PowerPoint - nothing else even comes close. As engineers we don't care about it, but there are just as many people who live and die by the PowerPoint presentation (literally in some cases, as the US military leadership is sadly all about the PPT these days).
SmartArt is freaking magic for some people. It's exactly the sort of automation that LaTeX would be great at, but presented visually, not as "yet another programming language for those geeks." Like VI or EMACS, PowerPoint will always be with us: it's that central to a culture.
>>> It's time to deal with radical Islamist extremists.
How? Declare Islam a thought-crime?
The problem has never been "Islam", and wanting to eliminate terrorists has nothing to do with being anti-religion. The problem is, as has happen so often throughout history, a bunch of people who self-identify with a particular religion are being steered by leaders who claim that religion as a tool to get followers.
The problem must be solved within the leadership of Islam. The honest leaders of the religion need to become more vigorous about this - expel those inciting violence, denounce them as heretics, cause a schism, all the same shit that the Catholic church had to go through in centuries past.
National leaders who are not religious leaders need to do what they can to support that. When someone with religious authority denounces a terrorist religious leader as such, of course that terrorist group will try to kill that authority. The state can offer protection.
Completely separate form religion, we should be bombing the fuck out of assholes who start conquering, looting and raping their neighbors like it was the middle ages! America still has some strength, and there's a growing territory where women have become property, and are being raped daily. Where men re being executed out of hand for having the wrong religion. Where they're partying like it's 999. We can't let that cancer grow - humanity mustn't slide back into barbarism.
Tabs suck - switching between explorers using the task bar (when set up properly to not combine windows on the taskbar) is good.
What explorer has lacked since Windows 3.1 is two panes in explorer, to simplify moving/sorting stuff between directories. Yeah, you can snap an explorer to each side of the desktop these days but that only works properly if you have just 1 monitor. If I could easily tile explorers on one monitor in a multi-mon setup, that would be far less annoying.
There are still bills I pay with paper. (Some companies still charge for the "privilege" of paying online, which pisses me off even though the amount doesn't matter.)
I occasionally deposit checks via mail. Even if I trusted my phone enough to put banking software on it (which would be a silly thing to do), that only works for some kinds of checks.
Some companies respond to customer complaints via paper mail much better than they do via the net.
Sometimes I send checks to family members who aren't technologically sophisticated enough for there to be another way.
Maybe all of those reasons will disappear eventually, but I doubt that will be in my lifetime. It's also worth remembering that you can still send some mail anonymously - frankly, I'm surprised you still can, as there's nothing a totalitarian state hates more than anonymous communication.
So you're argument, as I understand it is: "I don't care that it wasn't actually illegal, because this is really about why Bush was bad"? Or was it "I'm going to insist on my own private definition of illegal and yell at anyone who uses the normal meaning"?
You don't find the idea of fertilizing an egg just so you can harvest the embryo creepy, and morally dubious? Seems creepy to me - if the problems can be solved a different way, lets do that.
Where the Hell do you work? Sounds like a terribly crappy company - name and shame! Then change to a less crappy one (which may involve learning not-Ruby). I've been a dev for 20-mumble years in 4 states, and I've never seen a culture like that.
Unless things have changed dramatically*, there are rules that make it harder to use commercial cloud computing, as not all can guarantee that the services will only be hosted in the U.S.
Almost everything you do in Amazon is by region - certainly any EC2 servers you use directly are. Scaling up to thousands of servers in a region is easier than you think with the tools available now - EC2 is a mature ecosystem these days. Plus there's this, which you may have heard of.
Want a front-end behind a load balancer that adds servers as load grows, and gives them back when is shrinks? There's hardly any coding involved. If you have non-transactional data, like TFA, you just use their NoSQL DB and, seriously, just type the IOPS you need into a box (though it's hard to make that part elastic). For "year make and model"-indexed recall data, that data will all fit in memory on cache servers, so just stand up some memcached (or something more modern) in front of the DB.
This stuff is only hard if you're on a really tiny budget.
You seem intent on missing the point that it doesn't matter what system you come up with, that system must be performed by people, and people are very corruptible. If you need the opinion of scientists, then completely complicit scientists will be found or created. There's ultimately no way to makes laws other than "those in power decide," as every system is really that system under the covers - by the definition of "power."
To a court, what is "scientifically valid" other than the testimony of scientists as to what's valid?
The puritanical obscenity laws were backed with "scientific studies" showing that society would collapse if people watched porn, or some such BS. Ultimately, the court just injected its own personal opinions. The current extreme laws against CP (beyond obscenity laws) are based on just such an argument of direct harm due to the content - an argument the SCOTUS bought. Are those arguments actually compelling enough to justify banning CP under obscenity laws (a lower bar)? I dunno, I didn't spend that much time looking into it, but it's not unreasonable to think it might be so. Does that extend to drawings? I'm highly skeptical.
If they can show true harm, then I think it's fine to ban it. I thought we were talking about obscenity laws, though.
Sure, which keeps coming back to "who decides" what's true harm. That's the heart of all government corruption - the power given to the decider. As much as the US does some screwy stuff from time to time, our systems for deciding have proven pretty robust, relative to all the systems we know about. If the system occasionally spits out stuff like obscenity laws, well, there are far worse failure modes, like what just happened in the UK.
A great many laws in the USSR were "backed by scientifically valid studies and scientific consensus". Amazing what consensus you can get when all the scientists' families have guns pointed at them, and you have firm control over universities and who's allowed to be a scientist. I believe we're quite far along in the latter problem in the US today.
You can't substitute one kind of oligarchy for another and come out ahead.
The right to speech is not the right to throw a brick wrapped in a note through a window.
The right to speech is not the right to deliberately cause real and immediate physical harm to another.
You know, we're in full agreement here. Neither of those things are pure speech.
Finally, common ground. I'd note that selling a product isn't pure speech either (especially advertising, or other avenues for fraud). Neither is a disruptive protest that blocks streets etc. When a government argues that allowing X would cause real harm to the person or liberties of others, there must be some process to arbitrate that claim. Life is never simple.
It's not about "bad", it's about "likely to cause harm in this measurable way". I think obscenity laws are pretty silly, but that's just my opinion. As has often been said, democracy is the worst form of government, other than everything else that's ever been tried. If the local government can convince a court that there's a compelling state interest ("throwing a brick through a window clearly damages property and may cause injury") and that the least restrictive method was chosen ("we're not banning the words on the note, just the part where the brick flies through the window"), then I'm OK with that process, as much as it sometimes ends in particular places I disapprove of.
That rarely comes up in law, is the thing, other than the occasional attempt to redefine pi. Almost all law is banning stuff people simply don't like, backed by studies justifying that opinion. Everything's a trade-off. What's the right tradeoff? What's the best speed limit? Where to set the testing bar for a new drug? Metric or imperial? Free trade or protectionism? Nudity or burkas?
So you're OK with someone shouting through a bullhorn at 3AM? That's a kind of speech right?
So your OK with lynch mobs, with some addressing an angry crowd shouting "are there any queers in the theater tonight? get them up against the wall! that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon, who let all this riffraff into the room? get em up against the wall!"
What about conspiracy to murder - that's speech?
I'm all for protecting the content of speech, and highly skeptical of any restrictions on political speech, but free speech isn't the only protected right, and often rights come into conflict. The right to speech is not the right to throw a brick wrapped in a note through a window. The right to speech is not the right to deliberately cause real and immediate physical harm to another. The right to speech is not the right to public nudity, though that's certainly a form of free expression.
And in this day and age, where it's trivial to order almost anything online, a local government restricting the local sale of X doesn't bother me - that's a world of difference from forbidding possession of X.
Repeated assertions are not argument. "Yes they are!" "No they aren't!"
There's a world of difference between content-based restrictions and time-place-manner based restrictions - do you agree? Are you okay with someone shouting their political speech through a bullhorn at your window at 3AM? Their non-political speech?
Do you believe "dry counties" are constitutional? Can a local government restrict the sale of anything the democratic process dislikes? No restrictions at all? Remember, what's "subjective" is subjective - I can find a study supporting any crazy idea.
Where specifically is your point of objection, or are you just emoting "I want everything I like gimme now"? Believing issues have simple black-and-white answers is something children do while they're learning about the world in all its complexity. The interesting discussion is "what's the right test for allowing the government to restrict this"? "Never ever" is a childish answer.
Or, put differently, a diversity of skills and abilities is what you want to deal with the unknown. NASA knows this, of course. But it's not just a variety of PhDs that you want, it's a variety of physical capacities and problem-solving approaches.
Historically, NASA has expected any improvisation to happen on the ground, where teams could experiment and relay the best, tested idea back to the guy in space. That becomes less practical the further you get form Earth. Diversity beyond "diversity of PhDs" will be valuable.
All law is subjective. The test for this stuff is well-hammered-out. To restrict something, the state must show both that there's a compelling state interest in doing so, and that the ban is the least-restrictive means of achieving that. Restricting commercial sale of something "harmful" is completely within the remit of government. That's different from outlawing the content itself, which is the core of the First Amendment. "Time, place, and manner" restrictions are legit.
This is much like the distinction between "hate speech," thankfully fully protected, and "incitement to riot" which might the very same content, but in a different time and place.
What people lose sight of is that these CP laws go farther than obscenity laws, so far that no other material has been allowed to be similarly restricted by the SCOTUS. And I very much fear that's just the camels nose under the tent when it comes to bypassing the First Amendment entirely.
Obscenity laws are much less restrictive than the witchhunt-inspired CP laws. Obscenity laws only ban the sale, and public display/performance of material. They don't ban possession, and IANAL but I don't know of any states where they ban the free, private distribution of material. Very different from the CP laws, which are overt prior restraint.
I don't find sensibly-written obscenity laws objectionable - that's just product regulation of a sort. If a local government wants to outlaw the sale of cartoons, or bomb-making instructions, or whatever, well, if they can demonstrate a strong interest of the state in doing so, and also that this is the least-restrictive means to achieve that objective, then go for it.
It's outlawing possession or non-commercial private distribution of "objectionable materials" that alarms me: it's only a matter of time before anti-party-in-power political speech joins the list of "objectionable material", if history is any guide.
Is there any current distro focused on easy desktop use that has resisted the system wave? I'd hate to see the world divided into "server distros (know what's you're doing or don't even try)" and "easy desktop distros, system required".
Further, this sounds like there's a lot of money to be made, and if your line went faster, you'd make a lot more money at the same price. Anyone capable of the logistics who wants some money? Sounds like you could make a pretty sum.
There's been a real shortage of RNs for over a decade now (there are various skill levels in nursing, but an RN is as much work as a non-specialist doctor, really). Supply and demand.
If you develop software for $40k, you should be looking. If you're willing to relocate and aren't fresh out of school, you'll certainly double, maybe triple that. All the big companies are hiring now. Make sure your resume is visible on LinkedIn (and maybe that Dice site, I guess) - I know my team is searching the nation for anyone qualified and willing to relocate, and we're not alone in that!
Slashdot Mirror
PowerPoint - nothing else even comes close. As engineers we don't care about it, but there are just as many people who live and die by the PowerPoint presentation (literally in some cases, as the US military leadership is sadly all about the PPT these days).
SmartArt is freaking magic for some people. It's exactly the sort of automation that LaTeX would be great at, but presented visually, not as "yet another programming language for those geeks." Like VI or EMACS, PowerPoint will always be with us: it's that central to a culture.
>>> It's time to deal with radical Islamist extremists.
How? Declare Islam a thought-crime?
The problem has never been "Islam", and wanting to eliminate terrorists has nothing to do with being anti-religion. The problem is, as has happen so often throughout history, a bunch of people who self-identify with a particular religion are being steered by leaders who claim that religion as a tool to get followers.
The problem must be solved within the leadership of Islam. The honest leaders of the religion need to become more vigorous about this - expel those inciting violence, denounce them as heretics, cause a schism, all the same shit that the Catholic church had to go through in centuries past.
National leaders who are not religious leaders need to do what they can to support that. When someone with religious authority denounces a terrorist religious leader as such, of course that terrorist group will try to kill that authority. The state can offer protection.
Completely separate form religion, we should be bombing the fuck out of assholes who start conquering, looting and raping their neighbors like it was the middle ages! America still has some strength, and there's a growing territory where women have become property, and are being raped daily. Where men re being executed out of hand for having the wrong religion. Where they're partying like it's 999. We can't let that cancer grow - humanity mustn't slide back into barbarism.
Just to level-set, do you find camps where undesirables (defined however you like) can be sent creepy, and morally dubious?
Ah, this sort of Linux-inspired "you'll never figure it out, a friend has to tell you" stuff annoys me. Well, thanks for telling me!
Tabs suck - switching between explorers using the task bar (when set up properly to not combine windows on the taskbar) is good.
What explorer has lacked since Windows 3.1 is two panes in explorer, to simplify moving/sorting stuff between directories. Yeah, you can snap an explorer to each side of the desktop these days but that only works properly if you have just 1 monitor. If I could easily tile explorers on one monitor in a multi-mon setup, that would be far less annoying.
Man, there's straw everywhere. Who's going to clean this mess up?
The only time I ever see "women are stupid and bad at coding! " on /. is when SJWs construct a new strawman to thrash.
There are still bills I pay with paper. (Some companies still charge for the "privilege" of paying online, which pisses me off even though the amount doesn't matter.)
I occasionally deposit checks via mail. Even if I trusted my phone enough to put banking software on it (which would be a silly thing to do), that only works for some kinds of checks.
Some companies respond to customer complaints via paper mail much better than they do via the net.
Sometimes I send checks to family members who aren't technologically sophisticated enough for there to be another way.
Maybe all of those reasons will disappear eventually, but I doubt that will be in my lifetime. It's also worth remembering that you can still send some mail anonymously - frankly, I'm surprised you still can, as there's nothing a totalitarian state hates more than anonymous communication.
So you're argument, as I understand it is: "I don't care that it wasn't actually illegal, because this is really about why Bush was bad"? Or was it "I'm going to insist on my own private definition of illegal and yell at anyone who uses the normal meaning"?
You don't find the idea of fertilizing an egg just so you can harvest the embryo creepy, and morally dubious? Seems creepy to me - if the problems can be solved a different way, lets do that.
Where the Hell do you work? Sounds like a terribly crappy company - name and shame! Then change to a less crappy one (which may involve learning not-Ruby). I've been a dev for 20-mumble years in 4 states, and I've never seen a culture like that.
Or was that a list of imaginary problems?
Unless things have changed dramatically*, there are rules that make it harder to use commercial cloud computing, as not all can guarantee that the services will only be hosted in the U.S.
Almost everything you do in Amazon is by region - certainly any EC2 servers you use directly are. Scaling up to thousands of servers in a region is easier than you think with the tools available now - EC2 is a mature ecosystem these days. Plus there's this, which you may have heard of.
Want a front-end behind a load balancer that adds servers as load grows, and gives them back when is shrinks? There's hardly any coding involved. If you have non-transactional data, like TFA, you just use their NoSQL DB and, seriously, just type the IOPS you need into a box (though it's hard to make that part elastic). For "year make and model"-indexed recall data, that data will all fit in memory on cache servers, so just stand up some memcached (or something more modern) in front of the DB.
This stuff is only hard if you're on a really tiny budget.
You seem intent on missing the point that it doesn't matter what system you come up with, that system must be performed by people, and people are very corruptible. If you need the opinion of scientists, then completely complicit scientists will be found or created. There's ultimately no way to makes laws other than "those in power decide," as every system is really that system under the covers - by the definition of "power."
Anyhow, on the subject of obscenity laws, if you haven't seen this yet you'll appreciate it: http://www.lehighvalleylive.co...
To a court, what is "scientifically valid" other than the testimony of scientists as to what's valid?
The puritanical obscenity laws were backed with "scientific studies" showing that society would collapse if people watched porn, or some such BS. Ultimately, the court just injected its own personal opinions. The current extreme laws against CP (beyond obscenity laws) are based on just such an argument of direct harm due to the content - an argument the SCOTUS bought. Are those arguments actually compelling enough to justify banning CP under obscenity laws (a lower bar)? I dunno, I didn't spend that much time looking into it, but it's not unreasonable to think it might be so. Does that extend to drawings? I'm highly skeptical.
If they can show true harm, then I think it's fine to ban it. I thought we were talking about obscenity laws, though.
Sure, which keeps coming back to "who decides" what's true harm. That's the heart of all government corruption - the power given to the decider. As much as the US does some screwy stuff from time to time, our systems for deciding have proven pretty robust, relative to all the systems we know about. If the system occasionally spits out stuff like obscenity laws, well, there are far worse failure modes, like what just happened in the UK.
A great many laws in the USSR were "backed by scientifically valid studies and scientific consensus". Amazing what consensus you can get when all the scientists' families have guns pointed at them, and you have firm control over universities and who's allowed to be a scientist. I believe we're quite far along in the latter problem in the US today.
You can't substitute one kind of oligarchy for another and come out ahead.
The right to speech is not the right to throw a brick wrapped in a note through a window.
The right to speech is not the right to deliberately cause real and immediate physical harm to another.
You know, we're in full agreement here. Neither of those things are pure speech.
Finally, common ground. I'd note that selling a product isn't pure speech either (especially advertising, or other avenues for fraud). Neither is a disruptive protest that blocks streets etc. When a government argues that allowing X would cause real harm to the person or liberties of others, there must be some process to arbitrate that claim. Life is never simple.
It's not about "bad", it's about "likely to cause harm in this measurable way". I think obscenity laws are pretty silly, but that's just my opinion. As has often been said, democracy is the worst form of government, other than everything else that's ever been tried. If the local government can convince a court that there's a compelling state interest ("throwing a brick through a window clearly damages property and may cause injury") and that the least restrictive method was chosen ("we're not banning the words on the note, just the part where the brick flies through the window"), then I'm OK with that process, as much as it sometimes ends in particular places I disapprove of.
That rarely comes up in law, is the thing, other than the occasional attempt to redefine pi. Almost all law is banning stuff people simply don't like, backed by studies justifying that opinion. Everything's a trade-off. What's the right tradeoff? What's the best speed limit? Where to set the testing bar for a new drug? Metric or imperial? Free trade or protectionism? Nudity or burkas?
Ahh, an ideolog, unconcerned with the real world.
So you're OK with someone shouting through a bullhorn at 3AM? That's a kind of speech right?
So your OK with lynch mobs, with some addressing an angry crowd shouting "are there any queers in the theater tonight? get them up against the wall! that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon, who let all this riffraff into the room? get em up against the wall!"
What about conspiracy to murder - that's speech?
I'm all for protecting the content of speech, and highly skeptical of any restrictions on political speech, but free speech isn't the only protected right, and often rights come into conflict. The right to speech is not the right to throw a brick wrapped in a note through a window. The right to speech is not the right to deliberately cause real and immediate physical harm to another. The right to speech is not the right to public nudity, though that's certainly a form of free expression.
And in this day and age, where it's trivial to order almost anything online, a local government restricting the local sale of X doesn't bother me - that's a world of difference from forbidding possession of X.
Repeated assertions are not argument. "Yes they are!" "No they aren't!"
There's a world of difference between content-based restrictions and time-place-manner based restrictions - do you agree? Are you okay with someone shouting their political speech through a bullhorn at your window at 3AM? Their non-political speech?
Do you believe "dry counties" are constitutional? Can a local government restrict the sale of anything the democratic process dislikes? No restrictions at all? Remember, what's "subjective" is subjective - I can find a study supporting any crazy idea.
Where specifically is your point of objection, or are you just emoting "I want everything I like gimme now"? Believing issues have simple black-and-white answers is something children do while they're learning about the world in all its complexity. The interesting discussion is "what's the right test for allowing the government to restrict this"? "Never ever" is a childish answer.
Or, put differently, a diversity of skills and abilities is what you want to deal with the unknown. NASA knows this, of course. But it's not just a variety of PhDs that you want, it's a variety of physical capacities and problem-solving approaches.
Historically, NASA has expected any improvisation to happen on the ground, where teams could experiment and relay the best, tested idea back to the guy in space. That becomes less practical the further you get form Earth. Diversity beyond "diversity of PhDs" will be valuable.
All law is subjective. The test for this stuff is well-hammered-out. To restrict something, the state must show both that there's a compelling state interest in doing so, and that the ban is the least-restrictive means of achieving that. Restricting commercial sale of something "harmful" is completely within the remit of government. That's different from outlawing the content itself, which is the core of the First Amendment. "Time, place, and manner" restrictions are legit.
This is much like the distinction between "hate speech," thankfully fully protected, and "incitement to riot" which might the very same content, but in a different time and place.
What people lose sight of is that these CP laws go farther than obscenity laws, so far that no other material has been allowed to be similarly restricted by the SCOTUS. And I very much fear that's just the camels nose under the tent when it comes to bypassing the First Amendment entirely.
Obscenity laws are much less restrictive than the witchhunt-inspired CP laws. Obscenity laws only ban the sale, and public display/performance of material. They don't ban possession, and IANAL but I don't know of any states where they ban the free, private distribution of material. Very different from the CP laws, which are overt prior restraint.
I don't find sensibly-written obscenity laws objectionable - that's just product regulation of a sort. If a local government wants to outlaw the sale of cartoons, or bomb-making instructions, or whatever, well, if they can demonstrate a strong interest of the state in doing so, and also that this is the least-restrictive means to achieve that objective, then go for it.
It's outlawing possession or non-commercial private distribution of "objectionable materials" that alarms me: it's only a matter of time before anti-party-in-power political speech joins the list of "objectionable material", if history is any guide.
Is there any current distro focused on easy desktop use that has resisted the system wave? I'd hate to see the world divided into "server distros (know what's you're doing or don't even try)" and "easy desktop distros, system required".
Further, this sounds like there's a lot of money to be made, and if your line went faster, you'd make a lot more money at the same price. Anyone capable of the logistics who wants some money? Sounds like you could make a pretty sum.
There's been a real shortage of RNs for over a decade now (there are various skill levels in nursing, but an RN is as much work as a non-specialist doctor, really). Supply and demand.
If you develop software for $40k, you should be looking. If you're willing to relocate and aren't fresh out of school, you'll certainly double, maybe triple that. All the big companies are hiring now. Make sure your resume is visible on LinkedIn (and maybe that Dice site, I guess) - I know my team is searching the nation for anyone qualified and willing to relocate, and we're not alone in that!