The only sense in which ID is a valid hypo is the trivial sense in which every evidence free but self-consistent hypothesis is a valid hypothesis. There's an infinity of ways they could all be true or any number of them could be true. L Ron Hubbard could be right about absolutely everything. And. So what? What exactly is it you want/.ers or the larger society to do on account of this? Treat whatever your pet theory is as a special case to be dealt with gingerly and accorded more respect that the Thetan Hypothesis?
From that perspective , the Nazi "philosophy" was "well thought out" also.
You shouldn't assign "well thought out" to systems of thought that run contrary to reality and are based on evidence free hypothesizing, which describes both Rand and the Nazis. Elaborating endlessly on a false set of premises about reality should not be reckoned as "well thought out". Your philosophy has to meet up with what is actually true somewhere along the line.
Actually, we have a system that does hold itself to those standards; it's called science.
So for instance while Ayn Rand's "extremely well thought out " philosophy led her to "know" that the tobacco industry was a great thing and smoking was not detrimental to your health, a fact that she loved to hold forth on ad-naseum while puffing on a cancer stick, science had proof that the lung cancer growing in Ayn Rand's lungs as she spoke was directly caused by just that cancer stick.
I think the overall attitude of the right wing commentators was summed up pretty well by National Review senior writer Matt Labash when he exaplined why conservative media outlets are doing so well:
"Because they feed the rage. We bring the pain to the liberal media...the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it actually."
Which pretty well does describe most of what passes for mainstream conservative "thought:" these days. No one forced conservatives to be anti-science, anti-rational, anti-evidence based thinking. But since they made those selections, they have no one but themselves to blame when the content of opinions so generated get dismissed and mocked. No one is responsible for the choices you make but yourself. You are responsible for the consequences of your actions, not the people around you. I wish conservatives could learn these basic precepts. So far, no luck.
And one piece of advice- the most valuable thing you can develop is a sense of what technologies you can ignore. I made my career ignoring all manners of things that came and went. If your job or business depends on learning it, then do it, but you can't learn everything CORBA, AJAX, Linux, PHP, J2EE, Spring, Java,.net, Perl, GTK, Swing, ActionScript or etc. etc. on and on forever. Have a skill set that taken together either directly serves your own product / company or makes sense to potential employers.
In the first case, only let limited time contain what you learn, go both narrow and deep in a large number of things each of which serves your exact purpose.
In the second case, get a feel for the cluster of technologies that people who have jobs you like possess. Are they mostly on the Linux platform? Are they LAMP developers? PHP? Are they developing under the Java stack?
If you're building a skill set in order to land a job, find the thing in programming that you just like to do. I could never stand J2EE even though I'm a java developer. I went HCI and Swing and thick clients. Other developers were the exact opposite.
If your passion is to create a specific product, then let that product's demands be your guide to what to learn.
best wishes.
Start your own company- work for yourself. Your greatest danger isn't ability to perform, it's age discrimination. I have had so many recruiters ask me if I was married or had kids. ILLEGAL. Young people who will work 80 hours for peanuts is the ideal. The further you are from that idea, the slimmer your prospects become.
Learn your craft, have a decent idea, become business savvy, do the whole thing. Your customers aren't going to care if you're 2' 5" and have a very hair back.
Get judged by your merits- go into the market.
I know a physicist in a major US university whose dept. needed a custom board made. They contracted with a Chinese company. Long (expensive) story short: quality control was so bad, they took it in house.
Just one data point, but the lesson I took from that was if you're a small company or just a few people, Chinese fab (is there any other?) may be a crap shoot. I would have told you that a the Chinese factory would have been excited by the order and done what it took to make things go right.
My advice: have a bushy strategic tree that allows for survival if the hardware doesn't work. If that's not part of your game plan, rewrite your game plan.
Or you could just say it this way: Cloud. Cloud is a service that Sun can charge for and people will pay for just because it's Sun.
Who has more sw/ net cred than Sun Microsystems? not IBM, that's for sure. Not Google, not in software. Not Microsoft, not in net and not in software either.
Since when does Wall Street accuratel value tech companies? Wall Street is either hyperbolic (Google) or depressive (Sun).
Sun has been up more than they've been down over the years. Their stock is worth more than when they started, although not near the boom years.
More to the point is Sun is stuffed to the gills with excellent software and developers.
So why doesn't Wall Street take a lesson from Buffet and learn to value companies by their underlying competencies and take a long view of Sun's prospects.?
"What's Sun's software worth to you? That's the question being put to developers at a poll
at Mr. Poll. The poll asks Java developers what they would be willing to pay to guarantee continued access to and development on Sun's Open Source software including Java, Glassfish, ZFS, MySQL, etc.
The results, while limited, seem encouraging: the vast majority (92%) of independent or small company developers say they would open their wallets to the tune of U.S. $100.00 (the mode) to U.S. $$1,000.00 (9%) to keep Sun producing software while an encouraging 77% of developers in large companies say they believe that their companies should be willing to pony up U.S. $1,000.00 per developer per year to keep the Sun software machine going.
Sun seems about to set into a Big Blue sky, leaving the future of major pieces of the Java stack in question. Are developers just finding religion now that they're faced with the possible abandonment of their language of choice? Or has Sun missed out by not asking for support, reasoning that people wouldn't pay for something they could get for free?
If it would save Sun's software from oblivion (or worse) would you pay real money to keep Sun's software developers developing?"
This is M and A mania ala RJR Nabisco and AOL/ Times Warner. This is going to destroy Suns legacy and cost IBM big time.
The only reason IBM would buy Sun is to acquire rights to Sunâ(TM)s patents and then wield them despotically in a way Sun never did. The long story there is this will accelerate the movement to simply ban software patents the way business method patents were all but disposed of by the Supreme Court recently.
What does Sun have that IBM wants? This is not about a smaller company being bought for their technology. Itâ(TM)s about a larger company buying a weakened rival in order to kill off a competitor. This is HP and Compaq / Carly Fiorina II.
Sun could continue as it is. It has the cash. It has the vision. The future of computing / cloud based applications, PaaS SaaS is on its side. If anything, theyâ(TM)ve been too far ahead of their times.
If IBM buys Sun you can bet that developers will desert Java en mass. IBM has their own VM just the way they have their own GUI toolkit for Java. They'll do for Java what they did for the GUI, except now there will be no countervailing force to stop them.
In the software arena, IBM has the worst case of NIH ever seen. Their developers are convinced they can do everything better, with marginal results and more importantly, the creation of discontinuities in technology development and adoption. IBM broke the Java the GUI community into two camps for NO good effect when it introduced SWT. So also with Eclipse, which is a poor imitation of IntelliJ and NB. The cultural differences between IBM and Sun developers are where the rubber will meet the road on this M and A. Developers are not so many thinking cogs that you can shuffle around from company to company, like other assets. They are people with a POV and an attitude about what they do. That is, to the extent they are any good at what they do. To the victor, IBM will not go the spoils.
Here is a dose of reality to all my friends on Wall Street and in management at both companies. Beneath the level of anything any analyst can see or quantify, there are little tiny social and psychological micro-events that determine how the knowledge that is in the heads and practices of Sunâ(TM)s employees - which is what gives Sun its real value - gets transferred or not to IBM. So you bought the company. So what. Trust me, you did not buy the developers. Quite the opposite. If you think you can walk into any part of the Sun IP, excepting the patents, and take ownership of it, you and Wall Street have a big surprise coming. It is not under your control, and it never was and it never will be. The culture clash between the Sun way of doing things, egalitarian, optimistic, inventive, forward looking and social is going to slam head on into the well documented culture of manipulation, mean spirited employee relations, exploitative relationships with its customers (billable hours), aggressive and opportunistic use of the broken IP system (Phelps), divisive, conceited and rank-abusing management hierarchy, forced rankings among employees where the bottom 10% are automatically fired, etc. etc. that exists at IBM.
Prediction- the best of Sun employees flee to Google and Adobe, the rest foot drag and passively resist their new-found hell, IBM destroys zfs, Netbeans and other middleware products, Swing and finally Java itself through a combination ineptitude , alienation of key developers, grandiosity and conceit and when it is all over a huge amount of really good stuff simply no longer exists, the market is poorer and the forward momentum of software development is set back by 15 years.
Don't forget that the majority of voters didn't want "colored people" to be able to vote, be able to marry outside their race, didn't want integration of public services (think water fountains) etc. etc.
Some things are a matter of majority rule, but some things, more basic in their nature, are a mater of interpreting the Constitution, which the Supreme Court is legally bound to do.
Gay marriage is exactly one of those things in the eyes of progressives, who, by the way, are the same people who wantedhe abolition of slavery, voting rights for African Americans, voting rights for women, equal pay for equal work, permission to divorce, repeal of obscenity laws (think: James Joyce and Henry Miller) and on and on and on for the past 230 years.
Some things come down to the principles this country was founded on, adjusted for the changing times.
Thank God for that.
That's not how human caused global warming was established. That's not how science is done, period. The fallacious methodology is entirely the product of Wall Street. Which brings us back to the real topic- why does any politician listen to anything anyone on Wall Street has to say anyway?
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The only sense in which ID is a valid hypo is the trivial sense in which every evidence free but self-consistent hypothesis is a valid hypothesis. There's an infinity of ways they could all be true or any number of them could be true. L Ron Hubbard could be right about absolutely everything. And. So what? What exactly is it you want /.ers or the larger society to do on account of this? Treat whatever your pet theory is as a special case to be dealt with gingerly and accorded more respect that the Thetan Hypothesis?
From that perspective , the Nazi "philosophy" was "well thought out" also. You shouldn't assign "well thought out" to systems of thought that run contrary to reality and are based on evidence free hypothesizing, which describes both Rand and the Nazis. Elaborating endlessly on a false set of premises about reality should not be reckoned as "well thought out". Your philosophy has to meet up with what is actually true somewhere along the line. Actually, we have a system that does hold itself to those standards; it's called science. So for instance while Ayn Rand's "extremely well thought out " philosophy led her to "know" that the tobacco industry was a great thing and smoking was not detrimental to your health, a fact that she loved to hold forth on ad-naseum while puffing on a cancer stick, science had proof that the lung cancer growing in Ayn Rand's lungs as she spoke was directly caused by just that cancer stick.
"Because they feed the rage. We bring the pain to the liberal media...the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it actually."
Which pretty well does describe most of what passes for mainstream conservative "thought:" these days. No one forced conservatives to be anti-science, anti-rational, anti-evidence based thinking. But since they made those selections, they have no one but themselves to blame when the content of opinions so generated get dismissed and mocked. No one is responsible for the choices you make but yourself. You are responsible for the consequences of your actions, not the people around you. I wish conservatives could learn these basic precepts. So far, no luck.
And one piece of advice- the most valuable thing you can develop is a sense of what technologies you can ignore. I made my career ignoring all manners of things that came and went. If your job or business depends on learning it, then do it, but you can't learn everything CORBA, AJAX, Linux, PHP, J2EE, Spring, Java, .net, Perl, GTK, Swing, ActionScript or etc. etc. on and on forever. Have a skill set that taken together either directly serves your own product / company or makes sense to potential employers.
In the first case, only let limited time contain what you learn, go both narrow and deep in a large number of things each of which serves your exact purpose.
In the second case, get a feel for the cluster of technologies that people who have jobs you like possess. Are they mostly on the Linux platform? Are they LAMP developers? PHP? Are they developing under the Java stack?
If you're building a skill set in order to land a job, find the thing in programming that you just like to do. I could never stand J2EE even though I'm a java developer. I went HCI and Swing and thick clients. Other developers were the exact opposite.
If your passion is to create a specific product, then let that product's demands be your guide to what to learn.
best wishes.
Start your own company- work for yourself. Your greatest danger isn't ability to perform, it's age discrimination. I have had so many recruiters ask me if I was married or had kids. ILLEGAL. Young people who will work 80 hours for peanuts is the ideal. The further you are from that idea, the slimmer your prospects become. Learn your craft, have a decent idea, become business savvy, do the whole thing. Your customers aren't going to care if you're 2' 5" and have a very hair back. Get judged by your merits- go into the market.
I know a physicist in a major US university whose dept. needed a custom board made. They contracted with a Chinese company. Long (expensive) story short: quality control was so bad, they took it in house. Just one data point, but the lesson I took from that was if you're a small company or just a few people, Chinese fab (is there any other?) may be a crap shoot. I would have told you that a the Chinese factory would have been excited by the order and done what it took to make things go right. My advice: have a bushy strategic tree that allows for survival if the hardware doesn't work. If that's not part of your game plan, rewrite your game plan.
Who has more sw/ net cred than Sun Microsystems? not IBM, that's for sure. Not Google, not in software. Not Microsoft, not in net and not in software either.
Since when does Wall Street accuratel value tech companies? Wall Street is either hyperbolic (Google) or depressive (Sun).
Sun has been up more than they've been down over the years. Their stock is worth more than when they started, although not near the boom years.
More to the point is Sun is stuffed to the gills with excellent software and developers.
So why doesn't Wall Street take a lesson from Buffet and learn to value companies by their underlying competencies and take a long view of Sun's prospects.?
"What's Sun's software worth to you? That's the question being put to developers at a poll at Mr. Poll. The poll asks Java developers what they would be willing to pay to guarantee continued access to and development on Sun's Open Source software including Java, Glassfish, ZFS, MySQL, etc. The results, while limited, seem encouraging: the vast majority (92%) of independent or small company developers say they would open their wallets to the tune of U.S. $100.00 (the mode) to U.S. $$1,000.00 (9%) to keep Sun producing software while an encouraging 77% of developers in large companies say they believe that their companies should be willing to pony up U.S. $1,000.00 per developer per year to keep the Sun software machine going. Sun seems about to set into a Big Blue sky, leaving the future of major pieces of the Java stack in question. Are developers just finding religion now that they're faced with the possible abandonment of their language of choice? Or has Sun missed out by not asking for support, reasoning that people wouldn't pay for something they could get for free? If it would save Sun's software from oblivion (or worse) would you pay real money to keep Sun's software developers developing?"
This is M and A mania ala RJR Nabisco and AOL/ Times Warner. This is going to destroy Suns legacy and cost IBM big time. The only reason IBM would buy Sun is to acquire rights to Sunâ(TM)s patents and then wield them despotically in a way Sun never did. The long story there is this will accelerate the movement to simply ban software patents the way business method patents were all but disposed of by the Supreme Court recently. What does Sun have that IBM wants? This is not about a smaller company being bought for their technology. Itâ(TM)s about a larger company buying a weakened rival in order to kill off a competitor. This is HP and Compaq / Carly Fiorina II. Sun could continue as it is. It has the cash. It has the vision. The future of computing / cloud based applications, PaaS SaaS is on its side. If anything, theyâ(TM)ve been too far ahead of their times. If IBM buys Sun you can bet that developers will desert Java en mass. IBM has their own VM just the way they have their own GUI toolkit for Java. They'll do for Java what they did for the GUI, except now there will be no countervailing force to stop them. In the software arena, IBM has the worst case of NIH ever seen. Their developers are convinced they can do everything better, with marginal results and more importantly, the creation of discontinuities in technology development and adoption. IBM broke the Java the GUI community into two camps for NO good effect when it introduced SWT. So also with Eclipse, which is a poor imitation of IntelliJ and NB. The cultural differences between IBM and Sun developers are where the rubber will meet the road on this M and A. Developers are not so many thinking cogs that you can shuffle around from company to company, like other assets. They are people with a POV and an attitude about what they do. That is, to the extent they are any good at what they do. To the victor, IBM will not go the spoils. Here is a dose of reality to all my friends on Wall Street and in management at both companies. Beneath the level of anything any analyst can see or quantify, there are little tiny social and psychological micro-events that determine how the knowledge that is in the heads and practices of Sunâ(TM)s employees - which is what gives Sun its real value - gets transferred or not to IBM. So you bought the company. So what. Trust me, you did not buy the developers. Quite the opposite. If you think you can walk into any part of the Sun IP, excepting the patents, and take ownership of it, you and Wall Street have a big surprise coming. It is not under your control, and it never was and it never will be. The culture clash between the Sun way of doing things, egalitarian, optimistic, inventive, forward looking and social is going to slam head on into the well documented culture of manipulation, mean spirited employee relations, exploitative relationships with its customers (billable hours), aggressive and opportunistic use of the broken IP system (Phelps), divisive, conceited and rank-abusing management hierarchy, forced rankings among employees where the bottom 10% are automatically fired, etc. etc. that exists at IBM. Prediction- the best of Sun employees flee to Google and Adobe, the rest foot drag and passively resist their new-found hell, IBM destroys zfs, Netbeans and other middleware products, Swing and finally Java itself through a combination ineptitude , alienation of key developers, grandiosity and conceit and when it is all over a huge amount of really good stuff simply no longer exists, the market is poorer and the forward momentum of software development is set back by 15 years.
Don't forget that the majority of voters didn't want "colored people" to be able to vote, be able to marry outside their race, didn't want integration of public services (think water fountains) etc. etc. Some things are a matter of majority rule, but some things, more basic in their nature, are a mater of interpreting the Constitution, which the Supreme Court is legally bound to do. Gay marriage is exactly one of those things in the eyes of progressives, who, by the way, are the same people who wantedhe abolition of slavery, voting rights for African Americans, voting rights for women, equal pay for equal work, permission to divorce, repeal of obscenity laws (think: James Joyce and Henry Miller) and on and on and on for the past 230 years. Some things come down to the principles this country was founded on, adjusted for the changing times. Thank God for that.
That's not how human caused global warming was established. That's not how science is done, period. The fallacious methodology is entirely the product of Wall Street. Which brings us back to the real topic- why does any politician listen to anything anyone on Wall Street has to say anyway?