And why, exactly, should a species that can eat anything from carrion to dirt to dried meat worry about the genetics of its food? Unless the bugger's toxic, mutative, or just bad tasing I see no problem in eating it.
This... is probably one of the funniest bits of truth I've seen in a good while. Thanks for making me laugh:-)
About 2 years ago an Ariane 5 rocket malfunctioned and left a very expensive Artemis satellite in an unusable orbit. Well, over the course of 18 months, the European Space Agency actually managed to push the satellite into a usable orbit using measly 15mN ion thrusters!
Damn. It's obvious that Planetary's efforts on behalf of mankind have been negated yet again...
"Why do I even have to say this? Why do I have to say
'Get off the unique and probably alien plinth that zaps the unwary?' What is wrong with my life that I have to say these things out loud to someone?"
Then again, if they could ONLY burn what they are going to sell, then Sony wouldn't be left with 10 million extra copies of Michael Jackson's latest CD after selling only 2 million. That alone would boost margins by eliminating waste.
Unlikely to ever happen. I imagine that there's some fiscal wrangling going on that makes those 10 million "unsold" copies worth some $ amount as a tax deduction.
I'm probably being cynical, but I wouldn't be surpised if the tax deductions were more valuable to the company than the money spent pressing and storing the extra CDs.
I tend to rely on "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it", which I first saw in
Another Fine Myth by Asprin, back fifteen years or so.
Also the title of a Jimmy Buffet song... it happens to be one of my wife's favorite phrases. And you're absolutely correct, checking someone's reaction when she uses it is a definite indication of their general level of cluefullness.
Now I wonder what the exact origin of this little phrase is, though...
The law doesn't say anywhere that you're allowed to acquire copyrighted material without paying for it, as long as it's not for commercial purposes.
Really? Which law? Which country? Some countries do not honor *any* international copyright laws; some make exceptions to allow for fair use that includes file trading. Even the countries with the most stringent copyright laws allow for fair use (like my quote of your first point here, used for rebuttal purposes.)
The law says that it's a violation of copyright law to participate (as sender or recipient) in copying the property of another entity.
Better start rounding up the book and newspaper publishers, most of the RIAA and MPAA, the staff of CD pressing facilities, and whatever telecomunication execs haven't already been thrown in jail for other reasons. The gall of those people, participating in the copying of the property of another entity!
Unless, of course, you just forgot to add that very important caveat, "without their permission". Once you mention that, though, you really have to acknowledge that even in countries with the most stringent copyright laws, those same laws almost always specifically grant the permission to copy "the property of another entity" under certain circumstances. Backups, archival copies, teaching materials, reviews...
So, basically, there isn't anything about your post that can be considered true or accurate. (Well, maybe the timestamp. Having looked at slashcode, though, even that's being generous.)
KDE developers put their computers through a lot of work.
Perhaps they should consider using ccache to avoid recompiling unchanged sources and distcc to make use of the almost-inevitable collection of low-powered machines every developer seems to have?
We need a flat tax with a high minimum deductable (to keep all the kids / summer jobs out of the paperwork). Perhaps a $20k deductible with a flat percentage after that.
I've always wondered about the resistance to a flat tax, particularly since most of those proposals eliminate taxes for those with the lowest income. The only thing I can come up with is that politicians want to maintain across-the-board taxes so they can continue to "reward" some earners by providing tax cuts (generating votes), and "punish" other earners by takeing a proportionally higher percentage of income (generating votes in a different way, I guess...)
You would think that your type of proposal would appeal to the vast majority of people. Low income earners would not have to deal with paying income taxes at all. Middle range income earners would pay less in taxes overall, thanks to the deductible. High range income earners would see very little change in their tax situation, except that they would have the benefit of having a stable tax rate to deal with. The government would be able to save money currently spent enforcing the tax code. Congress would spend less time passing absurd tax legislation.
I have received a disdainful, belittling, and openly hostile response from one package maintainer. Moreover, this was not in response to a feature request - I found, documented, and fixed a bug that had been lurking in the code for about 4 years, and this was what I got when I tried to submit a patch.
I pity the "end user" who dares to approach him with a feature request.
[It is] he that sitteth upon the
circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof [are] as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in...
Typcial argument proceeds from here along the lines that a circle is not a sphere, that Isaiah actually thought the world was a flat disk, etc.
I don't want to paint every PhD with the same brush... I'm sure there are such folks who find the various lightweight methodologies useful, just as there are those who prefer an iterative process, or a waterfall processs. (As a side note: from what I've seen, the type of methodology that gets used during a project is driven much more by the corporate culture than anything else.)
I think the general tendency for PhD's, though, is to generate more detailed designs, and do more detailed design work up front. Again, I think that's primarily a factor of their education, training, and the personality types that would tend to succeed in that kind of academic environment.
For the record, I think this is a fairly general observation... I think that, in any technical field, those who tend to enjoy abstract thought and problem solving gravitate towards obtaining a more advanced degree. There's a big difference between being a practicing engineer and a PhD. Not that one is any better than the other - they just tend to focus on very different aspects of the same problems. Finding someone who is perfectly comfortable in both the theoretical and practical realms is rare, and impressive:-)
I'll agree. From what I've seen, folks with a PhD in CS are the ones who are capable of taking an idea and turning in into working code. It's the folks that follow them - the non-academics - who take that and, in turn, create somethign that's useful and usable.
I've seen more than a few academics crank out very elegant, very intricate designs that were effectively broken because their implemenation just plain sucked rocks. All too often, they were unable to pull away from the abstractions and focus on the concrete implementation. As a result, they just did not seem to understand that there were points where their design broke down and failed to deal well with limitations in the hardware (memory constraints, CPU usage, disk access speeds), the operating system, or the implementation language.
They just don't understand that in the real world, there are often places where you want to break that beautiful design and layers of abstraction, because doing so will give you a 10x performance increase that makes their project usable on something other than a state-of-the-art workstation.
There are PhD's who understand these sort of things, and can crank out some really good code. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are very few PhD's who enjoy this type of work... they got their PhD, after all, because they like thinking in terms of abstractions, and elegant design, and other "big problems".
The folks who get a kick out of optimizing performance, or enhancing the UI, or dealing with cross-platform compilation problems, or tweaking code so it's portable across 20 different architectures... these folks are as essential to the software as the PhDs, but because of where they derive their enjoyment from working, they're unlikely to ever become one of those PhDs.
IMHO, success comes when members from each of these groups understand their particular strengths and weaknesses, and learn to defer to each other's areas of expertise.
There's an inherent assumption in this statement which is incorrect. You've assumed that the embryos used for stem cell research would have otherwise grown to be human. That's not necessarily the case. Imagine...
Please. Your "imaginary" scenario is just that - imaginary. What you describe does not happen. If for no other reason, it is far more time-consuming and expensive that simply killing an unborn child.
If we were discussing gun control, and I spun out a fairy tale about some old lady using her sainted husband's old.45 to defend herself from a slavering gang of would-be rapists, I'd be (justly) blasted for presenting a picture of life that was wildly out of sync with reality.
You've tried to do the same thing here... spin a wildly distorted view of reality in the hopes that someone will debate the imaginary point instead of what really happens out in the Big Room.
I've seen make work just fine with UTF-8 and other character encodings. You can build gcc with "--enable-c-mbchar" to turn on MBCS support. The kernel would need little or no modification to work properly - take a look at the "How do I have to modify my software?" and "What is UTF-8?" entries in the FAQ mentioned above:
Any Unix-style kernel can do fine with soft conversion and needs only very minor modifications to fully support UTF-8.
UTF-8 was originally called UTF-FSS (for "UCS transformation format, file system safe") UTF-8 was originally called UTF-FSS (for "UCS transformation format, file system safe")
I think "dialect" is an entirely appropriate term... while "schema" may be the technical term, using "dialect" brings to mind the idea of a California Valley Girl trying to converse with someone from northern Ireland. The point is that even while both are speaking English, they're very different kinds of English, and communication is not neccesarily as simple as you would think...
I think I'll go walk into a Church and start preaching about the Prince of Darkness. I wonder how long it'd take for them to call the police.
Not long at all - you'd be on private property; if you were asked to leave, and you refused, you'd be trespassing. Doesn't matter if it's a church, a business, or a home. You'd get what you deserved for being obnoxious and confrontational.
Missions and missionaries should be passive.
What? They shouldn't talk to anyone about their beliefs? That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? If they're physically coercing people into listing to them, then they'r not missionaries, they're thugs. Otherwise, if whoever they are speaking to has the opportunity to say "No thank you" and walk away, how can you complain about what they're doing?
So answer me this - there are plenty of people in the world. Why didn't these Christian missionaries travel to more populous countries, where their message could be heard by so many more "poor souls"? Why not talk to Muslims, Hindus, etc and save them?
Some of us do just that.
My church (independent baptist, if you care) supports 33 missionaries; of those, two-thirds are in what would be considered first- or second-world countries. Germany, Ireland, England, Canada, Mexico, India, Thailand, Brazil... a third of them are "missionaries" to the US. Rough work, but the commandment was "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations..." Whether the people of those nations accept or reject the teaching is a matter between them and God.
Terrorism is the use of terror tactics against a civilian population...
While I'll agree with that, I have to disagree with the idea that "blowing up the Pentagon" comes under the heading of "guerilla warfare." If you are referencing the 9/11 attacks, I'll point out that an airplane full of civilians were killed in order to make the attack possible. IMHO, that makes the attack on the Pentagon a terrorist action. Damage to the Pentagon was of secondary importance; the primary goal was to instill fear into American citizens. If the folks who comandeered the planes were kept from plowing into the Pentagon, they probably would have been just as happy to head for any available location where they would be able to kill as many people (civilian or military) as possible. If they had attached the Pentagon using some other means (a kamakazi pilot in a single passenger plane, a truck loaded with explosives, etc.) I'd be more willing to accept it as an act of warfare vs. an act of terrorism.
Second, I'll point out that while "attacking military targets is perfectly legitimate acts of guerilla warfare", this is really a moral distinction. "Shooting off-duty US marines in Yemen" might be considered a "legitimate" act of guerilla warfare, in that the guerillas doing the shooting can claim that attacking enemy soldiers is not immoral (though, IMHO, it's not very smart on the part of said guerillas, as they are implicitly depending on non-military factors they hafve no control over to stifle effective reprisals). Despite this, it's unlikely that the civil government Yemen would treat these killings as anything but murder. (Granted, I'm unfamiliar with the current situation in Yemen. Whether or not the government there would abide by their own laws and investigate such killings as any other murder is a seperate issue entirely.)
What's the difference between bloat and less-frequently-used functionality?
For any feature X...
If you have ever used feature X before, it's "less-frequently-used functionality".
If you've never used feature X before, and have half a brain, it's "rarely-used functionality".
If you've never used feature X before, and lack the basic mental capacity to understand that it's in there because at least one person not only found a use for it but - in the case of Open Source software - also found the time to write the code for it... then it's "bloat".
Congresswoman
Stephanie Tubbs Jones - OH - Democrat
Requires constituents to use evil, proprietary software from a criminal monopoly in order to communicate with her. Has never been caught kicking puppies and kittens. Lives in Ohio.
Congresswoman Melissa Hart - PA - Republican
Supports open standards, including those used by Open Source software. As American as apple pie. Probably scowls when she hears the word "Microsoft". Most sincere desire is to retire from politics and spend her time promoting Linux.
Regardless of what they say about liberty, these people are not elected, so they have no incentive to protect your rights. Treat them as the enemy
Ah. I guess the same goes for local, state, and federal police forces. The military, certainly. Same thing for just about any government office. Oh - wait; I didn't elect any of our local, regional, or national news service reporters, etiher. Or any of the representatives of those watchdogs groups that claim to be looking out for my rights, or...
Hey, waitaminnit. I didn't elect you, either! You're just out to take away my liberties, you non-elected creep!
In my mind, potential corruption withing the FBI and/or CIA is much more of a threat. The NSA doesn't do law enforcement, they're an intelligence agency. So, yes, there is a serious potential for the agency to be abused (probably by an "elected official") but I think there's little chance of the NSA personally being the instigator of any assault against the rights of US citizens.
Except that he didn't lead with an exaggeration - he lead with a statement that was obviously false. It doesn't draw the reader in; instead, it makes them more likely to read the rest of his comments in a negative light. Also, his points didn't back up his lead statement. What he was really trying to do was switch the topic of the debate. I think that's a different situation from the one you describe.
That said, I've not read Seutonious, nor been formally trained in the art of rhetoric... few people are these days:-/
You are stating your opinion about what companies should be, not what they must be.
No... he's stating what the current reality is, and has been in the US and Canada since the first European colonists landed on these shores and decided to stay. You are the one stating an "opinion about what companies should be".
Aside from that, your argument is fairly clear and your points well made. What's there is weakened by the fault in the introduction, though. You probably would have been better off with an opening line like:
You are right - companies are not social programs. They way that they deal with employees is reprehensible, though, and at least in part enabled by a convenient (for corporations) legal fiction that a corporation is an individual, and has the same rights as the employees they treat so callously...
Slashdot Mirror
This... is probably one of the funniest bits of truth I've seen in a good while. Thanks for making me laugh :-)
Damn. It's obvious that Planetary's efforts on behalf of mankind have been negated yet again...
Unlikely to ever happen. I imagine that there's some fiscal wrangling going on that makes those 10 million "unsold" copies worth some $ amount as a tax deduction.
I'm probably being cynical, but I wouldn't be surpised if the tax deductions were more valuable to the company than the money spent pressing and storing the extra CDs.
Also the title of a Jimmy Buffet song... it happens to be one of my wife's favorite phrases. And you're absolutely correct, checking someone's reaction when she uses it is a definite indication of their general level of cluefullness.
Now I wonder what the exact origin of this little phrase is, though...
Really? Which law? Which country? Some countries do not honor *any* international copyright laws; some make exceptions to allow for fair use that includes file trading. Even the countries with the most stringent copyright laws allow for fair use (like my quote of your first point here, used for rebuttal purposes.)
Better start rounding up the book and newspaper publishers, most of the RIAA and MPAA, the staff of CD pressing facilities, and whatever telecomunication execs haven't already been thrown in jail for other reasons. The gall of those people, participating in the copying of the property of another entity!
Unless, of course, you just forgot to add that very important caveat, "without their permission". Once you mention that, though, you really have to acknowledge that even in countries with the most stringent copyright laws, those same laws almost always specifically grant the permission to copy "the property of another entity" under certain circumstances. Backups, archival copies, teaching materials, reviews...
So, basically, there isn't anything about your post that can be considered true or accurate. (Well, maybe the timestamp. Having looked at slashcode, though, even that's being generous.)
Perhaps they should consider using ccache to avoid recompiling unchanged sources and distcc to make use of the almost-inevitable collection of low-powered machines every developer seems to have?
For the record, it's been moved...
Larch FTP Site
January 28, 1999
Many files formerly on this site were moved elsewhere after a disk
crash in March, 1998.
The LCLint distribution can be found at
ftp://ftp.sds.lcs.mit.edu/pub/lclint
or http://www.sds.lcs.mit.edu/lclint
Suprised no one's mentioned them yet...
Sarah Zettel:
Highly recommended: Fool's War.
James Alan Gardner:
Highly recommended: Expendable, Trapped.
C. S. Friedman:
Highly recommended: The Coldfire trillogy (fantasy), This Alien Shore (SF).
You know, that's what's so frustrating about Bush.
One one hand, he's an incompetent, bumbling, moronic yahoo who doesn't deserve the presidency.
On the other hand, he's a highly intelligent, cunning, decisive, and capable force of capitalistic evil.
What's even more annoying is how he generally manages to be both at the exact same time.
You would think that your type of proposal would appeal to the vast majority of people. Low income earners would not have to deal with paying income taxes at all. Middle range income earners would pay less in taxes overall, thanks to the deductible. High range income earners would see very little change in their tax situation, except that they would have the benefit of having a stable tax rate to deal with. The government would be able to save money currently spent enforcing the tax code. Congress would spend less time passing absurd tax legislation.
I have received a disdainful, belittling, and openly hostile response from one package maintainer. Moreover, this was not in response to a feature request - I found, documented, and fixed a bug that had been lurking in the code for about 4 years, and this was what I got when I tried to submit a patch.
I pity the "end user" who dares to approach him with a feature request.
Isa 40:22
Typcial argument proceeds from here along the lines that a circle is not a sphere, that Isaiah actually thought the world was a flat disk, etc.
I don't want to paint every PhD with the same brush... I'm sure there are such folks who find the various lightweight methodologies useful, just as there are those who prefer an iterative process, or a waterfall processs. (As a side note: from what I've seen, the type of methodology that gets used during a project is driven much more by the corporate culture than anything else.)
I think the general tendency for PhD's, though, is to generate more detailed designs, and do more detailed design work up front. Again, I think that's primarily a factor of their education, training, and the personality types that would tend to succeed in that kind of academic environment.
For the record, I think this is a fairly general observation... I think that, in any technical field, those who tend to enjoy abstract thought and problem solving gravitate towards obtaining a more advanced degree. There's a big difference between being a practicing engineer and a PhD. Not that one is any better than the other - they just tend to focus on very different aspects of the same problems. Finding someone who is perfectly comfortable in both the theoretical and practical realms is rare, and impressive :-)
I'll agree. From what I've seen, folks with a PhD in CS are the ones who are capable of taking an idea and turning in into working code. It's the folks that follow them - the non-academics - who take that and, in turn, create somethign that's useful and usable.
I've seen more than a few academics crank out very elegant, very intricate designs that were effectively broken because their implemenation just plain sucked rocks. All too often, they were unable to pull away from the abstractions and focus on the concrete implementation. As a result, they just did not seem to understand that there were points where their design broke down and failed to deal well with limitations in the hardware (memory constraints, CPU usage, disk access speeds), the operating system, or the implementation language.
They just don't understand that in the real world, there are often places where you want to break that beautiful design and layers of abstraction, because doing so will give you a 10x performance increase that makes their project usable on something other than a state-of-the-art workstation.There are PhD's who understand these sort of things, and can crank out some really good code. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are very few PhD's who enjoy this type of work... they got their PhD, after all, because they like thinking in terms of abstractions, and elegant design, and other "big problems".
The folks who get a kick out of optimizing performance, or enhancing the UI, or dealing with cross-platform compilation problems, or tweaking code so it's portable across 20 different architectures... these folks are as essential to the software as the PhDs, but because of where they derive their enjoyment from working, they're unlikely to ever become one of those PhDs.
IMHO, success comes when members from each of these groups understand their particular strengths and weaknesses, and learn to defer to each other's areas of expertise.
Please. Your "imaginary" scenario is just that - imaginary. What you describe does not happen. If for no other reason, it is far more time-consuming and expensive that simply killing an unborn child.
If we were discussing gun control, and I spun out a fairy tale about some old lady using her sainted husband's old .45 to defend herself from a slavering gang of would-be rapists, I'd be (justly) blasted for presenting a picture of life that was wildly out of sync with reality.
You've tried to do the same thing here... spin a wildly distorted view of reality in the hopes that someone will debate the imaginary point instead of what really happens out in the Big Room.
Already done, at least in part. Take a look at the UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux
I've seen make work just fine with UTF-8 and other character encodings. You can build gcc with "--enable-c-mbchar" to turn on MBCS support. The kernel would need little or no modification to work properly - take a look at the "How do I have to modify my software?" and "What is UTF-8?" entries in the FAQ mentioned above:
I think "dialect" is an entirely appropriate term... while "schema" may be the technical term, using "dialect" brings to mind the idea of a California Valley Girl trying to converse with someone from northern Ireland. The point is that even while both are speaking English, they're very different kinds of English, and communication is not neccesarily as simple as you would think...
Not long at all - you'd be on private property; if you were asked to leave, and you refused, you'd be trespassing. Doesn't matter if it's a church, a business, or a home. You'd get what you deserved for being obnoxious and confrontational.
What? They shouldn't talk to anyone about their beliefs? That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? If they're physically coercing people into listing to them, then they'r not missionaries, they're thugs. Otherwise, if whoever they are speaking to has the opportunity to say "No thank you" and walk away, how can you complain about what they're doing?
Some of us do just that.
My church (independent baptist, if you care) supports 33 missionaries; of those, two-thirds are in what would be considered first- or second-world countries. Germany, Ireland, England, Canada, Mexico, India, Thailand, Brazil... a third of them are "missionaries" to the US. Rough work, but the commandment was "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations..." Whether the people of those nations accept or reject the teaching is a matter between them and God.
While I'll agree with that, I have to disagree with the idea that "blowing up the Pentagon" comes under the heading of "guerilla warfare." If you are referencing the 9/11 attacks, I'll point out that an airplane full of civilians were killed in order to make the attack possible. IMHO, that makes the attack on the Pentagon a terrorist action. Damage to the Pentagon was of secondary importance; the primary goal was to instill fear into American citizens. If the folks who comandeered the planes were kept from plowing into the Pentagon, they probably would have been just as happy to head for any available location where they would be able to kill as many people (civilian or military) as possible. If they had attached the Pentagon using some other means (a kamakazi pilot in a single passenger plane, a truck loaded with explosives, etc.) I'd be more willing to accept it as an act of warfare vs. an act of terrorism.
Second, I'll point out that while "attacking military targets is perfectly legitimate acts of guerilla warfare", this is really a moral distinction. "Shooting off-duty US marines in Yemen" might be considered a "legitimate" act of guerilla warfare, in that the guerillas doing the shooting can claim that attacking enemy soldiers is not immoral (though, IMHO, it's not very smart on the part of said guerillas, as they are implicitly depending on non-military factors they hafve no control over to stifle effective reprisals). Despite this, it's unlikely that the civil government Yemen would treat these killings as anything but murder. (Granted, I'm unfamiliar with the current situation in Yemen. Whether or not the government there would abide by their own laws and investigate such killings as any other murder is a seperate issue entirely.)
For any feature X...
Hmm. Informal survey:
Final Score:
By Party:
By State:
Ah. I guess the same goes for local, state, and federal police forces. The military, certainly. Same thing for just about any government office. Oh - wait; I didn't elect any of our local, regional, or national news service reporters, etiher. Or any of the representatives of those watchdogs groups that claim to be looking out for my rights, or...
Hey, waitaminnit. I didn't elect you , either! You're just out to take away my liberties, you non-elected creep!
In my mind, potential corruption withing the FBI and/or CIA is much more of a threat. The NSA doesn't do law enforcement, they're an intelligence agency. So, yes, there is a serious potential for the agency to be abused (probably by an "elected official") but I think there's little chance of the NSA personally being the instigator of any assault against the rights of US citizens.
Except that he didn't lead with an exaggeration - he lead with a statement that was obviously false. It doesn't draw the reader in; instead, it makes them more likely to read the rest of his comments in a negative light. Also, his points didn't back up his lead statement. What he was really trying to do was switch the topic of the debate. I think that's a different situation from the one you describe.
That said, I've not read Seutonious, nor been formally trained in the art of rhetoric... few people are these days :-/
I'll have to see about broadening my horizons.
No... he's stating what the current reality is , and has been in the US and Canada since the first European colonists landed on these shores and decided to stay. You are the one stating an "opinion about what companies should be".
Aside from that, your argument is fairly clear and your points well made. What's there is weakened by the fault in the introduction, though. You probably would have been better off with an opening line like: