American to look down their nose at the Japanese resistance to immigrant labor as racist, citing our own history (as if the H1-B sentiments these days are somehow different.) In economic terms, their situation paralleled our own: a wealthy nation with an artificial work shortage created by the collapse of a bubble and the unwillingness of domestic labor to take realistic salaries (my friend is currently bitching that he's leaving a $120k/y web design job for a $100k/y design job; he sits on his ass all day playing video games at work) sees an abundance of bright, educated people in a poorer nation willing to work themselves to the bone in order to get what are to them preposterous foreign salaries. It was as frequent for Indonesians to work five years in Japan and retire wealthy, which Americans thought was smart, as it currently is for Indians to do the same, which Americans think is dirty pool. (Absconding with Japanese economy is witty; with American economy it's cheating instead.)
Lawyers have law-school quotas for example to protect them from a flood of cheap foreign legal geniouses
Uh, no, law schools have quotas to protect their reputations as difficult-to-reach goals, allowing their name to become a point of pride and therefore a valuable commodity when getting a job, in turn allowing the school to inflate the price of tuition drastically. You'll notice that second-rate law schools, such as the law school at your local pretty-good university which doesn't focus on law, rarely has such a quota in an undergraduate program. (Everyone has those quotas on graduate programs, but for different reasons: you really do need to control the number of graduate students, to make sure faculty have the appropriate amount of time to cultivate them into professionals; a faculty member frequently struggles with a third graduate. As my father's a college professor, I'm not speaking from ignorance.)
It's pretty standard issue scarcity tactics to inflate demand and therefore price. Ask a Nintendo sales rep how it works; they are the unchallenged masters of the tactic. (Note please that their central DS factory line was complete in October, and is currently cranking out more DSes per week than were demanded during the holiday season; nonetheless there was a holiday demand so bad that lines were hours long and some people simply couldn't get the toy. There was no need for that; Nintendo had the production capacity to fulfill almost triple the actual demand. However, if they were easy to get, nobody could brag that they had one first, and then fewer kids would want them as a social point, dropping console sales dramatically. This is also the basis of Sony's marketing attack on the Dreamcast, wherein the specs for the PS2 were announced the day before Dreamcast sales opened.)
If they can have protection from raw cheap-labor foreign competition, why can't we?
I'm not sure how capping input into law schools prevents foreign lawyers; you do not need to have gone to law school to take the bar. Any person with a good local library can become a lawyer relatively easily; one of my friends became a patent lawyer in order to register so
10 years in coding/web design. Never had a job where I averaged more than 40 hours a week.
Wow, there's a surprise, an HTML jockey which both thinks they're a programmer and thinks they're exposed to the rigors of programming. Here's a hint: TEX isn't a programming language, PDF isn't a programming language, and type-1 postscript isn't a programming language. Neither is HTML. "But DHTML and and and" No, DHTML is HTML with DOM access. Until you add a language such as JavaScript, it's impotent.
It's called comp time and setting boundaries.
It's all well and good to say that, but when you're faced with an application crashing and the ship date looming, sometimes you just have to put your nose to the grindstone. Granted, general protection faults in the hands of the client aren't as damning as the challenges an HTML author faces, such as how to get the image to stop moving three pixels to the left under IE, but surely you can step down to the level of us lowly programmers and think in terms of trying to sell something which simply doesn't function?
Then I say "in the future, unless it is a true emergency, I need at least 1 day, preferable 2 days of notice to make arrangments."
You know, I'm certain when I call that phrase astoundingly arrogant and self-important you're going to knee-jerk assume that I mean that asserting one's rights is the problem. I'm not. What's uncomfortably presumptuous there are that 1) you think an employer doesn't know about these things, and 2) you think that an employer needs simple education from you.
Here's a basic course in understanding the world around you. Employers know about things like comp time and respecting employee contracts. If you have the sort of employer which works a programmer 60 hours a week, what you just said not only wouldn't phase them, but would chalk you up for the first bus leaving the company for any other employer, because you're fairly transparently a troublemaker. If you have the sort of employer which doesn't do that, you've openly condescended to them because they once requested overtime from you (and for what it's worth, that they requested in the first place is a clear sign that what you said didn't need to be said at all.)
If one of my employees said something like that to me, I'd begin evaluating their work caliber immediately. I don't overwork programmers at all, and have been known to force them to go home when they're on voluntary after hours. Nonetheless, what you just said would infuriate me: if it's an emergency, I can't schedule around your trivial ass, and frankly, being able to rely on you to stay long hours is what being salaried means: you work until the work is done, no longer, no shorter, which is why you're not being paid by the hour. Yes, if there's chronic overwork then the manager is screwing up, but if I'm asking you to stay late once a month, not only is that not abnormal, but the idea that I have to schedule it with you is inexcusable.
If you're a salaried employee, you've already agreed to be available. Grow up.
Then, later that week, probably Friday, I'll say "I'm leaving early, 'cause I stayed late Tuesday." If they say a problem, I say, " well, I can take it next week". Note: DO NOT PHRASE THIS AS A QUESTION! Like "can I leave early". Just announce it.
If the office accepts that sort of thing you shouldn't need to tell them. If they don't, you've just dodged work and made yourself look like an ass.
Comp time doesn't work on the weekly scale, and doesn't come in whenever you magically want it. Whether or not you believe you are ethically owed that time, you do not have the right to simply walk out; your salary indebts you to stay until the work is done, not until you've worked 40 hours, no matter how you want to casually misread the law. There is exactly one state in the union which caps work hours, and even then not only are salaried employees mostly exempt, but further
Please feel free to actually give us this study, since just about everything involving the phrase "circadian rhythm" says you're utterly wrong.
If you need counterpoint other than an entire branch of medicine, consider watching the Nova special on the Mars Rover team. They do isolate themselves from the Earth solar cycle, and their day shift is only 45 minutes; nonetheless, two weeks in, every single one of them is constantly yawning, and complaining about the difficulty of the slightly longer Martian day.
but would like to stress that social skills are essential to a whole lot more than the business environment. I find it somewhat disheartening that so many "geeks" are actually proud of the basement dwelling stereotype they've acquired.
What's wrong with being a basement dweller? I find it very disheartening that being sociable or extroverted is perceived to be superior to being introverted.
It's a shame that the grandparent chose to appeal to emotion at the end of what he was saying; otherwise I could point out that all the grandparent actually said was that people which aren't in a social setting frequently lack social skills, which has nothing to do with superiority and would uncover what appeared at a distance to be a defensiveness on parent's part.
But many basement dwelling nerds are perfectly happy and functional members of our society (even if they prefer to spend as little time in it as they can).
This fallacy is called Equivocation, and most people will miss it because the primary target is in what the grandparent wrote. Both by context and common sense, the phrase "society" was used by grandparent to mean "social setting in which people openly interact." In order to make a point, you have attempted to switch gears to mean "society as a whole where we talk about things like the common good." The two are not exchangeable.
The topic at hand is specifically the basement dweller, whose sole definition is that they withdraw from the original important form of "society" meaning "people drinking beers and espresso under the daystar." Therefore, by context, no, cave swellers are neither happy nor functioning members of society, whether or not they enjoy their lives, have a job, pay taxes, et cetera. The suggestion that their status as a functioning member of the national community has anything to do with grandparent's disappointment that some people choose to withdraw, however - and I've had to use that phrase to distance myself from your equivocation - is a total straw man, and has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Good social skills are associated with success to the point where people will say "he will go far!" of someone with very good social skills but no other skills to speak of. And sadly, they are sometimes right.
It's amusing to watch you nod and agree with someone about stereotypes, only to watch you turn around and lambast people which don't exit schooling with their entire skillset intact for not already being a professional, and then further slander them as if social skills themselves aren't job skills. Maybe you should go to a college and ask a communications major what they really do; what you just pretended was insufficient for a job is in fact an entire field of study, and is considered one of the most valuable assets of many settings in which negotiations are common, such as large business, politics, police work and therapy.
If you're going to complain about other people's biases, mind operating without your own for a while?
I'm not contesting that social skills are useful, and sometimes necessary for advancing a career.
This doesn't make sense unless you meant "aren't useful," so I'll assume that was a typo. Yes, you quite clearly are saying exactly that, by way of your enthymeme earlier.
Please explain how "Good social skills are associated with someone which will go far; sadly this is often correct" somehow does not hinge on the unspoken "social skills are not ethically sufficient in the workplace."
They would be perfectly happy individuals except for the fact that society makes them feel bad about their anti-social behaviour.
If your workplace offers a company psychologist, I'd like you to take a lunch break to go discuss this issue with them. Humans are social animals, and are never happy without contact; hermits are not happy people.
Just because superficially the pain endured by going to a party seems greater th
I find it somewhat disheartening that so many "geeks" are actually proud of the basement dwelling stereotype they've acquired.
Yeah, and that I can't find my fifty cent off coupon for shampoo appalls me. I'm out of mustard - what an inhumane outrage. The light burnt out; this is so cruelly unjust it's criminal.
Hint: 'dishearten' isn't the same as 'disappoint.' Dishearten was coined by Shakespeare, and means "anguish of the mind." As far as your choice of words, this is the standard-issue sledgehammer for a nail proverb (well, in this case, perhaps steamroller to straighten the rug.) What you said was equivalent to "You've bean me at tic tac toe. I am embroiled in a murderous rage." Tone down the drama, there, champ.
but it also projects the impression that you have friends, or at least that there's one person in the world who's willing to talk to you. It works whether there's anyone at the other end, or not.... much like posting on Slashdot, except to fool others instead of one's self?
You may wonder how that is anti-social, but the reason they have a cell phone is to hide behind it.
I originally got mine for driving directions when moving across the country, and kept it because I found that being able to make and receive phone calls while not at home was convenient. If anything, cellular phones make it more difficult to hide, not less - you can be reached anywhere (unless your phone is a Sprint phone like mine.)
There's the nickname "electronic leash" for a reason.
This is called the spotlight fallacy, and is a special case of the broader fallacy Biased sample. Its shortest form is "between form A which is visible and form B which is not, all I ever see is form A, so surely form A is predominant." Of course everyone you know using cell phones also exists in the real world: if they didn't, you wouldn't know them.
That's why chat rooms get the bad reputations: they're a quick line to people which don't use other communications media. Whereas sure there are some shut-ins on IRC, personally I've found the ratio to be far smaller than that of a moderately sized college class, DMV line, or other cross-social-barrier settings.
My prediction for 2005: Slashdotters will continue to think that "Redudant" means "I saw that coming a mile away." (If I were less of a man, I'd call it ironic.)
And once someone in the military sees that movie, so will all the other satellites.
Dan Akroyd for Homeland Security. (Rita Rudner for General of the Armies. George Bush for General of the Trough Urinals, Commander, Special Forces Tongue Cleaning Squad.)
Most of these are good ideas, but an atomic plant would stick out like a sore thumb (they give off safe emissions like you wouldn't believe.) Probably the best way to power such a satellite would be by beaming a fraction of the collected solar power from other satellites to it by thin beam; I am not aware of a power plant technology which is easily concealed even in space, nor of a battery or fuel which could reasonably last long enough.
This is what I want to invent as a new fallacy: the "because you didn't fucking look" fallacy.
"Why don't we see poor people getting jobs?" "Because you live in Beverly Hills."
"Why don't we see third world nations bootstrapping their industries and infrastructures?" "Because you haven't looked at the progress of Cuba, Cypress, Eritrea, Djibouti, Cape Verde, Belize, etc."
"Why don't we see programmers migrating from the US to other countries, then?" "Because you don't work in the video game, telecommunications, math or library-writing industries."
"Why don't we see fossils below the cambrian line?" "Because you assumed there wouldn't be any and stopped digging."
etc.
Amusingly, a number of studies have been done on the statistics of psychics and omniscience claiming individuals and their lottery winnings; they win the lottery about 1.3% more than "normal" people on the average, which sounds very impressive until you find out that blacks win 1.7% more than the average, establishing 1.3% as nothing more than luck (unless of course black people are secretly psychic.)
In order to split hairs properly, it should be pointed out that in fact the passage you just quoted requires that the budgets be published; what is allowed is that the specific details of the budget be withheld. In that way, the American public knows that $X went to unnamed projects, just not what they're specifically up to.
It's one of the most interesting, IMO, secrecy policies in modern governmental design. The government is left the right to keep its military and intelligence secrets; they may not, however, charge us money for said development without telling us. Moreover, we know which branch is sucking up what proportion; they can't just say "$X for black box secrets, carry on;" they are instead required to say that $X goes to the Army, another $Y to the Air Force, and so forth. (It's actually quite a bit more specific than that, but I don't feel like dredging up the details.)
Actually, if grandparent were true, it would be a sign that we didn't have enough government; just because you reduce the number of people doesn't mean the count of their duties goes down with them.
That said, there are far more than 30300 people in the federal government alone, let alone the state government, so happily it seems that neither of you is significantly more clueful than the other, and therefore I don't have to take sides.
There are plenty of science sources on TV but few if any shows dedicated to computer technology.
You seem to have missed the list in my post. Re-read it; it contains some of what you're currently claiming doesn't exist under your new replacement complaint, which by the way doesn't actually jive with your previous text.
"I hate history, the people on the history channel don't talk about anything but history."
What else would you expect the history channel to talk about besides history?
Yes, jackass, that's the entire reason I said that. You're talking about a network with the word "game" in its title, bitching that it shows too many gaming shows. How is this unclear, again? How is explaining my own metaphor back to me useful in your diatribe in any way?
What would you expect a channel called G4/TechTV to talk and report about?
I wouldn't know: there hasn't been such a channel for almost two years now. It's just called G4, and games are in that title, whereas Tech is not. If you'd read my post, you'd know that I'd already dealt with that; of course, it's fairly apparent that you didn't, seeing one thing you disliked and immediately jumping into attack mode. Down, boy: my steak. Go eat your own food.
Change the channel, dimwit.
Guess what, I have changed the channel and no longer watch G4/TechTV.
Unfortunately, not in time to stop you from whining on slashdot. Luckily, since you didn't say that in your post (though you pretend to have and even attempt to shame me for it in the reply post,) but rather discussed what was still on the channel, it seemed to everyone that you're still watching the channel - and frankly, I suspect you're now claiming you don't to try to look less stupid.
If you would have read my original post you would have seen that.
Oh? Here's the original post:
the Screen Savers were the only show on TV that would come close to taking about technology. Where else on TV would you hear Linux mentioned as well as a live install (as Megan did on a show) They would often mention programs that I had never heard of and I would go download them. The first time I heard of Knoppix was on The Screensavers. Hell, they even had Taco in for an interview. (The last good thing they did after the merger)
I once loved watching the show but now I can't. The new hosts are all about gaming, gaming, gaming.
Apparently I wouldn't. Maybe you've got mystery words there that the rest of us can't see? Or, maybe you take that last paragraph differently, where you're talking about what's currently on the channel: I mean surely, if you know what's on the channel today, then you're not watching it. How silly of me. By the way, nobody's fooled; just thought you might like to know.
You are clearly a troll. Have a great day.
Yes, clearly it's me.
Oh, and since you don't seem to realize this: in Slashdot, we can get old articles and paste them again, and look what you really said. Lying about having meant or said something in the past may work when you're arguing with your little sister. Not here, son.
This should give you a sudden breath of air about the general (puns are fun) quality of Wikipedia, wherein misconception, misunderstanding, false memories and personal beliefs are frequently presented as fact.
George W. Bush Sr. has never held a military title above airman (a title he served with distinction, earning multiple moderate medals, unlike his son or father,) and Jr. never above first lieutenant; it is widely suspected among certain groups that Jr's service did not in fact earn him his Air National Guard status, but rather that it was a politically-inclined donation, and that Jr was an absentee to the degree that normal people would have been dishonorably discharged, and that his various documented refusals to take physical exams were cocaine-related.
It is worth noting that GHWB (that is, Sr.) did in fact get quite a distance within the intelligence community, eventually attaining high rank within the CIA, something that your Wikipedia article just totally fails to mention. It is amusing to note that both Bushes have a sordid drug history, despite their ridiculously overblown drug policies; whereas Jr.'s is illegal, Sr. participated in state-sanctionned LSD trials as a CIA agent, with megadoses of the drug which would make street users balk.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Commander in Chief is not a "general of the armies;" rather it is a civilian title ensuring that the military cannot simply take over during wartime, a remnant of fear of the sort of mess that came up during the then-recent Hundred Years' War. It is of critical importance that Commander In Chief is not a military title at all. That is, in fact, the entire purpose of the title. So, the notion that GWB Sr. was somehow a six star general is just bunk.
Wikipedia is in many ways similar to Herb Schildt: many people read it, many people believe it, and it's generally got the idea right, but all of the details are wrong in a way that makes educated people's blood boil. The information you read is, though not your fault, roughly equivalent void main(float Anger, const complex& Fury, wchar_t[]* Confusion) { return WithBadData; }
John Pershing is a very significant figure in the history of World War One, and is a much better target for this misunderstanding. The title "General of the Armies" was a title granted him in respect to his ass kicking of the Germans in France, after the fact; it is an honorarium, not an actual title. Whoever told you George Bush had earned this title was in error; it has only been applied twice in US history: once for Pershing, and then once again under Gerald Ford, applied posthumously to George Washington. In that respect, Pershing was unseated as the highest ranking US military official in history by a man which died sixty one years before Pershing was born.
It is interesting to note that though General of the Armies is a legitimate military rank by presidential decree since Ford's time, it doesn't actually have a rank position; it's just assumed to be higher in rank than all other military statuses. Because there's no rank position, one does not need to ascend the rank order to attain this title. (By comparison, no matter who desires it, a three star general may not become a five star general; they must do four stars first.)
This is why Pershing was able to become General of the Armies: he wasn't ever a five star general, and attained this rank as a four star general. Therefore, he is the only figure in US Military History to have command over superior military officers. It is also through this distinction that Ford was able to end-run Washington around Pershing as a PR maneuver; Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Army (remember, this is pre-Presidency; that's where the title comes from, even though it was made a civilian rank,) which through various humbuggery was decided to be equivalent to five-star general, and therefore was decided to trump four-star in the case of two historic figures with the non-ranked title.
Slashdot Mirror
Contesting : [...] To call into question.
eg. "I am not [calling into question] that social skills are useful".
No, dear. That's not how the referential interrogative works.
"I am not arguing that he is a murderer." Does this say "the argument I am making is not that he is a murderer", or "his being a murderer is established and I am not questionning it?" What you said reads as "My argument is not that social skills are useful," hence my wanting to invert the appositive. Get a grammar book.
"I think it's sad that so many people are proud of being shut-ins." "people should try to go out a bit more but not force it upon themselves only because society says so"
"and then you top it off by accusing me of overreacting?" Yep. You're doing it again. If I say hermits aren't happy people, I'm psychoanalyzing them? And where, exactly, did I analyze you? Is it analysis to suggest you ask a professional about a misconception in their field? I mean, if you said "carbide steel is sharp enough to cut glass," would I be analyzing you to tell you to go to sears and ask if carbide without the common diamond coating can cut glass?
read all sorts of things that I did not write,
Oh, settle down. I didn't read anything you didn't write.
tell me what I am not, guess my profession (getting it wrong)
The only thing that even remotely fits these two seperate accusations is my saying "you're not a psychologist," and given that you are each flying off of the handle and repeating common mistakes about human nature, and given that you're misspelling simple frequently used psychologist words like "analyze," I stand by my evaluation: if you tell me you're a psychologist, I will believe you're lying.
And sure, maybe you're a gas-lamp laudanist from the Victorian era, but I've just got to retain my doubt. Real psychologists don't throw this big a fit over a simple ribbing. Real psychologists don't suggest that shut-ins are made happy by remaining shut-in. Real psychologists don't think that the stress from avoiding groups comes from social pressures. Real psychologists are critically aware of issues like equivocation and enthymemes, because they're primary tools in identifying and dissecting delusional systems.
I mean, look. If you show up in a public forum, and some guy starts talking about using gum to seal a leak, thinks the cracks have been there since the pipe was made, and is holding their monkey wrench upside down, wouldn't you say "listen, you're not a plumber, stop giving advice?"
Salaries are generally not negotiable. They are paid based on perceptions, not on supply-and-demand bidding.
Programmers are currently discovering that this is not true based on offshoring.
I bid real low once to get my foot into a new technology. It did not work.
Perhaps you ought to look for other explanations.
The BAR is a quota (protection) technique also.
The hell are you talking about? Anyone may take the bar whenever they want to. The results are scored by mail, and there is neither a limit on how many people pass, nor is passing graded or ratioed in any way. It's no more a quota technique than a driver's license is: it's just "this test says you know what you're talking about well enough to do this for a living."
Are you suggesting we let every Tom, Dick, and Hari in?
Given that that's the founding principle of this nation, yes, that's exactly what I suggest.
Why bother then to have "citizens"?
Just because they have to be recorded for purposes of taxation and census doesn't mean that we should start denying people entrance into the nation. There are many good reasons to have citizens. Maybe you didn't realize it, but you can live in this country, be born in this country, never leave this country, and still not be a citizen; certain classes of criminal, for example, are not citizens at all, once convicted, even once released from prison (many classes of felon cannot vote, lose many citizen's rights, and so on.)
What is the purpose of being a citizen in a democracy? In order be part of the system. This is what allows us to drive our government, rather than to be driven by it. It is statistically unlikely, not to mention based on your seeming failure to grasp legal immigration, that you're Native American in whole; as a result, oh ye of
"why do they get this but we don't," just remember that you're two or three generations behind that Hari you just mentioned, and that chances are some Victorian Brit was asking whether your parents really needed to be here either.
Plus, other countries usually have very strict work visa systems.
Are you unable to read? As the post you just replied to clearly states, the US work visa system is quite a bit stricter than that of almost any other nation in the world. Before going off half-cocked stating things you dont' know as fact, go look it up.
They don't swing open their gates
Name two countries whose immigration or work restrictions are stricter than those of the US after 9/11, which don't have such reasons because of war.
so why should we do the same?
"Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" sound even remotely familiar? Who are you to rewrite what this country is based on?
"I don't believe people should do things for reasons they don't understand--things like looking healthy, eating spinach, or avoiding GO TO statements. Rules without reasons focus on the appearance of things, not the substance."
No, rules without reasons help a person develop healthy habits and to benefit from them before he learns the reasons for them. That can come in its own good time.
The mantra of indocrination everywhere.
It rarely does any good to try to explain to a child why he should eat his spinach
Don't confuse explanation with convincing. It's one thing to tell a child to eat his spinach because it's got vitamins and iron whether he wants to or not; entirely another to tell him to eat his spinach without telling him why.
By the time he understands why it's good for him he's in the habit of eating it
Honestly, if you have a hard time explaining "this has vitamins which you need to grow" to a five year old, you need a Doctor Spock book or three.
A novice programmer might not understand why GOTOs are to be reserved for a small number of special situations, but you impose standards enforced via peer review that makes him avoid them when unnecessary anyway.
Yes yes, and this seems like a perfectly rational viewpoint. The problem is, it's not; this is an exposition of bias, and whether or not there's a real underlying motive, at best it's nothing more than an enthymeme.
Besides, the fact of the matter is that people are just sometimes wrong. If you refuse to expose your reasoning, then you also deny the person being controlled their oppoirtunity and right to suggest counterpoints or alternatives. Consider for example the first game I wrote for a cellular phone development firm: they simply told me that I was not to use C++. It being a new job I simply rolled over. However, as time went on, as is typical, it became more and more obvious that the lack of proper encapsulation was helping certain of my coworkers retard my code up something proper. Eventually I took the employer, who'd set himself up in mch the same manner as you've set yourself up, to task on the issue; I got him to admit that the issue was supposedly efficiency, and proceeded on my own time to perform a proper code seperation. The application was actually very slightly (insignificantly) faster, presumably due to the compiler being able to make some obscure tiny optimization somewhere based on new knowledge.
In my admittedly limited experience, it has been the case that people which set limits without explaining them generally do not understand the limits, and as a corrolary effect have usually picked them up by hearing them repeated by other supposedly clueful people.
In fact, in my experience, frequently the people which repeat these mantras think that just being aware that there is such a principle is what creates clue. But, if you ask them to justify why gotos are bad, they tend to flounder: "because, well, it breaks the, uh, path of flow of the function, and, er, because they're just bad form, everybody knows it, god, just do your work." I've been aware of and annoyed by this principle for quite some time now; it's become my habit to attempt to catch people in it. Unfortunately, I only know how to catch people in conversation, and I don't feel like rereading this thread, so I'll just show you how it works.
Start by saying "GOTOs aren't really that bad, though. People just use them in broken ways." When the response is inevitably "yeah, GOTOs are bad because people use them wrong," say "No, no: I mean, people just write bugs with GOTO. It's hard to use it in a capital-B bad way which isn't just incorrect." When they insist that's not true, ask them for an example.
When they tell you they don't have time to write the code, then grab the GOTO fascicle from Dewhurst and ask them if they think th
Single words cannot be oxymora.
But globalization has turned brains into a cheap commodity.
Briefly, sure. Engineers in California said the same thing after Promontory, when suddenly educated men from the eastern seaboard came flooding into an area which previously had been dominated by prospectors. Suddenly, Californian engineers weren't rare and precious, and in fact weren't even any longer the unquestionable best; nationalization had, in their eyes, made brains a commodity.
Thing is, it didn't last. That people could be shipped place to place didn't change the need for brains, nor did it change the commonality of brains among people; it just more evenly distributed the pressure difference between supply and demand.
An easier example was the inflow of Korean, Thai and Indonesian programmers into Japan in the late 80s, when it was chic for an American to look down their nose at the Japanese resistance to immigrant labor as racist, citing our own history (as if the H1-B sentiments these days are somehow different.) In economic terms, their situation paralleled our own: a wealthy nation with an artificial work shortage created by the collapse of a bubble and the unwillingness of domestic labor to take realistic salaries (my friend is currently bitching that he's leaving a $120k/y web design job for a $100k/y design job; he sits on his ass all day playing video games at work) sees an abundance of bright, educated people in a poorer nation willing to work themselves to the bone in order to get what are to them preposterous foreign salaries. It was as frequent for Indonesians to work five years in Japan and retire wealthy, which Americans thought was smart, as it currently is for Indians to do the same, which Americans think is dirty pool. (Absconding with Japanese economy is witty; with American economy it's cheating instead.)
Lawyers have law-school quotas for example to protect them from a flood of cheap foreign legal geniouses
Uh, no, law schools have quotas to protect their reputations as difficult-to-reach goals, allowing their name to become a point of pride and therefore a valuable commodity when getting a job, in turn allowing the school to inflate the price of tuition drastically. You'll notice that second-rate law schools, such as the law school at your local pretty-good university which doesn't focus on law, rarely has such a quota in an undergraduate program. (Everyone has those quotas on graduate programs, but for different reasons: you really do need to control the number of graduate students, to make sure faculty have the appropriate amount of time to cultivate them into professionals; a faculty member frequently struggles with a third graduate. As my father's a college professor, I'm not speaking from ignorance.)
It's pretty standard issue scarcity tactics to inflate demand and therefore price. Ask a Nintendo sales rep how it works; they are the unchallenged masters of the tactic. (Note please that their central DS factory line was complete in October, and is currently cranking out more DSes per week than were demanded during the holiday season; nonetheless there was a holiday demand so bad that lines were hours long and some people simply couldn't get the toy. There was no need for that; Nintendo had the production capacity to fulfill almost triple the actual demand. However, if they were easy to get, nobody could brag that they had one first, and then fewer kids would want them as a social point, dropping console sales dramatically. This is also the basis of Sony's marketing attack on the Dreamcast, wherein the specs for the PS2 were announced the day before Dreamcast sales opened.)
If they can have protection from raw cheap-labor foreign competition, why can't we?
I'm not sure how capping input into law schools prevents foreign lawyers; you do not need to have gone to law school to take the bar. Any person with a good local library can become a lawyer relatively easily; one of my friends became a patent lawyer in order to register so
I will let the reader find the moral to this story.
That we need to run naked through the streets of Athens more often?
10 years in coding/web design. Never had a job where I averaged more than 40 hours a week.
Wow, there's a surprise, an HTML jockey which both thinks they're a programmer and thinks they're exposed to the rigors of programming. Here's a hint: TEX isn't a programming language, PDF isn't a programming language, and type-1 postscript isn't a programming language. Neither is HTML. "But DHTML and and and" No, DHTML is HTML with DOM access. Until you add a language such as JavaScript, it's impotent.
It's called comp time and setting boundaries.
It's all well and good to say that, but when you're faced with an application crashing and the ship date looming, sometimes you just have to put your nose to the grindstone. Granted, general protection faults in the hands of the client aren't as damning as the challenges an HTML author faces, such as how to get the image to stop moving three pixels to the left under IE, but surely you can step down to the level of us lowly programmers and think in terms of trying to sell something which simply doesn't function?
Then I say "in the future, unless it is a true emergency, I need at least 1 day, preferable 2 days of notice to make arrangments."
You know, I'm certain when I call that phrase astoundingly arrogant and self-important you're going to knee-jerk assume that I mean that asserting one's rights is the problem. I'm not. What's uncomfortably presumptuous there are that 1) you think an employer doesn't know about these things, and 2) you think that an employer needs simple education from you.
Here's a basic course in understanding the world around you. Employers know about things like comp time and respecting employee contracts. If you have the sort of employer which works a programmer 60 hours a week, what you just said not only wouldn't phase them, but would chalk you up for the first bus leaving the company for any other employer, because you're fairly transparently a troublemaker. If you have the sort of employer which doesn't do that, you've openly condescended to them because they once requested overtime from you (and for what it's worth, that they requested in the first place is a clear sign that what you said didn't need to be said at all.)
If one of my employees said something like that to me, I'd begin evaluating their work caliber immediately. I don't overwork programmers at all, and have been known to force them to go home when they're on voluntary after hours. Nonetheless, what you just said would infuriate me: if it's an emergency, I can't schedule around your trivial ass, and frankly, being able to rely on you to stay long hours is what being salaried means: you work until the work is done, no longer, no shorter, which is why you're not being paid by the hour. Yes, if there's chronic overwork then the manager is screwing up, but if I'm asking you to stay late once a month, not only is that not abnormal, but the idea that I have to schedule it with you is inexcusable.
If you're a salaried employee, you've already agreed to be available. Grow up.
Then, later that week, probably Friday, I'll say "I'm leaving early, 'cause I stayed late Tuesday." If they say a problem, I say, "
well, I can take it next week". Note: DO NOT PHRASE THIS AS A QUESTION! Like "can I leave early". Just announce it.
If the office accepts that sort of thing you shouldn't need to tell them. If they don't, you've just dodged work and made yourself look like an ass.
Comp time doesn't work on the weekly scale, and doesn't come in whenever you magically want it. Whether or not you believe you are ethically owed that time, you do not have the right to simply walk out; your salary indebts you to stay until the work is done, not until you've worked 40 hours, no matter how you want to casually misread the law. There is exactly one state in the union which caps work hours, and even then not only are salaried employees mostly exempt, but further
Please feel free to actually give us this study, since just about everything involving the phrase "circadian rhythm" says you're utterly wrong.
If you need counterpoint other than an entire branch of medicine, consider watching the Nova special on the Mars Rover team. They do isolate themselves from the Earth solar cycle, and their day shift is only 45 minutes; nonetheless, two weeks in, every single one of them is constantly yawning, and complaining about the difficulty of the slightly longer Martian day.
but would like to stress that social skills are essential to a whole lot more than the business environment. I find it somewhat disheartening that so many "geeks" are actually proud of the basement dwelling stereotype they've acquired.
What's wrong with being a basement dweller? I find it very disheartening that being sociable or extroverted is perceived to be superior to being introverted.
It's a shame that the grandparent chose to appeal to emotion at the end of what he was saying; otherwise I could point out that all the grandparent actually said was that people which aren't in a social setting frequently lack social skills, which has nothing to do with superiority and would uncover what appeared at a distance to be a defensiveness on parent's part.
But many basement dwelling nerds are perfectly happy and functional members of our society (even if they prefer to spend as little time in it as they can).
This fallacy is called Equivocation, and most people will miss it because the primary target is in what the grandparent wrote. Both by context and common sense, the phrase "society" was used by grandparent to mean "social setting in which people openly interact." In order to make a point, you have attempted to switch gears to mean "society as a whole where we talk about things like the common good." The two are not exchangeable.
The topic at hand is specifically the basement dweller, whose sole definition is that they withdraw from the original important form of "society" meaning "people drinking beers and espresso under the daystar." Therefore, by context, no, cave swellers are neither happy nor functioning members of society, whether or not they enjoy their lives, have a job, pay taxes, et cetera. The suggestion that their status as a functioning member of the national community has anything to do with grandparent's disappointment that some people choose to withdraw, however - and I've had to use that phrase to distance myself from your equivocation - is a total straw man, and has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Good social skills are associated with success to the point where people will say "he will go far!" of someone with very good social skills but no other skills to speak of. And sadly, they are sometimes right.
It's amusing to watch you nod and agree with someone about stereotypes, only to watch you turn around and lambast people which don't exit schooling with their entire skillset intact for not already being a professional, and then further slander them as if social skills themselves aren't job skills. Maybe you should go to a college and ask a communications major what they really do; what you just pretended was insufficient for a job is in fact an entire field of study, and is considered one of the most valuable assets of many settings in which negotiations are common, such as large business, politics, police work and therapy.
If you're going to complain about other people's biases, mind operating without your own for a while?
I'm not contesting that social skills are useful, and sometimes necessary for advancing a career.
This doesn't make sense unless you meant "aren't useful," so I'll assume that was a typo. Yes, you quite clearly are saying exactly that, by way of your enthymeme earlier.
Please explain how "Good social skills are associated with someone which will go far; sadly this is often correct" somehow does not hinge on the unspoken "social skills are not ethically sufficient in the workplace."
They would be perfectly happy individuals except for the fact that society makes them feel bad about their anti-social behaviour.
If your workplace offers a company psychologist, I'd like you to take a lunch break to go discuss this issue with them. Humans are social animals, and are never happy without contact; hermits are not happy people.
Just because superficially the pain endured by going to a party seems greater th
I find it somewhat disheartening that so many "geeks" are actually proud of the basement dwelling stereotype they've acquired.
Yeah, and that I can't find my fifty cent off coupon for shampoo appalls me. I'm out of mustard - what an inhumane outrage. The light burnt out; this is so cruelly unjust it's criminal.
Hint: 'dishearten' isn't the same as 'disappoint.' Dishearten was coined by Shakespeare, and means "anguish of the mind." As far as your choice of words, this is the standard-issue sledgehammer for a nail proverb (well, in this case, perhaps steamroller to straighten the rug.) What you said was equivalent to "You've bean me at tic tac toe. I am embroiled in a murderous rage." Tone down the drama, there, champ.
but it also projects the impression that you have friends, or at least that there's one person in the world who's willing to talk to you. It works whether there's anyone at the other end, or not. ... much like posting on Slashdot, except to fool others instead of one's self?
... Beep.)
(At the beep, it will be 9:35 AM.
You may wonder how that is anti-social, but the reason they have a cell phone is to hide behind it.
I originally got mine for driving directions when moving across the country, and kept it because I found that being able to make and receive phone calls while not at home was convenient. If anything, cellular phones make it more difficult to hide, not less - you can be reached anywhere (unless your phone is a Sprint phone like mine.)
There's the nickname "electronic leash" for a reason.
This is called the spotlight fallacy, and is a special case of the broader fallacy Biased sample. Its shortest form is "between form A which is visible and form B which is not, all I ever see is form A, so surely form A is predominant." Of course everyone you know using cell phones also exists in the real world: if they didn't, you wouldn't know them.
That's why chat rooms get the bad reputations: they're a quick line to people which don't use other communications media. Whereas sure there are some shut-ins on IRC, personally I've found the ratio to be far smaller than that of a moderately sized college class, DMV line, or other cross-social-barrier settings.
Your observation is thusly flawed.
Between the phrase "other essential chemicals" and your nick, I think caffeine isn't the only thing implied. Then again, my nick's no better...
My prediction for 2005: Slashdotters will continue to think that "Redudant" means "I saw that coming a mile away." (If I were less of a man, I'd call it ironic.)
I nominate you for most cruelly coincidental combination of content error and sig discussion of knowledge ever.
This is already well known. (Pity I can't find the original.)
And once someone in the military sees that movie, so will all the other satellites.
Dan Akroyd for Homeland Security. (Rita Rudner for General of the Armies. George Bush for General of the Trough Urinals, Commander, Special Forces Tongue Cleaning Squad.)
Most of these are good ideas, but an atomic plant would stick out like a sore thumb (they give off safe emissions like you wouldn't believe.) Probably the best way to power such a satellite would be by beaming a fraction of the collected solar power from other satellites to it by thin beam; I am not aware of a power plant technology which is easily concealed even in space, nor of a battery or fuel which could reasonably last long enough.
This is what I want to invent as a new fallacy: the "because you didn't fucking look" fallacy.
"Why don't we see poor people getting jobs?" "Because you live in Beverly Hills."
"Why don't we see third world nations bootstrapping their industries and infrastructures?" "Because you haven't looked at the progress of Cuba, Cypress, Eritrea, Djibouti, Cape Verde, Belize, etc."
"Why don't we see programmers migrating from the US to other countries, then?" "Because you don't work in the video game, telecommunications, math or library-writing industries."
"Why don't we see fossils below the cambrian line?" "Because you assumed there wouldn't be any and stopped digging."
etc.
Amusingly, a number of studies have been done on the statistics of psychics and omniscience claiming individuals and their lottery winnings; they win the lottery about 1.3% more than "normal" people on the average, which sounds very impressive until you find out that blacks win 1.7% more than the average, establishing 1.3% as nothing more than luck (unless of course black people are secretly psychic.)
Insightful my ass, funny or not. Mod parent down.
In order to split hairs properly, it should be pointed out that in fact the passage you just quoted requires that the budgets be published; what is allowed is that the specific details of the budget be withheld. In that way, the American public knows that $X went to unnamed projects, just not what they're specifically up to.
It's one of the most interesting, IMO, secrecy policies in modern governmental design. The government is left the right to keep its military and intelligence secrets; they may not, however, charge us money for said development without telling us. Moreover, we know which branch is sucking up what proportion; they can't just say "$X for black box secrets, carry on;" they are instead required to say that $X goes to the Army, another $Y to the Air Force, and so forth. (It's actually quite a bit more specific than that, but I don't feel like dredging up the details.)
You mean it wasn't George, Prince of Wales ?
Actually, if grandparent were true, it would be a sign that we didn't have enough government; just because you reduce the number of people doesn't mean the count of their duties goes down with them.
That said, there are far more than 30300 people in the federal government alone, let alone the state government, so happily it seems that neither of you is significantly more clueful than the other, and therefore I don't have to take sides.
Mod both parent and grandparent down.
There are plenty of science sources on TV but few if any shows dedicated to computer technology.
You seem to have missed the list in my post. Re-read it; it contains some of what you're currently claiming doesn't exist under your new replacement complaint, which by the way doesn't actually jive with your previous text.
"I hate history, the people on the history channel don't talk about anything but history."
What else would you expect the history channel to talk about besides history?
Yes, jackass, that's the entire reason I said that. You're talking about a network with the word "game" in its title, bitching that it shows too many gaming shows. How is this unclear, again? How is explaining my own metaphor back to me useful in your diatribe in any way?
What would you expect a channel called G4/TechTV to talk and report about?
I wouldn't know: there hasn't been such a channel for almost two years now. It's just called G4, and games are in that title, whereas Tech is not. If you'd read my post, you'd know that I'd already dealt with that; of course, it's fairly apparent that you didn't, seeing one thing you disliked and immediately jumping into attack mode. Down, boy: my steak. Go eat your own food.
Change the channel, dimwit.
Guess what, I have changed the channel and no longer watch G4/TechTV.
Unfortunately, not in time to stop you from whining on slashdot. Luckily, since you didn't say that in your post (though you pretend to have and even attempt to shame me for it in the reply post,) but rather discussed what was still on the channel, it seemed to everyone that you're still watching the channel - and frankly, I suspect you're now claiming you don't to try to look less stupid.
If you would have read my original post you would have seen that.
Oh? Here's the original post:
Apparently I wouldn't. Maybe you've got mystery words there that the rest of us can't see? Or, maybe you take that last paragraph differently, where you're talking about what's currently on the channel: I mean surely, if you know what's on the channel today, then you're not watching it. How silly of me. By the way, nobody's fooled; just thought you might like to know.
You are clearly a troll. Have a great day.
Yes, clearly it's me.
Oh, and since you don't seem to realize this: in Slashdot, we can get old articles and paste them again, and look what you really said. Lying about having meant or said something in the past may work when you're arguing with your little sister. Not here, son.
Carry on.
This should give you a sudden breath of air about the general (puns are fun) quality of Wikipedia, wherein misconception, misunderstanding, false memories and personal beliefs are frequently presented as fact.
George W. Bush Sr. has never held a military title above airman (a title he served with distinction, earning multiple moderate medals, unlike his son or father,) and Jr. never above first lieutenant; it is widely suspected among certain groups that Jr's service did not in fact earn him his Air National Guard status, but rather that it was a politically-inclined donation, and that Jr was an absentee to the degree that normal people would have been dishonorably discharged, and that his various documented refusals to take physical exams were cocaine-related.
It is worth noting that GHWB (that is, Sr.) did in fact get quite a distance within the intelligence community, eventually attaining high rank within the CIA, something that your Wikipedia article just totally fails to mention. It is amusing to note that both Bushes have a sordid drug history, despite their ridiculously overblown drug policies; whereas Jr.'s is illegal, Sr. participated in state-sanctionned LSD trials as a CIA agent, with megadoses of the drug which would make street users balk.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Commander in Chief is not a "general of the armies;" rather it is a civilian title ensuring that the military cannot simply take over during wartime, a remnant of fear of the sort of mess that came up during the then-recent Hundred Years' War. It is of critical importance that Commander In Chief is not a military title at all. That is, in fact, the entire purpose of the title. So, the notion that GWB Sr. was somehow a six star general is just bunk.
Wikipedia is in many ways similar to Herb Schildt: many people read it, many people believe it, and it's generally got the idea right, but all of the details are wrong in a way that makes educated people's blood boil. The information you read is, though not your fault, roughly equivalent void main(float Anger, const complex& Fury, wchar_t[]* Confusion) { return WithBadData; }
John Pershing is a very significant figure in the history of World War One, and is a much better target for this misunderstanding. The title "General of the Armies" was a title granted him in respect to his ass kicking of the Germans in France, after the fact; it is an honorarium, not an actual title. Whoever told you George Bush had earned this title was in error; it has only been applied twice in US history: once for Pershing, and then once again under Gerald Ford, applied posthumously to George Washington. In that respect, Pershing was unseated as the highest ranking US military official in history by a man which died sixty one years before Pershing was born.
It is interesting to note that though General of the Armies is a legitimate military rank by presidential decree since Ford's time, it doesn't actually have a rank position; it's just assumed to be higher in rank than all other military statuses. Because there's no rank position, one does not need to ascend the rank order to attain this title. (By comparison, no matter who desires it, a three star general may not become a five star general; they must do four stars first.)
This is why Pershing was able to become General of the Armies: he wasn't ever a five star general, and attained this rank as a four star general. Therefore, he is the only figure in US Military History to have command over superior military officers. It is also through this distinction that Ford was able to end-run Washington around Pershing as a PR maneuver; Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Army (remember, this is pre-Presidency; that's where the title comes from, even though it was made a civilian rank,) which through various humbuggery was decided to be equivalent to five-star general, and therefore was decided to trump four-star in the case of two historic figures with the non-ranked title.