That's pretty fair—although, to my knowledge, the 'bastardised' version of ThinThread that the NSA didn't appear to be a budget-sucker like Trailblazer as much as just a quick-and-dirty solution. I wouldn't argue that their motives are pure, merely that they've been using the supposedly-pure goal of national security as a partial justification in their own minds.
In general, we like to treat people in positions of power such as this as purely rational beings, but there's a lot of evidence to consider that suggests they're really not. Consider, for example, that Bush and Cheney were once both avid alcoholics, and that (in general) prolonged alcoholism can have profound effects on behaviour that lead to a kind of psychosis that glosses over incongruous behaviour, like gross displays of corruption, carried out under duress; they develop an extremely warped self-image. I would argue that many heavily corrupt or despotic governments in the past century could have been stopped by a publicly-available psychological evaluation (assuming access to modern knowledge.)
Whoa! Who's showing anger here, really? I read his post as indicating disgust more than anger.
His decision to move the focus from this specific incident, and its relevance to the origin of the problems of the Bush era, to a more generalized complaint about the administration of the United States throughout its entire history struck me as hasty and rant-like. That usually implies an underlying sense of frustration (and therefore anger). However, assessing whether the tone of a passage of written text is disgusted or angry is very a subjective process, and I don't think it makes sense to try and interpret it. It can, after all, be both.
FWIW I see no italicization of "why" in your post.
The italicised "why" is the sixteenth word in the second sentence of the second paragraph, immediately before the portion that countertrolling quoted. It's not very difficult to find, given that it's the only usage of the word "why" in that post.
In any case, discussing a history of malfeasance is always more enlightening than discussing a single incident in isolation. I view his post as relevant to the discussion.
In general it's a pertinent and relevant subject to discuss, but in the context of my assumption that his post was an angry rant, it seemed more like he was going off-topic. The decision to pivot around topics so rapidly and the lack of connective prose tying his statements back into the previous conversation did not present a natural part of the conversation as much as an attempt to ramble about a pet peeve.
The part that really got me was that he said nothing worth saying: no new combination of facts or feelings was presented; it's just the same bitching that arises every time there's a news article on Slashdot that mentions oppressive misconduct by the government. His post could be cut-and-paste in a solid 20% of all Slashdot articles and be just as relevant. That doesn't mean it should be repeated over and over again.
No respondent can read your mind and know the exact intentions of your post. If you wish to limit the discussion please explicitly state the scope of your argument.
While telepathy is indeed not generally an ability found amongst Slashdot posters, I believe I have presented a coherent and consistent position that can be understood without too much trouble. Please read the above carefully and let me know if you have any further concerns.
Sorry, correction: I misread the part where it said the jurors would not see the original documents. I guess that makes the execution of this court case just as unfair as the initial prosecution.
Oh dang. I missed that part. I thought the silent witness rule was supposed to only be applied to the general public, and that the jurors were going to see the full documents, similar to a closed case. That's definitely another layer of foul play at work.
Given that the silent witness rule doesn't interfere with the normal procedure of the court room (i.e. the jury isn't supposed to know about public opinion in a case anyway) I would most definitely agree, and indeed I don't think it's even that big of a deal in this case. My post was about the origins of this case, which the New Yorker went to great lengths to document. The link to it that I gave in the GP weaves a tale that leaves little room for interpretation and opinion.
Your point may be valid, but it shows an astounding lack of reading comprehension. I was giving an explanation for the current cycle of problems only, not making a general statement about the history of the United States. I even italicized "why". You should probably start a blog to vent your anger instead of derailing pre-existing conversations.
If you missed it,a few weeks ago here we had another story about Drake. The story of his case is less of an impenetrable vast state chasing him and more like a handful of people whom he knew from his previous job (critical point: at the NSA) trying to manipulate the law to get him put away for whistleblowing on the NSA's spying program—which he claims he didn't even actually do.
This guy's problems are way more Orwellian than anything the average citizen has ever experienced in the United States. Read the New Yorker article I linked to, and you'll gain a new appreciation for why the government has become so messed up over the past decade. Men with no oversight are doing what they will in the name of national security because they've convinced themselves that they can't permit 9/11 to reoccur, and that it was their fault. They've driven themselves mad, falling into the mentality of "those who prefer security to freedom." It's not that they're innately cruel tyrants, or sadists, it's that they're paranoid and guilt-wracked—a horribly dangerous combination when you add on the "defend the collective" mentality that causes police officers to protect each other when corruption charges manifest.
In another world, that might be a fair and major concern, but considering that this is a piece of science journalism intended to notify the public about something bad, it's a very high priority to prevent mass panic. If the article sought to trivialize the threat posed by antibiotic abuse, it probably wouldn't use the word 'superbug,' which has become tightly connected with factory farming and hospital hypersterilization.
I'm pretty sure you may want to read the sentence that comes before that one. No one's saying it's not a concern, just that it doesn't survive the pasteurization process. Which makes sense, because pasteurization involves a great deal of heat, and the kind of microbes that infect the human body tend not to do well with extreme levels of heat.
I don't think this kind of accountability law can be readily abused. The Slashdot poster archetype that hates regulation, the libertarian, does so primarily because it hates big/corrupt/Orwellian government. I think everyone here will agree that such a law is what should be.
The real problem is the SIGs that can lobby their way into blocking it. And when you're talking about agents of the law, they already have friends amongst the legal profession who've ascended to Congress. They don't even need to spend millions of dollars to buy off politicians.
Well, technically, it doesn't need to, no. Turing introduced his eponymous machines in the mid-thirties, when they were still nothing more than a mathematical formalism. Understanding and working with them doesn't require access to a computer, and while the turtle-pushing power of Logo is a really good introductory environment to prepare the mind for programming and CS, not even it is essential. A good working knowledge of, for example, sorting algorithms has practical value to someone who needs to organize a large collection of physical objects such as papers; similarly, the application of binary search to telephone books is a classic introductory example.
I agree with the tone of your post, but your analogy is off-base and troubles me. Arithmetic is a direct underpinning of mathematics. The equivalent computer science task would probably be learning how to break instructions down into discrete and logical steps. Computer science as a discipline is fundamentally about procedures and algorithms, just as mathematics is about numbers and equations, and set theory is about relationships and groups.
Consequentially, using Office is less of a computer science curriculum element and more like a general life skill that involves computers. It's true that working with computers as a user is an important preface to learning how to program and think in the exact terms of a computer, but by no means does it fit the same position as arithmetic does for mathematics.
A better post might be "c'mon, guys, he's got a Masters degree. Stop being dicks about semantics and realise that he knows what he means better than most of you do."
(Sorry, that link slipped 3D models in for the monsters; it's a recording of a newer source port, possibly eDuke32. This is more accurate. But still, the first video I linked is a good demonstration of the level appearance; note especially the sloped floors.)
I don't think that last link really proves your point. It depicts the Genesis running an engine roughly comparable to Wolfenstein 3-D. Notice the orthogonal walls and total lack of floor or ceiling textures. Here's what the real Duke actually plays like, in case you've forgotten (although the music didn't sound that good on most sound cards.)
They do, but the minute someone makes the connection between NAT and security the dead rise and chant repeatedly "NAT is not security".
What a silly thing to say. NAT is security in the same sense that switching your grandmother to Firefox with an IE theme is security. Not all security measures are about actually preventing breaches. Who are these dead, and are they weakest to silver bullets, garlic, or MBAs?
(I'll concede that maybe we need another word for it, though.)
And also herd immunity: you're less likely to get infected if everyone else is exempt from being capable of infecting you. Firewalling routers really don't get enough love for their role in reducing the internet's trash density.
At least two other people got the joke, as evidenced by the Funny moderation and TheLink's comment—and humour is always hit-and-miss anyway. You should really just give it a rest. I guess the take-home message is that trying to explain a joke based on inherently derogatory stereotypes rarely works out.
Here's a hint to remember in the future: between Canada, the UK, and Australia, there are 118 million English speakers, most of whom were raised with metric as their native measuring system. If all of those countries contribute the same percentage of their population to Slashdot as the United States does, you could have as much as 27% of Slashdot users who don't make mistakes in metric. That should be a sufficient enough fraction to make you think twice about assuming fault, particularly when there are other clues present (e.g. the "thickness" of sand/glass grains instead of the size) that the statement is meant to be absurd.
And if all else fails, check the comment history! Maybe they're not a native English speaker and you can't trust them to know the difference between "thickness" and "length" or "size"—but maybe, conversely, that will clear everything up. I don't think that's a disproportionate amount of effort if it avoids a protracted and uncomfortable dialogue about the semantics of a tasteless joke.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty fair—although, to my knowledge, the 'bastardised' version of ThinThread that the NSA didn't appear to be a budget-sucker like Trailblazer as much as just a quick-and-dirty solution. I wouldn't argue that their motives are pure, merely that they've been using the supposedly-pure goal of national security as a partial justification in their own minds.
In general, we like to treat people in positions of power such as this as purely rational beings, but there's a lot of evidence to consider that suggests they're really not. Consider, for example, that Bush and Cheney were once both avid alcoholics, and that (in general) prolonged alcoholism can have profound effects on behaviour that lead to a kind of psychosis that glosses over incongruous behaviour, like gross displays of corruption, carried out under duress; they develop an extremely warped self-image. I would argue that many heavily corrupt or despotic governments in the past century could have been stopped by a publicly-available psychological evaluation (assuming access to modern knowledge.)
Whoa! Who's showing anger here, really? I read his post as indicating disgust more than anger.
His decision to move the focus from this specific incident, and its relevance to the origin of the problems of the Bush era, to a more generalized complaint about the administration of the United States throughout its entire history struck me as hasty and rant-like. That usually implies an underlying sense of frustration (and therefore anger). However, assessing whether the tone of a passage of written text is disgusted or angry is very a subjective process, and I don't think it makes sense to try and interpret it. It can, after all, be both.
FWIW I see no italicization of "why" in your post.
The italicised "why" is the sixteenth word in the second sentence of the second paragraph, immediately before the portion that countertrolling quoted. It's not very difficult to find, given that it's the only usage of the word "why" in that post.
In any case, discussing a history of malfeasance is always more enlightening than discussing a single incident in isolation. I view his post as relevant to the discussion.
In general it's a pertinent and relevant subject to discuss, but in the context of my assumption that his post was an angry rant, it seemed more like he was going off-topic. The decision to pivot around topics so rapidly and the lack of connective prose tying his statements back into the previous conversation did not present a natural part of the conversation as much as an attempt to ramble about a pet peeve.
The part that really got me was that he said nothing worth saying: no new combination of facts or feelings was presented; it's just the same bitching that arises every time there's a news article on Slashdot that mentions oppressive misconduct by the government. His post could be cut-and-paste in a solid 20% of all Slashdot articles and be just as relevant. That doesn't mean it should be repeated over and over again.
No respondent can read your mind and know the exact intentions of your post. If you wish to limit the discussion please explicitly state the scope of your argument.
While telepathy is indeed not generally an ability found amongst Slashdot posters, I believe I have presented a coherent and consistent position that can be understood without too much trouble. Please read the above carefully and let me know if you have any further concerns.
Sorry, correction: I misread the part where it said the jurors would not see the original documents. I guess that makes the execution of this court case just as unfair as the initial prosecution.
Oh dang. I missed that part. I thought the silent witness rule was supposed to only be applied to the general public, and that the jurors were going to see the full documents, similar to a closed case. That's definitely another layer of foul play at work.
Given that the silent witness rule doesn't interfere with the normal procedure of the court room (i.e. the jury isn't supposed to know about public opinion in a case anyway) I would most definitely agree, and indeed I don't think it's even that big of a deal in this case. My post was about the origins of this case, which the New Yorker went to great lengths to document. The link to it that I gave in the GP weaves a tale that leaves little room for interpretation and opinion.
Your point may be valid, but it shows an astounding lack of reading comprehension. I was giving an explanation for the current cycle of problems only, not making a general statement about the history of the United States. I even italicized "why". You should probably start a blog to vent your anger instead of derailing pre-existing conversations.
If you missed it,a few weeks ago here we had another story about Drake. The story of his case is less of an impenetrable vast state chasing him and more like a handful of people whom he knew from his previous job (critical point: at the NSA) trying to manipulate the law to get him put away for whistleblowing on the NSA's spying program—which he claims he didn't even actually do.
This guy's problems are way more Orwellian than anything the average citizen has ever experienced in the United States. Read the New Yorker article I linked to, and you'll gain a new appreciation for why the government has become so messed up over the past decade. Men with no oversight are doing what they will in the name of national security because they've convinced themselves that they can't permit 9/11 to reoccur, and that it was their fault. They've driven themselves mad, falling into the mentality of "those who prefer security to freedom." It's not that they're innately cruel tyrants, or sadists, it's that they're paranoid and guilt-wracked—a horribly dangerous combination when you add on the "defend the collective" mentality that causes police officers to protect each other when corruption charges manifest.
In another world, that might be a fair and major concern, but considering that this is a piece of science journalism intended to notify the public about something bad, it's a very high priority to prevent mass panic. If the article sought to trivialize the threat posed by antibiotic abuse, it probably wouldn't use the word 'superbug,' which has become tightly connected with factory farming and hospital hypersterilization.
I'm pretty sure you may want to read the sentence that comes before that one. No one's saying it's not a concern, just that it doesn't survive the pasteurization process. Which makes sense, because pasteurization involves a great deal of heat, and the kind of microbes that infect the human body tend not to do well with extreme levels of heat.
Looks like the idiot's guide to not being a douche wasn't available either. :-\
Nor was the idiot's guide to being original.
Nor was the idiot's guide to being original.
Nor was the idiot's guide to being original.
I don't think this kind of accountability law can be readily abused. The Slashdot poster archetype that hates regulation, the libertarian, does so primarily because it hates big/corrupt/Orwellian government. I think everyone here will agree that such a law is what should be.
The real problem is the SIGs that can lobby their way into blocking it. And when you're talking about agents of the law, they already have friends amongst the legal profession who've ascended to Congress. They don't even need to spend millions of dollars to buy off politicians.
Well, technically, it doesn't need to, no. Turing introduced his eponymous machines in the mid-thirties, when they were still nothing more than a mathematical formalism. Understanding and working with them doesn't require access to a computer, and while the turtle-pushing power of Logo is a really good introductory environment to prepare the mind for programming and CS, not even it is essential. A good working knowledge of, for example, sorting algorithms has practical value to someone who needs to organize a large collection of physical objects such as papers; similarly, the application of binary search to telephone books is a classic introductory example.
I agree with the tone of your post, but your analogy is off-base and troubles me. Arithmetic is a direct underpinning of mathematics. The equivalent computer science task would probably be learning how to break instructions down into discrete and logical steps. Computer science as a discipline is fundamentally about procedures and algorithms, just as mathematics is about numbers and equations, and set theory is about relationships and groups.
Consequentially, using Office is less of a computer science curriculum element and more like a general life skill that involves computers. It's true that working with computers as a user is an important preface to learning how to program and think in the exact terms of a computer, but by no means does it fit the same position as arithmetic does for mathematics.
A better post might be "c'mon, guys, he's got a Masters degree. Stop being dicks about semantics and realise that he knows what he means better than most of you do."
(Sorry, that link slipped 3D models in for the monsters; it's a recording of a newer source port, possibly eDuke32. This is more accurate. But still, the first video I linked is a good demonstration of the level appearance; note especially the sloped floors.)
I don't think that last link really proves your point. It depicts the Genesis running an engine roughly comparable to Wolfenstein 3-D. Notice the orthogonal walls and total lack of floor or ceiling textures. Here's what the real Duke actually plays like, in case you've forgotten (although the music didn't sound that good on most sound cards.)
They do, but the minute someone makes the connection between NAT and security the dead rise and chant repeatedly "NAT is not security".
What a silly thing to say. NAT is security in the same sense that switching your grandmother to Firefox with an IE theme is security. Not all security measures are about actually preventing breaches. Who are these dead, and are they weakest to silver bullets, garlic, or MBAs?
(I'll concede that maybe we need another word for it, though.)
And also herd immunity: you're less likely to get infected if everyone else is exempt from being capable of infecting you. Firewalling routers really don't get enough love for their role in reducing the internet's trash density.
Well. First you'd need some malware that actually runs on XP x64...
I think the idea is that food is now a drug maybe?
You missed a story. All is well and accounted for.
Sure—but if it's cheaper, why not pick up the extra functionality?
This may be a little premature, but you sound more than a bit like an astroturfer with anonymous talk like that. No offense or anything.
"Perpetual finance" is usually called "sustainable growth." (ba-dum, tish!)
If only there had been a very large man with very big hands to stop capitalists from fucking up sustainability.
My best guess is that they both have extremely awkward-sounding names (at least, in English.)
At least two other people got the joke, as evidenced by the Funny moderation and TheLink's comment—and humour is always hit-and-miss anyway. You should really just give it a rest. I guess the take-home message is that trying to explain a joke based on inherently derogatory stereotypes rarely works out.
Here's a hint to remember in the future: between Canada, the UK, and Australia, there are 118 million English speakers, most of whom were raised with metric as their native measuring system. If all of those countries contribute the same percentage of their population to Slashdot as the United States does, you could have as much as 27% of Slashdot users who don't make mistakes in metric. That should be a sufficient enough fraction to make you think twice about assuming fault, particularly when there are other clues present (e.g. the "thickness" of sand/glass grains instead of the size) that the statement is meant to be absurd.
And if all else fails, check the comment history! Maybe they're not a native English speaker and you can't trust them to know the difference between "thickness" and "length" or "size"—but maybe, conversely, that will clear everything up. I don't think that's a disproportionate amount of effort if it avoids a protracted and uncomfortable dialogue about the semantics of a tasteless joke.