Apparently you HS economics teacher drank too much of the Objectivist Kool-Aid, because not only is the Linux kernal free, so are most of the distros and the apps and drivers that run on them. Ideology makes fools of us all. Sometimes free as in beer does work better than the free market. It's an old concept called the "commons" that the free marketers dismiss out of hand. A well tended field of grass that anyone can use to feed their sheep works better than hundreds of jealously guarded walled microfields of patented grass. And grows the economy, because the people who generate real wealth by making things can spend money on things that improve their ability to do work, and hire more workers, rather than pay rent to all those monopolistic landlords. The latter system just works for the landlords. What you think works depends on which side of those walls you're standing.
By the way. Anyone keeping track where all that blank media money is going? Fat, happy, recompensed artists, perhaps? Or straight into a bookeepers hell?
Why, how can Norway spend money on this far-sighted project?
They nationalized the oil industry. They don't pay tens of billions of dollars a quarter in raw profits to the big four oil corporations. They have their own oil resources in the North Sea.
And since the told the reavers to get the hell out, they are running nice surpluses, have an excellent federally funded school system, giving them intelligent citizens, and they may save the plant diversity of the planet during the coming climate wreck.
Now, if they can fast track some space colonization, they might save humans from getting overheated to death.
These are things you can do if your country isn't being run by international oil companies.
Oh, here's a bit of news this week: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales just this past week fired a large number of US Attorneys across the country who weren't toeing the Gonzales party line. It's called a "coup d' etat". We lost the rule of law five years ago. We now have Rule by Party. If you don't play, you're gone.
"unless the justice departement already went wrong and had thrown away current legal rights. "
Um, yes. It was just two weeks ago that the Attorney General asserted there was no legal right to habeaus corpus in the Constitution. Apparently, all it takes for you to go away is the Decider deciding it so.
The future wid da boot in da face is already here. As the hundred or so people who died under torture these past five years. I think you'll need to hold a seance.
The problem is, somehow they've managed to judicially smooth the path for courts to accept fMRI "mindreading". It's a done deal. I don't know what mechanism they've used, but somehow, unlike polygraphs, the industry promoting this blow-flow detector has convinced ????? that these machines work. When they stick your head into this bucket, the courts and your employer will believe what it tells them. So get busy thinking innocent thoughts, and have faith that the promoters of this brain scanner will be as reliable as the suits who told election boards that PCs make swell vote counting machines.
Yes, you are paranoid. You've been fed fear via profitized news businesses most of your life, and you think you are under attack. You're fed this meme day in and day out, so much that you don't even notice that you're not even watching news anymore. You're watching fear pornography. Phobography. Fear that sells. Fear that turns us into people afraid of LEDs.
You're in more danger from your toaster than from a claymore.
Your car is a godless killing machine that's more efficient at killing than any war -- cars have killed far more people than all the wars of history combined, much less "terrorists". Yet somehow you sit in it, drive at 80 mph in a ten foot lane surrounded by others doing the same in an opposing lane, and never think about how much energy your vehicle can transmit to you if it is hit.
This fear of "terrorists" is demonstrably fear of the "other". The other is/has been the French, the English, the Indian, the Spanish, the anarchist, the socialist, the Russian Communist, the Libyan, the Chinese Communist, and now, the Arab/Moslem. All of them out to kill us for mad reasons. All the ultimate threat. And no one notices that the older version of the "other" isn't feared anymore, even tho they're still around.
The world isn't trying to kill you. Snap out of it! Your pockets are being picked! Your grandchildren are being robbed to service industries that are selling you terror. You're in debt up to your ass to give money to people who promise you they will protect you. And if someone really, really wanted to detonate a bomb, all your bomb squads, Homeland Security monitoring, airport security, all the paranoid procedures you all have put in place -- none of this will stop someone who's willing to die.
You want that to stop? Stop manufacturing people who are willing to die to get even with us.
Words, people, words have power. They had people put up signs. Viral marketing. If they'd pretended to be terrorists, that would have been a "stunt". The phraseology grants the victory to the idiotic for-profit news machines who created their own crisis, and the embarassed city officials who went insane and now want to look victimized. Nay, 'twasn't a stunt, 'twas a sign.
Point is, that there are different expectations of privacy for you, a schmuck, and for the rich and powerful. Try photographing the Vice President's home. Try it.
We're always quietly told that the age of privacy is gone forever, but it's a crock. It's over for US. A new age of superprivacy has been established behind gates all over the country for people whose names you don't need to know, move along.
It's called "feudalism". Lords and Barons on one side of the gate, safe and private, serfs and vassals in the wild countryside, giving up DNA, retinaprints, fingerprints, and photos on demand, having their movements tracked if the PowersThatBe laguidly lift their fingers and point at the person of interest. Two tiers, two countries, one side doing the lying, the other accepting the lie in terror of... everything.
It's a shame that Americans don't care as much about the real people being blown up with IEDs as they do about a cartoon ad that they imagine to be one. It's about as close to reality as they want to get, it seems.
Some of this might have been covered in other posts and in "Why writing software is hard", but oh well.
1. Calculus. Not designed for easy understanding, and arguably not necessary for CS. It may be part of programming, but is that because it is necessary, or because CS people know calculus and want to do something with all that painfully acquired knowledge? It's also a barrier that keeps out extremely intelligent people who could do great in CS, but didn't go down that particular mathematical road. Not knowing calc, I am not qualified to say whether or not it is indespensible, but it IS possible to live without it. I guess it is the old CS/CIS divide. Left and right brain, all that.
2. CS people are perceived as supercilious, arrogant, dissmissive, know-it-all antisocial males. This is a cliche, which is synonym for "obvious truth". Not many want to hang around such a social group. They also run heavily to objectivism, which makes for strained relationships with anyone to the left of Robert Heinlein.
3. No women. See above #2 for why.
4. Ageism. It is obvious that anyone over the age of 35 is not really welcome at the table. Unless you are in management, teaching, or are just the very best, you are not at the front of the line when you are applying for work at CoolTech. There are exceptions, and they are growing in number, because of the sheer pressure of so many aging tech people. But the perception, based on reality, is that you have a 15 year career and then you are not welcome at the D&D table at lunchtime.
5. The profession has been... no word for it, so let's call it "corporatized"? "Downprestiged"? "Bluecollared"? In the early 2000's, a little H1B magic and outsourcing work to cheaper countries gave employers the ability treat their formerly royal employees like janitorial temps. Wages plummetted, management grew rich, resumes were used as kindling for the boss's fireplace. People who spent a decade or more working long days found out that they were as disposable as a Bic lighter in the management's view. Wrong of course, but perception is key and they weren't about to admit they were wrong, so the bitchslapping continues. The bosses *hate* the CS people for having the upper hand for over ten years, and the payback is not going to stop.
6. Not everyone wants to leap around the country year after year following contract jobs. Can't raise a family or grow equity in real estate that way, and it is a pain in the ass besides.
7. No unions allowed. Rightist attitudes amongst CS people themselves and a host of labor laws gone unenforced for over 25 years have seen to it that no collective bargaining can be performed, or even be legal. A bit of elitism ("we aren't blue collar lazy union asses!") doesn't help.
8. What the HELL kind of mess has programming become? Where do you even start anymore? It's in every direction at once.
9. When exactly did programming become so "businesslike" we have to dress like bankers? Not everyone wants to be a suit. Especially when it's not necessary.
10. Wages down. Manipulated to stay that way.
11. It's a lonely profession, and if you are gregarious, the silence and enforced isolation (even if its in your own head) is wearing. Not everyone wants to be a mathematically inclined loner.
I agree with ya, but for this: 1. There is no such thing as "terrorism". Or "terrorists". It's facile paranoia, a method of lumping anything or anyone who dislikes us into a thing, a (pseudo)country we can spend lots of money having wars with.
2. There aren't any "terrorists" monitoring our fears, rejoicing in our reactions. The Great Terrorist Threat doesn't exist as described by Bush and Cheney.
Bin Laden has specific goals that he mostly achieved, not only by blowing things up, but as he said, by making us do, through our ignorance and nature, stupid things in the Middle East and central asia, provoking a holy war against the encroaching West by the outraged. He was depressingly accurate. He wasn't clinically insane, just vicious and fanatical.
Point is, he's not sitting around with al Queda desperately trying to find ways past the unbelieveably impregnable fortress that Bush has created by repealing the constitution. He's done, we're igniting WW III, and there's no real reason to trick us into attacking anyone anymore. We've set our autopilot to Due Stupid, and we'll do what he wanted without any further help from his suicide boys, of which he didn't have enough anyway.
Mod you up if I could. NO one remembers that the whole Halloween killer kandy terror was caused by family killing their own, not strangers passing out goodies. I hesitate to say no one ever has done it since that hoax, since the idea is now firmly implanted in the minds of the deranged, but safe to say that not one human being in the US has poisoned any candy on Halloween and given it out at the door. But we still act like it happened, just as we still act like swarthy moslems are lurking at every overpass. Madness.
Pretty soon, every PC sold will have Vista on it. It's like water leaking into a basement. The install base grows, then it has to be maintained. Choice won't be a factor.
Time for the Newbux. Adjust money by x10. Pennies become worth a dime, dollars become valued at ten dollars. We keep the penny, everyone's happy. And stop borrowing to finance tax cuts, the inflation from flooding the economy with liquid high-tier wealth is killing us. Stop using foreign oil; it's become our gold standard.
People who live in cities, people who work on farms, people who have to walk, burn calories. People who drive, don't. To reduce the amount of food to adjust for your car driving, you'd have to eat like a supermodel. And that isn't socially possible, so we have fatty-fat-fats driving Navigators around the pesticide and herbicide soaked former meadows of America. Complaining about public transist subsidies...
Kerry was as good a man as life can produce. His oratory skills were pitched to a grade level so above the normal that people couldn't hear what he was saying. But for that, he was an excellent soldier who enlisted rather than be dragged or, as in every single case in the war-obsessed Bush White House, weaseled out through money and connections. I'm not saying that weaseling out of a stupid war is a bad character flaw, but after doing so, they shouldn't make a show of grinding up an all-volunteer army, saying, as Bush did last week, that they signed up for it, implying he had no responsibility for what happened after.
Kerry spent a life in public service when he could have done a hundred other things, and he seems to have done a good job. I'm not happy with his willingness to go along with Bush in the fake war push, but remember that he was a soldier, and they have deeply ingrained training to trust the CIC and the political process that send the US to war. And he was watching the same news media that everyone else but a few determined internet surfers were, so he believed the trainloads of crap that were being rolled out by Judith Miller and PBS and every damned outlet in the country.
He got better, he learned, so did everyone else. Now we are united, and the only question is how we disarm and tie up the "fucking loonies", as Bush 41's staff used to call the people who now run Bush 43's government.
"Partisan" doesn't mean "anti-Bush". The democrats were locked out of government, and that is a literal description of what happened in the Senate and the House committees in some cases, for the last six years. It's like a home invader complaining the the occupants are politicizing the burglary procedure. Fox News is running stories right now implying, saying, that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim. There is simply nothing like this class of filthy politics on the "liberal" side. the rightists have the field to themselves because they started out vile and have dived down into the cesspit of one-sided partisanship like nothing seen before in american history, and that is saying a lot. And the money that has been stolen, right out in front of god and man, it outclasses anything done in the Gilded Age of the 1800's. And the fake wars, and the military spending, and the secret torture gulags, and the claims that human rights don't exist if the President says not, even the majority of the people who call themselves rightwing are finally sounding out that what has happened is nothing like conservative government. We have a situation on our hands here, and it isn't the liberals vs. the conservatives, it's Bush's burgeoning fascists and their news outlets against the Democrats, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the Republican majority, and finally a timid press that has hid out, fearing being labeled liberal.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you HS economics teacher drank too much of the Objectivist Kool-Aid, because not only is the Linux kernal free, so are most of the distros and the apps and drivers that run on them. Ideology makes fools of us all. Sometimes free as in beer does work better than the free market. It's an old concept called the "commons" that the free marketers dismiss out of hand. A well tended field of grass that anyone can use to feed their sheep works better than hundreds of jealously guarded walled microfields of patented grass. And grows the economy, because the people who generate real wealth by making things can spend money on things that improve their ability to do work, and hire more workers, rather than pay rent to all those monopolistic landlords. The latter system just works for the landlords. What you think works depends on which side of those walls you're standing.
The Star Wars movies were filmed in England :)
By the way. Anyone keeping track where all that blank media money is going? Fat, happy, recompensed artists, perhaps? Or straight into a bookeepers hell?
If I get some mod points today, I'll be back to give you one.
Jobs finally decloaked, and stood up against the RIAA. Now Yahoo. And all I see is... people... calling them names.
Apparently nothing can satisfy you? Are you all just terminally apolitical? The enemy of the enemy is our friend. Back them the hell up.
Why, how can Norway spend money on this far-sighted project?
They nationalized the oil industry. They don't pay tens of billions of dollars a quarter in raw profits to the big four oil corporations. They have their own oil resources in the North Sea.
And since the told the reavers to get the hell out, they are running nice surpluses, have an excellent federally funded school system, giving them intelligent citizens, and they may save the plant diversity of the planet during the coming climate wreck.
Now, if they can fast track some space colonization, they might save humans from getting overheated to death.
These are things you can do if your country isn't being run by international oil companies.
Oh, here's a bit of news this week: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales just this past week fired a large number of US Attorneys across the country who weren't toeing the Gonzales party line. It's called a "coup d' etat". We lost the rule of law five years ago. We now have Rule by Party. If you don't play, you're gone.
"unless the justice departement already went wrong and had thrown away current legal rights. "
Um, yes. It was just two weeks ago that the Attorney General asserted there was no legal right to habeaus corpus in the Constitution. Apparently, all it takes for you to go away is the Decider deciding it so.
The future wid da boot in da face is already here. As the hundred or so people who died under torture these past five years. I think you'll need to hold a seance.
The problem is, somehow they've managed to judicially smooth the path for courts to accept fMRI "mindreading". It's a done deal. I don't know what mechanism they've used, but somehow, unlike polygraphs, the industry promoting this blow-flow detector has convinced ????? that these machines work. When they stick your head into this bucket, the courts and your employer will believe what it tells them. So get busy thinking innocent thoughts, and have faith that the promoters of this brain scanner will be as reliable as the suits who told election boards that PCs make swell vote counting machines.
Yes, you are paranoid. You've been fed fear via profitized news businesses most of your life, and you think you are under attack. You're fed this meme day in and day out, so much that you don't even notice that you're not even watching news anymore. You're watching fear pornography. Phobography. Fear that sells. Fear that turns us into people afraid of LEDs.
You're in more danger from your toaster than from a claymore.
Your car is a godless killing machine that's more efficient at killing than any war -- cars have killed far more people than all the wars of history combined, much less "terrorists". Yet somehow you sit in it, drive at 80 mph in a ten foot lane surrounded by others doing the same in an opposing lane, and never think about how much energy your vehicle can transmit to you if it is hit.
This fear of "terrorists" is demonstrably fear of the "other". The other is/has been the French, the English, the Indian, the Spanish, the anarchist, the socialist, the Russian Communist, the Libyan, the Chinese Communist, and now, the Arab/Moslem. All of them out to kill us for mad reasons. All the ultimate threat. And no one notices that the older version of the "other" isn't feared anymore, even tho they're still around.
The world isn't trying to kill you. Snap out of it! Your pockets are being picked! Your grandchildren are being robbed to service industries that are selling you terror. You're in debt up to your ass to give money to people who promise you they will protect you. And if someone really, really wanted to detonate a bomb, all your bomb squads, Homeland Security monitoring, airport security, all the paranoid procedures you all have put in place -- none of this will stop someone who's willing to die.
You want that to stop? Stop manufacturing people who are willing to die to get even with us.
Words, people, words have power. They had people put up signs. Viral marketing. If they'd pretended to be terrorists, that would have been a "stunt". The phraseology grants the victory to the idiotic for-profit news machines who created their own crisis, and the embarassed city officials who went insane and now want to look victimized. Nay, 'twasn't a stunt, 'twas a sign.
Point is, that there are different expectations of privacy for you, a schmuck, and for the rich and powerful. Try photographing the Vice President's home. Try it.
We're always quietly told that the age of privacy is gone forever, but it's a crock. It's over for US. A new age of superprivacy has been established behind gates all over the country for people whose names you don't need to know, move along.
It's called "feudalism". Lords and Barons on one side of the gate, safe and private, serfs and vassals in the wild countryside, giving up DNA, retinaprints, fingerprints, and photos on demand, having their movements tracked if the PowersThatBe laguidly lift their fingers and point at the person of interest. Two tiers, two countries, one side doing the lying, the other accepting the lie in terror of... everything.
It's a shame that Americans don't care as much about the real people being blown up with IEDs as they do about a cartoon ad that they imagine to be one. It's about as close to reality as they want to get, it seems.
Some of this might have been covered in other posts and in "Why writing software is hard", but oh well.
1. Calculus. Not designed for easy understanding, and arguably not necessary for CS. It may be part of programming, but is that because it is necessary, or because CS people know calculus and want to do something with all that painfully acquired knowledge? It's also a barrier that keeps out extremely intelligent people who could do great in CS, but didn't go down that particular mathematical road. Not knowing calc, I am not qualified to say whether or not it is indespensible, but it IS possible to live without it. I guess it is the old CS/CIS divide. Left and right brain, all that.
2. CS people are perceived as supercilious, arrogant, dissmissive, know-it-all antisocial males. This is a cliche, which is synonym for "obvious truth". Not many want to hang around such a social group. They also run heavily to objectivism, which makes for strained relationships with anyone to the left of Robert Heinlein.
3. No women. See above #2 for why.
4. Ageism. It is obvious that anyone over the age of 35 is not really welcome at the table. Unless you are in management, teaching, or are just the very best, you are not at the front of the line when you are applying for work at CoolTech. There are exceptions, and they are growing in number, because of the sheer pressure of so many aging tech people. But the perception, based on reality, is that you have a 15 year career and then you are not welcome at the D&D table at lunchtime.
5. The profession has been... no word for it, so let's call it "corporatized"? "Downprestiged"? "Bluecollared"? In the early 2000's, a little H1B magic and outsourcing work to cheaper countries gave employers the ability treat their formerly royal employees like janitorial temps. Wages plummetted, management grew rich, resumes were used as kindling for the boss's fireplace. People who spent a decade or more working long days found out that they were as disposable as a Bic lighter in the management's view. Wrong of course, but perception is key and they weren't about to admit they were wrong, so the bitchslapping continues. The bosses *hate* the CS people for having the upper hand for over ten years, and the payback is not going to stop.
6. Not everyone wants to leap around the country year after year following contract jobs. Can't raise a family or grow equity in real estate that way, and it is a pain in the ass besides.
7. No unions allowed. Rightist attitudes amongst CS people themselves and a host of labor laws gone unenforced for over 25 years have seen to it that no collective bargaining can be performed, or even be legal. A bit of elitism ("we aren't blue collar lazy union asses!") doesn't help.
8. What the HELL kind of mess has programming become? Where do you even start anymore? It's in every direction at once.
9. When exactly did programming become so "businesslike" we have to dress like bankers? Not everyone wants to be a suit. Especially when it's not necessary.
10. Wages down. Manipulated to stay that way.
11. It's a lonely profession, and if you are gregarious, the silence and enforced isolation (even if its in your own head) is wearing. Not everyone wants to be a mathematically inclined loner.
12. No women, not many anyway. Worth repeating.
I agree with ya, but for this:
1. There is no such thing as "terrorism". Or "terrorists". It's facile paranoia, a method of lumping anything or anyone who dislikes us into a thing, a (pseudo)country we can spend lots of money having wars with.
2. There aren't any "terrorists" monitoring our fears, rejoicing in our reactions. The Great Terrorist Threat doesn't exist as described by Bush and Cheney.
Bin Laden has specific goals that he mostly achieved, not only by blowing things up, but as he said, by making us do, through our ignorance and nature, stupid things in the Middle East and central asia, provoking a holy war against the encroaching West by the outraged. He was depressingly accurate. He wasn't clinically insane, just vicious and fanatical.
Point is, he's not sitting around with al Queda desperately trying to find ways past the unbelieveably impregnable fortress that Bush has created by repealing the constitution. He's done, we're igniting WW III, and there's no real reason to trick us into attacking anyone anymore. We've set our autopilot to Due Stupid, and we'll do what he wanted without any further help from his suicide boys, of which he didn't have enough anyway.
Mod you up if I could. NO one remembers that the whole Halloween killer kandy terror was caused by family killing their own, not strangers passing out goodies. I hesitate to say no one ever has done it since that hoax, since the idea is now firmly implanted in the minds of the deranged, but safe to say that not one human being in the US has poisoned any candy on Halloween and given it out at the door. But we still act like it happened, just as we still act like swarthy moslems are lurking at every overpass. Madness.
There was no reason for this, none whatsoever. No one should have to pay for the madness of the professionally terrified.
Pretty soon, every PC sold will have Vista on it. It's like water leaking into a basement. The install base grows, then it has to be maintained. Choice won't be a factor.
Time for the Newbux. Adjust money by x10. Pennies become worth a dime, dollars become valued at ten dollars. We keep the penny, everyone's happy. And stop borrowing to finance tax cuts, the inflation from flooding the economy with liquid high-tier wealth is killing us. Stop using foreign oil; it's become our gold standard.
Pointing out that the Attorney General doesn't believe in habeus corpus rights is now "leftist". Gotcha. The Constitution is now "lefty". Gotch.
You're lazy, and live too far away from Leeds. Couldn't resist.
I think you've spent some paragraphs defining "nihilism".
Two factors: eating and exercise.
People who live in cities, people who work on farms, people who have to walk, burn calories. People who drive, don't. To reduce the amount of food to adjust for your car driving, you'd have to eat like a supermodel. And that isn't socially possible, so we have fatty-fat-fats driving Navigators around the pesticide and herbicide soaked former meadows of America. Complaining about public transist subsidies...
Kerry was as good a man as life can produce. His oratory skills were pitched to a grade level so above the normal that people couldn't hear what he was saying. But for that, he was an excellent soldier who enlisted rather than be dragged or, as in every single case in the war-obsessed Bush White House, weaseled out through money and connections. I'm not saying that weaseling out of a stupid war is a bad character flaw, but after doing so, they shouldn't make a show of grinding up an all-volunteer army, saying, as Bush did last week, that they signed up for it, implying he had no responsibility for what happened after.
Kerry spent a life in public service when he could have done a hundred other things, and he seems to have done a good job. I'm not happy with his willingness to go along with Bush in the fake war push, but remember that he was a soldier, and they have deeply ingrained training to trust the CIC and the political process that send the US to war. And he was watching the same news media that everyone else but a few determined internet surfers were, so he believed the trainloads of crap that were being rolled out by Judith Miller and PBS and every damned outlet in the country.
He got better, he learned, so did everyone else. Now we are united, and the only question is how we disarm and tie up the "fucking loonies", as Bush 41's staff used to call the people who now run Bush 43's government.
"Partisan" doesn't mean "anti-Bush". The democrats were locked out of government, and that is a literal description of what happened in the Senate and the House committees in some cases, for the last six years. It's like a home invader complaining the the occupants are politicizing the burglary procedure. Fox News is running stories right now implying, saying, that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim. There is simply nothing like this class of filthy politics on the "liberal" side. the rightists have the field to themselves because they started out vile and have dived down into the cesspit of one-sided partisanship like nothing seen before in american history, and that is saying a lot. And the money that has been stolen, right out in front of god and man, it outclasses anything done in the Gilded Age of the 1800's. And the fake wars, and the military spending, and the secret torture gulags, and the claims that human rights don't exist if the President says not, even the majority of the people who call themselves rightwing are finally sounding out that what has happened is nothing like conservative government. We have a situation on our hands here, and it isn't the liberals vs. the conservatives, it's Bush's burgeoning fascists and their news outlets against the Democrats, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the Republican majority, and finally a timid press that has hid out, fearing being labeled liberal.