I didn't see the GP as being rude, just surprised/amazed. Like if you're reading out a questionnaire to someone over the phone and you say "male/female?" and the answer you get is "yellow", your answer is going to be along the lines of "say what?" Yes, the surprise/amazement could have been phrased better, but the basic concept still holds.
And to be perfectly honest, if you're doing something computer-related and the person on the other end doesn't have an email address, it's practically guaranteed they're not going to end up being a customer anyway. Like those people you hear about who ring up ISPs and say "I want to get onto the Internet", and when they're asked what computer they have, they say "what? do I need a computer for that?"
There's no need to be offensive about it, but if someone really *is* being ignorant then it's damn hard to give them any info without exposing their ignorance. And a helpdesk is *not* designed to teach people the basics of computing. The best answer I could give would be a recommendation to buy a tutorial book or go to a course at the local college. If they took offense at that, that's out of my control.
Sorry, no. If you don't know by now what email is, you are one out-of-touch individual.
Every advert and TV programme for god knows how long has had a web page attached, and most also have an email address. Every phone-in programme or radio programme I've heard for the last 10 years has had the "ring us on xxx or email on xxx". For the last 5 or more, they've also had "or text us on xxx".
Bad analogy time? OK - failing to know of the existence of email is as bad as failing to know of the existence of mobile phones. They've both been around for about the same length of time. Their very existence stares you in the face every day. To not know about them would require that you are unaware of any new inventions created in the last 10-15 years.
Note that I don't require you to have one, or to be fully conversant with its use, or to know what the latest-and-greatest version is. That's all your technocrat stuff. But simply to know that it exists qualifies you as an active member of Western civilisation. I don't think it's too strong to say that if you're so out of touch with the world today that you've never heard of email, then you are not an active member of society. It indicates that you never talk to other people, never read the papers, never read books, never watch the TV, and never listen to the radio. Society-wise, you could be dead and no-one would notice the difference.
I take your point about needing the energy to run these things - you'll be using a large amount of your 100x strength to lug the gas tank around!:-) But your assertion of 100% efficiency on the human body ain't quite right.
The human body takes a large amount of energy simply to keep running - IIRC it's about 1500 calories a day (for a man) if you simply lay in bed and didn't move a muscle.
For hard physical work, it doesn't get much tougher than Arctic expeditions or mountain climbing. They're typically using 6000-7000 calories a day. Let's say 7500 to make the maths easier. So of that 7500, only 6000 is actually doing work to move your body around - that's 80% efficiency. Actually it's less than that, bcos the body is also using some of that energy to produce heat so that you don't freeze. And this assumes the muscles themselves are 100% efficient at converting chemical energy (food) into kinetic energy (movement). If they're less than 100% efficient (which they will be), then it's going to drop still lower.
The *results* are not obvious. However the *process* (favoured survival of random mutations via increased reproduction) is very obvious. ID believers deny the existence of the *process*.
If I drop a handful of marbles on the floor, it'll take some pretty sophisticated maths to calculate in advance where they're going to end up (in fact, IIRC solving the maths for a collision of 3 or more objects simultaneously is not actually possible). But it takes nothing more than stating the bleeding obvious to say "dude, they're going to fall on the floor, and they're going to go all over the place". And it'd be pretty dumb to say "they're going to go wherever God tells them to go"...;-)
Grab.
Re:Not to act like a fanboy but...
on
Learning to DJ?
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· Score: 1
Which is completely unrelated to the OP, which was asking for the *technical* skills and tools required...
If you've ever used Windows, you wouldn't have to ask that question. You often need admin rights just to plug in a USB drive or other USB widgets. Depends on how they've configured it, but this is not unusual. In fact, if I was going anywhere offsite with a laptop, I wouldn't move until they'd given me admin rights, bcos if anything strange like that happened then I'd be screwed and my entire offsite trip would likely be wasted. This is a Bad Thing when your offsite visit involves a 7-hour flight.
Stallman is on record as saying that if a job cannot be performed with free software (and the only solution is closed-source software), then you should refuse to do that job. So I think the comparison to Savonarola is pretty valid - both of them are/were saying "if you ditch all this shiny stuff, then it'll be better for you in the long run".
You're right to be worrying about the source though - it does seem like the article's main purpose is shit-stirring!
Linus is not actively campaigning against it, and I didn't see the article claim Linus was campaigning.
What he's actually doing is refusing to work with it. He's read it, concluded that it is not suitable for Linux, and as a result will not allow any Linux kernel code to use that license. He's not the only one either.
As for Linus's opinions of the flaws, these are already well-documented in many other articles. Would you expect an article about 9/11 to summarise every event on that day? Of course not, bcos that information already exists.
Nope, that's bullshit. Where do you think all the people who subscribe to this philosophy are going to make their living?
Most people writing GPL software are hobbyists. That means they're being paid to produce *closed-source* software during the day, and they're spending their free time producing open-source software. If they weren't being paid for producing closed-source software, they would be unable to produce open-source software - or their ability to do so would be greatly diminished, due to their lower experience with software.
Currently, companies supporting GPL software (IBM, Red Hat, etc) are doing so because their investment in that is offset against increased revenue from other areas - hardware, support contracts, etc. This is a totally hard-eyed view, and if they weren't going to make more that way then they wouldn't be doing it. But this situation only holds true in certain circumstances - there are many cases where someone wants some custom software written, and hardware/support will not bring in enough money to keep that coder alive. Pretty much every piece of embedded software (ie. everything that doesn't run on a PC/Apple) fits into that category
Basically, if you can write a manifesto like that, then you don't have enough experience in life *or* software for your opinion to be valid. And yes, that includes RMS, who has *never* in his entire life worked in a non-academic environment.
It isn't that you have to be "broken down" and/or "brainwashed" in order for these techniques to take effect. The techniques are the "brainwashing" part.
Indeed. The purpose of a drill sergeant shouting recruits around a muddy field at 4am isn't to make the recruits fitter, it's to break down their natural inclination to question authority. At the end of it, they're prepared to do what they're told without question. This is just as much "breaking down" and "brainwashing" as the use of drugs, hypnosis or torture to achieve the same effect. These people's basic psychology is being changed to make them do things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
That a correlation between America's increasingly violent entertainment options and increasingly violent culture exists is beyond question.
Crap - of course it's questionable. Why? Because the same entertainment options are available to all other countries in the world, and none of those have the same murder rate as the US. And even the assertion that there's an "increasingly violent culture" is bogus - back in the 50s, violence between biker gangs in the US was taken as read, and ditto for Teddy Boys in the UK. In the 1960s, the UK was the scene of running battles between mods and rockers. In the 1970s you had punk, for which nuff said. And you're asserting that we're in an increasingly violent culture?! Sorry, no - the worst you can say is that our culture is equivalently violent to previous ones...
Also for reference, at the same time as these entertainment options have become available, the gap between richest and poorest has been opening wider and wider - there's been a massive growth in the upper percentiles of wealth. Even if there *had* been an increase in violence, could the increase not be due to disenfranchisement of the poor? I don't pretend this is the whole answer (or even that it *is* the answer), but it's got a damn sight more going for it than violent entertainment, which has existed since the Epic of Gilgamesh. (Incidentally, try reading Homer's "Illiad" and tell me that snuff is a new invention...)
Did you ever watch Westerns when you were a kid? Or let's go back more - how's about Bugs Bunny, or Road Runner, or Tom and Jerry? And didn't you ever play any of that with your friends?
Kids enjoy *playing* - and much of their play is imitation. It's why kids love dressing-up. We've all seen plenty of kids doing the kung fu/Power Rangers/whatever thing. None of them are likely to do any damage, for the simple reason they're just jumping in the air, sticking a leg out and shouting "heeeeyah!" And all of them know it's a game.
It *is* possible to use games to train for shooting someone to become a reflex action - the US Army does, for instance. But it requires extra work to get the subject in the right frame of mind first. Military training uses psychological breakdown and reconstruction to remove any ethical question about killing at the time of doing it, basically brainwashing the person to get them to consider shooting in RL to be no different to shooting in a game. Unless you're already in this psychological state, the games won't have this effect on you.
And if you *are* in this state, then anything could tip you over the edge - the film "Taxi Driver" did it for the guy who tried to kill Reagan, for example. Should we have banned the film "Taxi Driver" for that reason?
I suggest you go and talk to any GNU/Linux advocates who are busy trying to get companies to use it instead of Windows-based stuff. You'll find that high on the list of positive attributes is "it doesn't cost anything to buy".
As far as "donate anything" goes, what would you like them to donate? Bug reports? Suggestions? Patches? Cash? Quite possibly they will do any or all of these, but they ain't going to donate them *before* they find something that does what they want, now are they?
The alternative is to think "open source". No compulsion of "if it's not GPL, you shouldn't do it". For most people, software is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Free Software advocates tend to forget that.
We have mutual freedoms. You have the freedom to reuse *my* code, so long as I have the freedom to reuse *yours*. Yes, it's only as long as they comply with the rules - in other words, just like everything else in the rest of the world. Example: you have the freedom to get as drunk as you like, *so long as* you're not becoming abusive to the people around you and thereby preventing them having a good time.
Every freedom carries responsibilities. If you're not mature enough to handle the responsibilities, you're not prepared to have that freedom. A few companies to date have proved themselves immature in that sense. So far, they've all settled rather than fight...
I remember when the only "connections" were BBSes. Getting to uni and seeing Telnet and FTP to servers around the world was a revelation. I remember text MUDs over Telnet. I remember NCSA Mosaic, and all versions of IE and Netscape. I remember downloading music files off FTP servers, and being annoyed when the Harry Fox agency stopped that. I remember when, if we were going to do anything over the internet, we had to do between 12am and 12pm (UK time), bcos everything dropped out during US working hours. I remember under 10 bytes/second transfers when the US was awake. I remember digits-only Compuserve email addresses.
Rethink your argument. RedHat makes the majority of its money from *support*.
I don't give a damn if people need training, or need hand-holding while they work on it, or if they're prepared to subcontract installation of software. They're making money in a market which has been *enabled* by the existence of this software, which is fine. However, they're not making a profit by directly selling software written by me as "their product". You don't find Ford complaining about the existence driving schools...
You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return. Is that it?
Aiding individuals is just fine and dandy. Aiding multi-million dollar companies is another matter. If they want me to work for them, they can hire me, but I'm not doing their work for free. This doesn't make be a greedy bastard, simply a bastard who expects a return on the time I invest. That return may be monetary ("you pay me for writing your code") or it may be payment in kind ("you use my code, then you give me any new work you've done on it"). The only person who's a greedy bastard is the one who appropriates my work and represents it as all their own work, in order to make a large profit.
"Belongs to mankind" is certainly pitching it a bit strong.:-) But "may be used for the benefit of all computer owners worldwide" is 100% accurate and defensible.
Whales and squid regularly do serious depths, and are presumed (from the evidence of scars on dead whales and squid parts inside dead whales) to fight each other. Not sure quite why - maybe for a whale, a squid is like a 50-foot fishburger, so it's worth the hassle?
Well, if you can have African-American Pride marches (*many* black groups), Irish-American Pride marches (St Paddy's Day), or Being-Fat-Drunk-And-Dumn Pride marches (Shriners), then why not?
The statement is "We are here, and this is who we are". I see no harm in minorities making this statement, so that the majority don't forget that fact.
Not true. The ability to spell words correctly is mostly learnt by immersion in the relevant language. In other words, it's an indicator that you've done plenty of reading and are very familiar with written language.
Spelling in itself is not 100% important (so long as you can still communicate), but it's a symptom of a lack of familiarity with the language. A lack of familiarity with the language is practically a guarantee that this person's grammar will be similarly poor - and it is *not* possible to write technical documents well without highly-developed skills in grammar.
I'll grant you that some people pick this up better than others - dyslexia is a continuum of abilities, not a "yes/no" state. But if you're hiring someone to do a job, it is *absolutely* justified to discriminate based on the ability of that person to do the job. Spell-checkers can (mostly) cover up failures in spelling, but they *can't* cover up failures in grammar. There is currently no working grammar checker in existence (and nor is it likely that one will ever exist, due to the complexities of grammar), so there is no way to compensate for that disability. The rule is that you are not required to compensate for a disability if it's not practical to do so - and hiring a dyslexic to write technical documents is like hiring someone in a wheelchair to stack the top shelves in a supermarket.
If a dyslexic can't spell but can still construct their sentences so that they are clear and unambiguous, I'd hire them. If they can't, then I won't. I don't care if it's a disease/disability or if they're just not good at self-expression - they have no place being within a hundred yards of a technical document. If they want to learn these skills then fine, but you're not learning by trial and error on *my* projects, thanks all the same.
Nope, he's still a wanker. (Note - I'm truly uninhibited by skin and race. I'll call *anyone* a wanker if they're acting that way.)
In this guy's case, if he really thinks China is equivalent in evil to Nazi Germany, then as a member of the US government he can't justify the US government's encouragement of trade with China.
Or if he doesn't think that China is equivalent in evil to Nazi Germany, then he is even *less* justified in using it as an arguing point, bcos he knows *exactly* what happened in Nazi Germany. Implying equivalency in that case is spitting on the graves of his relatives.
Either way, he's not got a leg to stand on.
As an interesting sidenote, the US is doing precisely the same as it did in WWII. It's providing limited support to the side that it would *like* to win, but it's continuing trading with the evil side, so as to keep the money coming in. Unless the Chinese are stupid enough to create a second Pearl Harbor, that's unlikely to change. (Not that the British government is any better. I'm entirely with Prince Charles's take on the Chinese government - "ghastly bunch of old waxworks".)
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I didn't see the GP as being rude, just surprised/amazed. Like if you're reading out a questionnaire to someone over the phone and you say "male/female?" and the answer you get is "yellow", your answer is going to be along the lines of "say what?" Yes, the surprise/amazement could have been phrased better, but the basic concept still holds.
And to be perfectly honest, if you're doing something computer-related and the person on the other end doesn't have an email address, it's practically guaranteed they're not going to end up being a customer anyway. Like those people you hear about who ring up ISPs and say "I want to get onto the Internet", and when they're asked what computer they have, they say "what? do I need a computer for that?"
There's no need to be offensive about it, but if someone really *is* being ignorant then it's damn hard to give them any info without exposing their ignorance. And a helpdesk is *not* designed to teach people the basics of computing. The best answer I could give would be a recommendation to buy a tutorial book or go to a course at the local college. If they took offense at that, that's out of my control.
Grab.
Sorry, no. If you don't know by now what email is, you are one out-of-touch individual.
Every advert and TV programme for god knows how long has had a web page attached, and most also have an email address. Every phone-in programme or radio programme I've heard for the last 10 years has had the "ring us on xxx or email on xxx". For the last 5 or more, they've also had "or text us on xxx".
Bad analogy time? OK - failing to know of the existence of email is as bad as failing to know of the existence of mobile phones. They've both been around for about the same length of time. Their very existence stares you in the face every day. To not know about them would require that you are unaware of any new inventions created in the last 10-15 years.
Note that I don't require you to have one, or to be fully conversant with its use, or to know what the latest-and-greatest version is. That's all your technocrat stuff. But simply to know that it exists qualifies you as an active member of Western civilisation. I don't think it's too strong to say that if you're so out of touch with the world today that you've never heard of email, then you are not an active member of society. It indicates that you never talk to other people, never read the papers, never read books, never watch the TV, and never listen to the radio. Society-wise, you could be dead and no-one would notice the difference.
Grab.
I take your point about needing the energy to run these things - you'll be using a large amount of your 100x strength to lug the gas tank around! :-) But your assertion of 100% efficiency on the human body ain't quite right.
The human body takes a large amount of energy simply to keep running - IIRC it's about 1500 calories a day (for a man) if you simply lay in bed and didn't move a muscle.
For hard physical work, it doesn't get much tougher than Arctic expeditions or mountain climbing. They're typically using 6000-7000 calories a day. Let's say 7500 to make the maths easier. So of that 7500, only 6000 is actually doing work to move your body around - that's 80% efficiency. Actually it's less than that, bcos the body is also using some of that energy to produce heat so that you don't freeze. And this assumes the muscles themselves are 100% efficient at converting chemical energy (food) into kinetic energy (movement). If they're less than 100% efficient (which they will be), then it's going to drop still lower.
Grab.
The *results* are not obvious. However the *process* (favoured survival of random mutations via increased reproduction) is very obvious. ID believers deny the existence of the *process*.
;-)
If I drop a handful of marbles on the floor, it'll take some pretty sophisticated maths to calculate in advance where they're going to end up (in fact, IIRC solving the maths for a collision of 3 or more objects simultaneously is not actually possible). But it takes nothing more than stating the bleeding obvious to say "dude, they're going to fall on the floor, and they're going to go all over the place". And it'd be pretty dumb to say "they're going to go wherever God tells them to go"...
Grab.
Which is completely unrelated to the OP, which was asking for the *technical* skills and tools required...
If you've ever used Windows, you wouldn't have to ask that question. You often need admin rights just to plug in a USB drive or other USB widgets. Depends on how they've configured it, but this is not unusual. In fact, if I was going anywhere offsite with a laptop, I wouldn't move until they'd given me admin rights, bcos if anything strange like that happened then I'd be screwed and my entire offsite trip would likely be wasted. This is a Bad Thing when your offsite visit involves a 7-hour flight.
Grab.
Stallman is on record as saying that if a job cannot be performed with free software (and the only solution is closed-source software), then you should refuse to do that job. So I think the comparison to Savonarola is pretty valid - both of them are/were saying "if you ditch all this shiny stuff, then it'll be better for you in the long run".
You're right to be worrying about the source though - it does seem like the article's main purpose is shit-stirring!
Grab.
Linus is not actively campaigning against it, and I didn't see the article claim Linus was campaigning.
What he's actually doing is refusing to work with it. He's read it, concluded that it is not suitable for Linux, and as a result will not allow any Linux kernel code to use that license. He's not the only one either.
As for Linus's opinions of the flaws, these are already well-documented in many other articles. Would you expect an article about 9/11 to summarise every event on that day? Of course not, bcos that information already exists.
Grab.
Nope, that's bullshit. Where do you think all the people who subscribe to this philosophy are going to make their living?
Most people writing GPL software are hobbyists. That means they're being paid to produce *closed-source* software during the day, and they're spending their free time producing open-source software. If they weren't being paid for producing closed-source software, they would be unable to produce open-source software - or their ability to do so would be greatly diminished, due to their lower experience with software.
Currently, companies supporting GPL software (IBM, Red Hat, etc) are doing so because their investment in that is offset against increased revenue from other areas - hardware, support contracts, etc. This is a totally hard-eyed view, and if they weren't going to make more that way then they wouldn't be doing it. But this situation only holds true in certain circumstances - there are many cases where someone wants some custom software written, and hardware/support will not bring in enough money to keep that coder alive. Pretty much every piece of embedded software (ie. everything that doesn't run on a PC/Apple) fits into that category
Basically, if you can write a manifesto like that, then you don't have enough experience in life *or* software for your opinion to be valid. And yes, that includes RMS, who has *never* in his entire life worked in a non-academic environment.
Grab.
It isn't that you have to be "broken down" and/or "brainwashed" in order for these techniques to take effect. The techniques are the "brainwashing" part.
Indeed. The purpose of a drill sergeant shouting recruits around a muddy field at 4am isn't to make the recruits fitter, it's to break down their natural inclination to question authority. At the end of it, they're prepared to do what they're told without question. This is just as much "breaking down" and "brainwashing" as the use of drugs, hypnosis or torture to achieve the same effect. These people's basic psychology is being changed to make them do things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
That a correlation between America's increasingly violent entertainment options and increasingly violent culture exists is beyond question.
Crap - of course it's questionable. Why? Because the same entertainment options are available to all other countries in the world, and none of those have the same murder rate as the US. And even the assertion that there's an "increasingly violent culture" is bogus - back in the 50s, violence between biker gangs in the US was taken as read, and ditto for Teddy Boys in the UK. In the 1960s, the UK was the scene of running battles between mods and rockers. In the 1970s you had punk, for which nuff said. And you're asserting that we're in an increasingly violent culture?! Sorry, no - the worst you can say is that our culture is equivalently violent to previous ones...
Also for reference, at the same time as these entertainment options have become available, the gap between richest and poorest has been opening wider and wider - there's been a massive growth in the upper percentiles of wealth. Even if there *had* been an increase in violence, could the increase not be due to disenfranchisement of the poor? I don't pretend this is the whole answer (or even that it *is* the answer), but it's got a damn sight more going for it than violent entertainment, which has existed since the Epic of Gilgamesh. (Incidentally, try reading Homer's "Illiad" and tell me that snuff is a new invention...)
Grab.
Did you ever watch Westerns when you were a kid? Or let's go back more - how's about Bugs Bunny, or Road Runner, or Tom and Jerry? And didn't you ever play any of that with your friends?
Kids enjoy *playing* - and much of their play is imitation. It's why kids love dressing-up. We've all seen plenty of kids doing the kung fu/Power Rangers/whatever thing. None of them are likely to do any damage, for the simple reason they're just jumping in the air, sticking a leg out and shouting "heeeeyah!" And all of them know it's a game.
It *is* possible to use games to train for shooting someone to become a reflex action - the US Army does, for instance. But it requires extra work to get the subject in the right frame of mind first. Military training uses psychological breakdown and reconstruction to remove any ethical question about killing at the time of doing it, basically brainwashing the person to get them to consider shooting in RL to be no different to shooting in a game. Unless you're already in this psychological state, the games won't have this effect on you.
And if you *are* in this state, then anything could tip you over the edge - the film "Taxi Driver" did it for the guy who tried to kill Reagan, for example. Should we have banned the film "Taxi Driver" for that reason?
Grab.
I suggest you go and talk to any GNU/Linux advocates who are busy trying to get companies to use it instead of Windows-based stuff. You'll find that high on the list of positive attributes is "it doesn't cost anything to buy".
As far as "donate anything" goes, what would you like them to donate? Bug reports? Suggestions? Patches? Cash? Quite possibly they will do any or all of these, but they ain't going to donate them *before* they find something that does what they want, now are they?
Grab.
The alternative is to think "open source". No compulsion of "if it's not GPL, you shouldn't do it". For most people, software is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Free Software advocates tend to forget that.
Grab.
We have mutual freedoms. You have the freedom to reuse *my* code, so long as I have the freedom to reuse *yours*. Yes, it's only as long as they comply with the rules - in other words, just like everything else in the rest of the world. Example: you have the freedom to get as drunk as you like, *so long as* you're not becoming abusive to the people around you and thereby preventing them having a good time.
Every freedom carries responsibilities. If you're not mature enough to handle the responsibilities, you're not prepared to have that freedom. A few companies to date have proved themselves immature in that sense. So far, they've all settled rather than fight...
Grab.
"Almost thirty?" Man...
I remember when the only "connections" were BBSes. Getting to uni and seeing Telnet and FTP to servers around the world was a revelation. I remember text MUDs over Telnet. I remember NCSA Mosaic, and all versions of IE and Netscape. I remember downloading music files off FTP servers, and being annoyed when the Harry Fox agency stopped that. I remember when, if we were going to do anything over the internet, we had to do between 12am and 12pm (UK time), bcos everything dropped out during US working hours. I remember under 10 bytes/second transfers when the US was awake. I remember digits-only Compuserve email addresses.
Grab.
Rethink your argument. RedHat makes the majority of its money from *support*.
I don't give a damn if people need training, or need hand-holding while they work on it, or if they're prepared to subcontract installation of software. They're making money in a market which has been *enabled* by the existence of this software, which is fine. However, they're not making a profit by directly selling software written by me as "their product". You don't find Ford complaining about the existence driving schools...
Grab.
You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return. Is that it?
:-) But "may be used for the benefit of all computer owners worldwide" is 100% accurate and defensible.
Aiding individuals is just fine and dandy. Aiding multi-million dollar companies is another matter. If they want me to work for them, they can hire me, but I'm not doing their work for free. This doesn't make be a greedy bastard, simply a bastard who expects a return on the time I invest. That return may be monetary ("you pay me for writing your code") or it may be payment in kind ("you use my code, then you give me any new work you've done on it"). The only person who's a greedy bastard is the one who appropriates my work and represents it as all their own work, in order to make a large profit.
"Belongs to mankind" is certainly pitching it a bit strong.
Grab.
OK folks, we can guarantee the Hot Coffee mod will be compulsory...
Whales and squid regularly do serious depths, and are presumed (from the evidence of scars on dead whales and squid parts inside dead whales) to fight each other. Not sure quite why - maybe for a whale, a squid is like a 50-foot fishburger, so it's worth the hassle?
Grab.
Or is it just that sharks are 70% smaller than they used to be?
Dude, that's an image I really didn't need during my lunchbreak...
Hey, how's Voyager going to get to a Walmart when the bulbs blow?
I can just see the Enterprise stocktaking now:
"50 photon torpedoes - check. 20 tonnes of replicator stuff - check. 1000 boxes of hundred-watt filament bulbs - check..."
Well, if you can have African-American Pride marches (*many* black groups), Irish-American Pride marches (St Paddy's Day), or Being-Fat-Drunk-And-Dumn Pride marches (Shriners), then why not?
The statement is "We are here, and this is who we are". I see no harm in minorities making this statement, so that the majority don't forget that fact.
Grab.
Not true. The ability to spell words correctly is mostly learnt by immersion in the relevant language. In other words, it's an indicator that you've done plenty of reading and are very familiar with written language.
Spelling in itself is not 100% important (so long as you can still communicate), but it's a symptom of a lack of familiarity with the language. A lack of familiarity with the language is practically a guarantee that this person's grammar will be similarly poor - and it is *not* possible to write technical documents well without highly-developed skills in grammar.
I'll grant you that some people pick this up better than others - dyslexia is a continuum of abilities, not a "yes/no" state. But if you're hiring someone to do a job, it is *absolutely* justified to discriminate based on the ability of that person to do the job. Spell-checkers can (mostly) cover up failures in spelling, but they *can't* cover up failures in grammar. There is currently no working grammar checker in existence (and nor is it likely that one will ever exist, due to the complexities of grammar), so there is no way to compensate for that disability. The rule is that you are not required to compensate for a disability if it's not practical to do so - and hiring a dyslexic to write technical documents is like hiring someone in a wheelchair to stack the top shelves in a supermarket.
If a dyslexic can't spell but can still construct their sentences so that they are clear and unambiguous, I'd hire them. If they can't, then I won't. I don't care if it's a disease/disability or if they're just not good at self-expression - they have no place being within a hundred yards of a technical document. If they want to learn these skills then fine, but you're not learning by trial and error on *my* projects, thanks all the same.
Grab.
Nope, he's still a wanker. (Note - I'm truly uninhibited by skin and race. I'll call *anyone* a wanker if they're acting that way.)
In this guy's case, if he really thinks China is equivalent in evil to Nazi Germany, then as a member of the US government he can't justify the US government's encouragement of trade with China.
Or if he doesn't think that China is equivalent in evil to Nazi Germany, then he is even *less* justified in using it as an arguing point, bcos he knows *exactly* what happened in Nazi Germany. Implying equivalency in that case is spitting on the graves of his relatives.
Either way, he's not got a leg to stand on.
As an interesting sidenote, the US is doing precisely the same as it did in WWII. It's providing limited support to the side that it would *like* to win, but it's continuing trading with the evil side, so as to keep the money coming in. Unless the Chinese are stupid enough to create a second Pearl Harbor, that's unlikely to change. (Not that the British government is any better. I'm entirely with Prince Charles's take on the Chinese government - "ghastly bunch of old waxworks".)
Grab.