One "end" result I can guesstimate is that in the future we will come up with clever solutions to address the problematic side effects of the previous generation of clever solutions.
See also: Cleaner industry, to address the problematic side effects of heavy industry. Airbags, to address the problematic side effects of high-speed automobiles. GE crops, to address the problematic side effects of a growing and longer-lived population due to better hygiene and medical technology. Antivirus programs, to address the problematic side effects of internetworked general purpose computers. Etc., etc., etc.
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 1
The point isn't that the plutonium slug won't liquify, or vaporize, or whatnot, in the event of a catastrophic failure, but rather that even if it does, the result would not be meausurably harmful.
As one of the child posts in this thread points out, such a slug has in fact burned up on reentry into our atmosphere, with a distinct absence of the death and destruction the "hippies" insist should occur. It is that ignorant and contrafactual insistence, and the resulting negative impact on the pursuit of good science, that requires an apology.
Also, your unfunnyliciousness is showing to the point of being humorlesstastic. Have you considered being less boringriffic?
Re:Question for the white house
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In fact, NASA recently finalized the specifications and issued contracts (to Boeing, among others) for the next generation of orbital work vehicles. NASA has stated explicitly that these vehicles will be the testbeds and prototypes for the Lunar and Martian manned mission programs planned over the next ten years or so.
So not only is everything proceeding as planned, but actual physical artifacts are being built at this very moment in direct support of the Mars program.
Some of us think this is very cool, really neat, etc.
Apparently, others prefer ignorance, if it makes it easier to make cheap political shots.
This is exciting science-type stuff! Give the political asshattery a rest, why don't you?
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, a bunch of "hippies" should apologize for trying to stop good science with FUD based on totally erroneous assumptions about the nature of plutonium power slugs.
Since a space probe's plutonium slug would not actually bring harm in the event of a catastrophic failure, those of us who understand this would have nothing to apologize for even in the event of a catastrophic failure.
Summary: Stupid people should apologize for trying to influence policy according to their stupidity. Smart people should not apologize for trying to influence policy according to their smartitude.
This is about companies that violate a license agreement being liable under legislation aimed at curbing unethical business practices such as violating license agreements?
Is this related to the article from the other day about how the automobile made it so that nobody knows how to ride a horse anymore?
So let me get this straight: "Web 2.0" is really just a general term for "actually implementing the technology and business models to succeed at some (or all) of the things promised but not realized during the dot-com bubble"?
And this guy is pissed off because ecommerce actually took off, and some other guys came up with a catchphrse--"Web 2.0"--to describe the transition from the vaporware to the real thing?
Clearly, the man is a genius! Or a no-talent assclown.
If people weren't idiots, they'd follow the rules of grammar and spelling to begin with. Thus, if everybody followed the grammar/spelling nazis' advice, there'd be less idiots to filter out. A win-win situation.
Why should it have anything to do with anti-goldfarming sentiment?
Seems to me that one good reason to have an English test would be to keep illiterate asshats from ruining your group...
And as already been mentioned, surely if there are so many Chinese players, what's stopping them from forming their own groups, where English competence isn't a requirement, and English incompetence isn't a communication barrier?
Nowhere in the second version of the passage cited does it imply that faith is the belief in things made up for convenience.
I have faith in the quanta, though I have not seen them (nor has anybody else, really).
Am am sure that I will receive the tax return I hope for; this is faith in the policies and procedures of the IRS, which I have seen in the past, but not yet seen in the future.
Both of these instances involve faith as defined in Hebrews 1:11 (NIV), but neither involve me making up happy fun "facts" to believe in for convenience's sake.
Nor does the passage imply that this is the purpose of defining faith in this way.
In fact, in the context of the scriptures in general, it's clear that the authors who believe do so because they are satisfied that the evidence, while not complete, supports their conclusions.
For example, you provide no evidence at all that the textual change you describe occurred for the reasons you allege. Nor do you present (still less refute or debunk) the results of the NIV translation committee's deliberations on this matter. That is, the NIV translation committee might well have given other, internally consistent and apparently reasonable arguments in favor of the textual change, that have nothing to do with the motives you impute to them.
In this example, you would have us accept your analysis on faith. But it would be a blind, unreasoning faith, unsupported by evidence or common sense. If you were to ask us to accept your analysis based on substantial but incomplete evidence (for who can say what a person's real motives are; no one, but we can make well-reasoned guesses based on our understanding of human nature and the external signs we are able to observe), then to accept your analysis would be an act of rational, fact-based faith, filling in the few remaining gaps in a reality that is clearly, but limitedly, understood.
What I'm saying is that in my experience, engineers cannot be trusted to make sensible choices about maintainability and stability in a production environment. That's why we sysadmins tend to arrogate godlike powers to ourselves: whenever we don't some engineer goes and does something they believe is eminently sensible, and ruins our entire week.
And yes, it quite often is something as eminently sensible as deciding that since some other guy already jumped through hoops to get the Sun JDK installed, they shouldn't have to. Why? Because nine times out of ten the engineer is wholly, utterly ignorant of the other factors involved, that make the hoop-jumping necessary in every instance.
Don't get me wrong; I believe software engineers are tiny gods when it comes to writing code. But they're like the Olympian gods: prone to mortal-style fuckups, inclined to fits of megalomaniacal pique, and totally incompetent outside their area of "expertise". It's enough to make a Titan eat his offspring, really it is.
Ironically, one of my best friends is a software engineer, and as far as I can tell, he always makes excellent and maintenance-friendly design decisions. I would give ten Internets to be able to actually work with him.
Fair enough. But part of the problem with your WWII scenario is that a whole metric fuck-ton of people did not look out for their economic interests, properly understood. Also, Hitler was a crazy person, so he isn't really a good example of two rational libertarians negotiating a mutually agreeable compromise.
That "properly understood" thing is the real caveat, though. Obviously, we can all make bad decisions about our economic interests, based on inperfect information. Which is why it's in our economic interests to be as informed as possible. It's also why it's in the economic interests of anyone who might be harmed by our bad decisions to make sure we get better information before making those decisions. Which shows, yet again, that the world would be a better place, not a shittier one, if everybody looked after their own economic interests.
So you're saying that because our policy is to deploy code in a lab environment and test it thoroughly before putting it on our customer-facing servers, but the engineering team finds that requirement to time-consuming, and they'd rather bypass testing as much as possible and skip straight to production deployment, that's my fault?
The lab environment is there. It has been built out, to the engineer's specifications, and to their deadline. They just don't want to "waste" time using it. So it languishes, and our customers get shitty code, and I get headaches, and they absolutely deny me the authority to refuse production deployment of untested code, even though they insist that I have the responsibility of supporting that code, and that it is up to me to keep the customers from ever experiencing unpleasantness due to the crappiness of their code.
Do you also figure out whether or not the rape victim had it coming, based on how high the hemline on her skirt was?
If everybody went with their economic interests, the world would be a really shitty place to live in.
I dunno about that. If by "economic interests" you mean "acquiring the resources necessary to see to my own needs and wants", then where does the shittyness come in?
I mean, I look after my economic interests, and you look after your economic interests, then whenever our interests clash we negotiate a mutually agreeable compromise. It's a win-win situation: we both end up with the maximum amount of resources we could possibly expect.
For my money, the shittyness comes in when people do not, look out for their own economic interests, either because they can't or because they expect someone else to. Then those people get exploited by the rest of us, since, well, it's in our economic interests to do so.
I suppose you mean that the world becomes a shitty place for those who cannot look out for their own economic interests. I'll grant you that, but it doesn't really lead to your conclusion. After all, if those people could look out for their own economic interests, they'd not be living in such a shitty world. Therefore, looking out for your own economic interests does not lead to shittyness.
Sometimes... humanity requires us to do things that do not benefit us...
What, exactly, is the nature of "humanity", that it "requires" us to act against our own economic insterests?
I mean, as a strict evolutionist, and having observed the wide range of human behavior on evidence since the dawn of recorded history, I'm inclined to believe that the natural state of humanity is a policy of might makes right, do unto others before they do unto you, and get while the getting is good. These trends can be observed also in our evolutionary cousins, the other primates, although not nearly so pronounced as the are in our own species. Would you argue that we have somehow evolved through natural processes into an unnatural state?
The reason we sysadmins think we are gods half the time is because whenever we give engineers god-rights on the systems we have to support, they consistently ignore maintainability best practices, institutional standards, and documentation requirements, resulting in unstable, unsupportable, undocumented systems.
Seriously. Every single project I support is jam-packed with systems administration headaches that can all be traced directly back to bad coding and bad design decisions made by engineers who think they're too good to work within the boundaries we set for them. Fact: they're not.
The Sixties. Nuclear families based on square concepts such as "marriage" and whatnot fell out of favor during the Free Love movement, and the concept of responsible parenting never really recovered.
Only religious prudes take that shit seriously anymore.
Of course Wikipedia is banned because of ideas dangerous to the government. That's the whole point of the government banning them.
The debate in this thread has been about whether or not punishing the government with economic sanctions will bring about the change of heart we desire, or only make the problem worse.
I dunno about that. It seems like I just trivially obtained a piece of paper that results in greater wealth generation potential, increasing my health, happiness, and all sorts of other neat things that will improve my quality of life and give me more resources with which to pursue my dreams, satisfy my desires, and make the world a better place.
Slashdot Mirror
One "end" result I can guesstimate is that in the future we will come up with clever solutions to address the problematic side effects of the previous generation of clever solutions.
See also: Cleaner industry, to address the problematic side effects of heavy industry. Airbags, to address the problematic side effects of high-speed automobiles. GE crops, to address the problematic side effects of a growing and longer-lived population due to better hygiene and medical technology. Antivirus programs, to address the problematic side effects of internetworked general purpose computers. Etc., etc., etc.
The point isn't that the plutonium slug won't liquify, or vaporize, or whatnot, in the event of a catastrophic failure, but rather that even if it does, the result would not be meausurably harmful.
As one of the child posts in this thread points out, such a slug has in fact burned up on reentry into our atmosphere, with a distinct absence of the death and destruction the "hippies" insist should occur. It is that ignorant and contrafactual insistence, and the resulting negative impact on the pursuit of good science, that requires an apology.
Also, your unfunnyliciousness is showing to the point of being humorlesstastic. Have you considered being less boringriffic?
In fact, NASA recently finalized the specifications and issued contracts (to Boeing, among others) for the next generation of orbital work vehicles. NASA has stated explicitly that these vehicles will be the testbeds and prototypes for the Lunar and Martian manned mission programs planned over the next ten years or so.
So not only is everything proceeding as planned, but actual physical artifacts are being built at this very moment in direct support of the Mars program.
Some of us think this is very cool, really neat, etc.
Apparently, others prefer ignorance, if it makes it easier to make cheap political shots.
This is exciting science-type stuff! Give the political asshattery a rest, why don't you?
No, a bunch of "hippies" should apologize for trying to stop good science with FUD based on totally erroneous assumptions about the nature of plutonium power slugs.
Since a space probe's plutonium slug would not actually bring harm in the event of a catastrophic failure, those of us who understand this would have nothing to apologize for even in the event of a catastrophic failure.
Summary: Stupid people should apologize for trying to influence policy according to their stupidity. Smart people should not apologize for trying to influence policy according to their smartitude.
I don't think this has anything to do with monitoring search logs.
If I understand TFA correctly, the DOJ is arguing that it is possible to search for (and find) illegal things using internet search engines.
In order to support this argument, they will need evidence.
In this case, the evidence would be a bunch of search engine logs, which (the DOJ hopes) would support the case they are trying to make.
Seems reasonable to me.
So let me get this straight:
This is about companies that violate a license agreement being liable under legislation aimed at curbing unethical business practices such as violating license agreements?
Is this related to the article from the other day about how the automobile made it so that nobody knows how to ride a horse anymore?
There are not enough trees to sustain the industrialization of the western world.
All the factories will be shutting down any day now.
So let me get this straight: "Web 2.0" is really just a general term for "actually implementing the technology and business models to succeed at some (or all) of the things promised but not realized during the dot-com bubble"?
And this guy is pissed off because ecommerce actually took off, and some other guys came up with a catchphrse--"Web 2.0"--to describe the transition from the vaporware to the real thing?
Clearly, the man is a genius! Or a no-talent assclown.
If people weren't idiots, they'd follow the rules of grammar and spelling to begin with. Thus, if everybody followed the grammar/spelling nazis' advice, there'd be less idiots to filter out. A win-win situation.
Hey, anybody intelligent and motivated enough to spoof a high school education on a MMORPG guild chat is okay in my book.
Anybody who isn't? Go back to school.
Who cares if they're a well-rounded person?
I just want to make sure we can communicate clearly with each other.
"College graduate" isn't a requirement. "High school graduate" is. Hence combination of a literacy test and not giving a damn about higher education.
Why should it have anything to do with anti-goldfarming sentiment?
Seems to me that one good reason to have an English test would be to keep illiterate asshats from ruining your group...
And as already been mentioned, surely if there are so many Chinese players, what's stopping them from forming their own groups, where English competence isn't a requirement, and English incompetence isn't a communication barrier?
Nowhere in the second version of the passage cited does it imply that faith is the belief in things made up for convenience.
I have faith in the quanta, though I have not seen them (nor has anybody else, really).
Am am sure that I will receive the tax return I hope for; this is faith in the policies and procedures of the IRS, which I have seen in the past, but not yet seen in the future.
Both of these instances involve faith as defined in Hebrews 1:11 (NIV), but neither involve me making up happy fun "facts" to believe in for convenience's sake.
Nor does the passage imply that this is the purpose of defining faith in this way.
In fact, in the context of the scriptures in general, it's clear that the authors who believe do so because they are satisfied that the evidence, while not complete, supports their conclusions.
For example, you provide no evidence at all that the textual change you describe occurred for the reasons you allege. Nor do you present (still less refute or debunk) the results of the NIV translation committee's deliberations on this matter. That is, the NIV translation committee might well have given other, internally consistent and apparently reasonable arguments in favor of the textual change, that have nothing to do with the motives you impute to them.
In this example, you would have us accept your analysis on faith. But it would be a blind, unreasoning faith, unsupported by evidence or common sense. If you were to ask us to accept your analysis based on substantial but incomplete evidence (for who can say what a person's real motives are; no one, but we can make well-reasoned guesses based on our understanding of human nature and the external signs we are able to observe), then to accept your analysis would be an act of rational, fact-based faith, filling in the few remaining gaps in a reality that is clearly, but limitedly, understood.
Oh, I'm not disputing that.
What I'm saying is that in my experience, engineers cannot be trusted to make sensible choices about maintainability and stability in a production environment. That's why we sysadmins tend to arrogate godlike powers to ourselves: whenever we don't some engineer goes and does something they believe is eminently sensible, and ruins our entire week.
And yes, it quite often is something as eminently sensible as deciding that since some other guy already jumped through hoops to get the Sun JDK installed, they shouldn't have to. Why? Because nine times out of ten the engineer is wholly, utterly ignorant of the other factors involved, that make the hoop-jumping necessary in every instance.
Don't get me wrong; I believe software engineers are tiny gods when it comes to writing code. But they're like the Olympian gods: prone to mortal-style fuckups, inclined to fits of megalomaniacal pique, and totally incompetent outside their area of "expertise". It's enough to make a Titan eat his offspring, really it is.
Ironically, one of my best friends is a software engineer, and as far as I can tell, he always makes excellent and maintenance-friendly design decisions. I would give ten Internets to be able to actually work with him.
Fair enough. But part of the problem with your WWII scenario is that a whole metric fuck-ton of people did not look out for their economic interests, properly understood. Also, Hitler was a crazy person, so he isn't really a good example of two rational libertarians negotiating a mutually agreeable compromise.
That "properly understood" thing is the real caveat, though. Obviously, we can all make bad decisions about our economic interests, based on inperfect information. Which is why it's in our economic interests to be as informed as possible. It's also why it's in the economic interests of anyone who might be harmed by our bad decisions to make sure we get better information before making those decisions. Which shows, yet again, that the world would be a better place, not a shittier one, if everybody looked after their own economic interests.
So you're saying that because our policy is to deploy code in a lab environment and test it thoroughly before putting it on our customer-facing servers, but the engineering team finds that requirement to time-consuming, and they'd rather bypass testing as much as possible and skip straight to production deployment, that's my fault?
The lab environment is there. It has been built out, to the engineer's specifications, and to their deadline. They just don't want to "waste" time using it. So it languishes, and our customers get shitty code, and I get headaches, and they absolutely deny me the authority to refuse production deployment of untested code, even though they insist that I have the responsibility of supporting that code, and that it is up to me to keep the customers from ever experiencing unpleasantness due to the crappiness of their code.
Do you also figure out whether or not the rape victim had it coming, based on how high the hemline on her skirt was?
If everybody went with their economic interests, the world would be a really shitty place to live in.
I dunno about that. If by "economic interests" you mean "acquiring the resources necessary to see to my own needs and wants", then where does the shittyness come in?
I mean, I look after my economic interests, and you look after your economic interests, then whenever our interests clash we negotiate a mutually agreeable compromise. It's a win-win situation: we both end up with the maximum amount of resources we could possibly expect.
For my money, the shittyness comes in when people do not, look out for their own economic interests, either because they can't or because they expect someone else to. Then those people get exploited by the rest of us, since, well, it's in our economic interests to do so.
I suppose you mean that the world becomes a shitty place for those who cannot look out for their own economic interests. I'll grant you that, but it doesn't really lead to your conclusion. After all, if those people could look out for their own economic interests, they'd not be living in such a shitty world. Therefore, looking out for your own economic interests does not lead to shittyness.
Sometimes... humanity requires us to do things that do not benefit us...
What, exactly, is the nature of "humanity", that it "requires" us to act against our own economic insterests?
I mean, as a strict evolutionist, and having observed the wide range of human behavior on evidence since the dawn of recorded history, I'm inclined to believe that the natural state of humanity is a policy of might makes right, do unto others before they do unto you, and get while the getting is good. These trends can be observed also in our evolutionary cousins, the other primates, although not nearly so pronounced as the are in our own species. Would you argue that we have somehow evolved through natural processes into an unnatural state?
The reason we sysadmins think we are gods half the time is because whenever we give engineers god-rights on the systems we have to support, they consistently ignore maintainability best practices, institutional standards, and documentation requirements, resulting in unstable, unsupportable, undocumented systems.
Seriously. Every single project I support is jam-packed with systems administration headaches that can all be traced directly back to bad coding and bad design decisions made by engineers who think they're too good to work within the boundaries we set for them. Fact: they're not.
Wait, what?
This is the NEW Dalek?
That's what, thirty years, and these guys are still using toilet plungers and paint rollers for their futuristic space robots?
Even MST3K had better robot props, and they used everyday objects on purpose as a joke (probably a Dr. Who joke, now that I think about it).
If this is what socialized television has to offer, remind me to never vote for socialized medicine!
Ah. Right. That makes much more sense. Thanks!
I don't think mating with Cthulhu has any possible positive or useful outcomes for the mate.
We have muscles in places where they'd add extra weight during flight.
Please tell me which places contain muscles that wouldn't add extra weight during flight.
I mean, would my glutes add weight during flight, but my triceps magically weigh nothing the moment I lift off?
What ever happened to parental supervision?
Seriously?
The Sixties. Nuclear families based on square concepts such as "marriage" and whatnot fell out of favor during the Free Love movement, and the concept of responsible parenting never really recovered.
Only religious prudes take that shit seriously anymore.
Um, duh.
Of course Wikipedia is banned because of ideas dangerous to the government. That's the whole point of the government banning them.
The debate in this thread has been about whether or not punishing the government with economic sanctions will bring about the change of heart we desire, or only make the problem worse.
I dunno about that. It seems like I just trivially obtained a piece of paper that results in greater wealth generation potential, increasing my health, happiness, and all sorts of other neat things that will improve my quality of life and give me more resources with which to pursue my dreams, satisfy my desires, and make the world a better place.
Living failure? Bah.