This is true, in America and other places with high income inequality. It doesn't seem to be true in really poor countries, where even starving people seem to stick together. Why do you suppose that is?
It is important to remember that no matter how horrific the crime, it happens for a reason. Those reasons are only rarely completely internal to the criminal. Calling somone a bastard, while a reasonable response to such horrors, isn't helpful. It amounts to throwing up one's hands and saying, 'the devil made him do it.' It's not an explanation, but an expression of emotion. In order to come to grips with crime, we must put aside emotion and analyze the root causes dispationately. I say this as a victim of violent crime who was permaently handicapped in an attack.
Income inequality drives crime. When everyone is poor, no one steals from each other. When everyone is rich, everyone steals from each other, but there are rules. When some people are very, very rich and some are poor, the poor feel justified in evening out the unfairness through direct action. If everyone had their basic needs met, I don't think income inequality would matter as much. But as long as some people are desperare and feel they are being screwed, and they can find an easy target in a rich person, there will be crime.
This is slashdot, after all.. Hentai is about as close to real women majority here has gotten so far.
Okay,/. has been around for a long time. I'm willing to bet the majority of people here are over 25. They do not live in their mother's basement. Many of them are married and many of those have children. We're not a bunch of geeky kids any more. For chrissake, people are starting to call me sir! I hate to kill the stereotype of the typical slashdot virgin, but I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people here get as much sex as any other married person.
Still, it's a funny stereotype, and we geeks are a self-deprecating bunch. I'd be willing to bet we'll still be joking about beign virgins when we're sixty with a half dozen grandkids.
You have laid out the differences between the fields very clearly. CS has always seemed to be winging it compared to engineering. Given enough time, CS will become like any other engineering field.
This is a very important point, one I allude to in my comment. Engineers have tradition to go on, thousands of years of experience with what works and what doesn't. Cs is too new, we're in a stage like that of Egyptian engineers when they first started putting up the pyramids. "Okay, so a 45 degree angle didn't work, lets try 37..." Give us a few thousand years like you guys have had and I think we'll do okay;)
Don't get rid of computer science. Theorists are needed in all fields. Breakthrough advances rarely come from the applied sciences. But I really do wish we CS types could take some lessons from the engineering guys, who have a much longer history.
One reason I love OSS is that its goal is to standardize and reuse code. I hate reinventing the wheel over and over again just because of some dumb non-disclosure clause.
I think part of the problem is that computer programming takes a special blend of language, mathematical and logical ability. The type of person who is good at all three and thus a great programmer is different from the type of person who is drawn to engineering.
Now it sounds like I'm dissing engineers but I don't mean to disrespect them or IT people. What I mean is that engineering requires a certain kind of very methodical personality. Computer science requires more of an ability to think outside the box, to see problems in new and unexpected ways.
Ah, you are an actual thinker then. Well that's different. My hat is off to you and thanks for the reasoned response. The one thing that I have to say is that, while a Nations's economy has an impact on an arbitrary measure such as "quality of life," such measures do not corolate with human happiness. Quality of life measures things that are irrelevant to real human happiness. Does having a wide screen TV really make anyone happier in the long run? I think not. In fact, economic factors, except in extreme cases has very little to do with self-reported human happiness. People in some of the poorest places in the world report happiness and life satisfaction levels as high or higher than people in industrialized nations. Factors that do have a high corellation to happiness include genetics, having a spouse, community, and religion.
I both agree and disagree with you. It is not only detrimental to society to believe that all humans are purely selfish and mercenary, it is not true. Recent experiments in economics have shown that the majority of people will, given the opportunity, value fairness and reciprocity more than pure self interest. It is our high level ability to cooperate with each other that sets us apart from other animals.
However, there are a small minority of people who will always act selfishly, and the higher up you go in business or politics, the more of these people you will find. It is not uncommon to find large corporations doing things like this at all. So while I agree with you that complete cynicism hurts individuals and society, I also think that in big business the crap has risen to the top. In general, the high level business person focused on "doing what's right", "giving back to the community", and "providing quality and value" is the exception, not the rule.
In fact, as a general rule I would say that business people who love the business they are in more than money will never rise to the highest levels. Rather unfortunate, but understandable. Our economic system is based on the falsehood of "selfish actor" theory. Of course it is going to promote selfishness.
In other disciplines, the engineers ARE math guys. Face it, compared to other engineering types, software engineers and programmers are SLOPPY. This is because engineering has thousands of years worth of spectacular cork-ups with enormous death tolls to look back on, and engineering students are (I'm guessing, IANAE) shown horrific, traffic-safetyesque movies like Blood on the Protractor, Slide Rule Massacre, and London Bridge is Falling Down, Killing Litle Johnny's Entire Family.
Maybe we CS types need our own safety movies, perhaps When Buffers Attack!, Threads: Your Parallel Friends or Quagmires of Debugging DOOM?, or maybe Metric or Imperial: You Mean there's a Difference? Or maybe we need to recognize that many of us have the same awesome responsibility that other engineers do of protecting human lives from the consequences of our mistakes. I'm told that this point is hammered home in engineering schools, why not in CS departments?
Nah, not really serious. I should have made that more clear. And he probably has done more for the environment than I have. At first I thought he was just lazy, but I'm not so young that I don't know what it feels like to get old, so I apologized.
Oh, well that's fine then. Sorry I was so strident. Hey, caring about shit is what the young are for anyway, right? I'm getting old enough myself that I can see The Big Tired on my horizon, so I better not cast stones.
Judicious use of DDT would more than likely have minimal environmental impact, but the problem seems to be in convincing people that just because a little is good, a lot isn't better. Online in general doesn't handle tounge in cheek well. I like to use the winky;) or toungy:P smiley to indicate I'm just kidding in situations where it might not be clear.
Well, privilege defines the difference: if an unprivileged app can be hacked in such a way as to escalate privileges, that is the fault of the OS, no matter what the app did wrong. If it can be hacked only so that a remote user can execute arbitrary commands with the privilege of the process they hacked, that is the fault of the app.
Well, fuck it, I was all set to come at you like a spider monkey but at least you did something. That's more than most people do. Anyway, you may be right that you're safe for the next two years. I'm just sayin' the day will come, before you die, when you will be forced to consider this your problem, because it is. Nothing gives you the right to go around polluting and wasting energy, sorry, I and everyone else on the planet have the right, nay, the moral obligation to stop you from ruining it for the rest of us.
It's as if I said, "I made not pissing in your well a priority for a long time, and now I'm old and I'm going to piss in your well if I damn well feel like it." Sorry, we are not going to let you piss in our well, old or not. It doesn't matter one bit how long you didn't piss in the well, it's not like you get to save up pissing in the well points and trade them all in on your death bed.
I always appreciate being called a young whippersnapper now that I'm closer to 40 than 30. But I do remember DDT, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and thin eggshells. Bird populations have rebounded after removing DDT from the US market. Although they are not now resistant, mosquitos were already building up a hefty tolerance to DDT by the time it was removed. That was one reason DDT was being so over-applied: it wasn't working anymore.
This is only a handful of tropical diseases, not all of which can be controlled through DDT, which itself is not the cure-all you make it out to be. You do know that DDT is legal in most countries where these diseases are currently a problem, right? Are you really trying to say that the spread of tropical diseases due to global warming would not be an issue if only we used more pesticides? Because, as idiotic as that statement is, it really sounds like that is what you are trying to say. I hope for your sake that you aren't that dumb, and I'm just misinterpreting things.
That last statement of yours is such a non-sequiter, it just baffles me. It sounds as if you are trying to troll me but have no idea of what pushes my buttons and are just lashing out at random.
It is one of the major jobs of an OS to keep one out-of-control app from hosing your entire machine, whether that app is out of control due to hacking, user error, or other bugs. If your PHP app has a problem on a good OS, the attacker may be able to change files owned by the apache user, while on a bad OS they might undetectably rootkit your machine.
I think the mistake you are making is assuming that if these global climate change deniers really knew how bad things are going to get, they would want to do something. They don't want change and they will do or say anything in order to put off having to change. Whether or not disaster is on it's way is completely irellevant to these people. They just don't want to have to do anything, and endlessly pointing fingers like a bunch of five year olds is a perfect way to put off foing anything.
It's like when you want to put a child to bed, but they don't want to go. They will argue and argue, but they don't really care about winning. All they care about is the fact that one more minute of arguing is one more minute they don't have to go to bed.
Unfortunately, for the developmentally challenged among us who are stuck at your level of moral reasoning, the only answer is, "because bigger more powerful people are going to MAKE you do it." Whine about your rights and freedoms all you want, but whether you care or not is irrelevant. Some of us aren't as old as you and will be having to live on this planet after you are gone. You are making this our problem, so we are GOING to make it yours, old man.
Wow, way to ignore the main point. Malaria may be easy to control, especially (apparantly) if one does not mind dispensing calcium supplements to birds. Malaira is not the only tropical diseas? Got a plan for West Nile virus? Dengue fever? Lymphatic filariasis? Ebola? Leishmaniasis? African trypanosomiasis? Lobomycosis? Schistosomiasis? Tuberculosis? Labrea Fever? Any of those? What, you've never heard of most of those? You will. Let's just hope it isn't in the context of you or one of your lved ones dying from one of them.
We dump billions of tons of C02 (heat trapping gas) into the atmosphere annually and it is accumulating. How could this not be having an effect? Wishful thinking?
Good thing you're here to explain how simple it is. Too bad we wasted all those research hours of all those climatologists studying and trying to model what they called a massively complex system, when in fact, you had the simple, obvious answer all along.
You really should have spoken up sooner.
So you are denying that CO2 has an effect on climate? And you are saying that that is what all those research hours have been spent on, finding out whether CO2 has an effect? He says CO2 has an effect, and you pull out the ridiculous straw man, accusing him of making a statement he never made. Nice opening salvo, there.
Consider the trade deficit benefits of importing less oil, the price for oil would probably drop along with this further improving the deficit
True. Of course, that will simply increase the economic pressure to use oil, which will require more draconian enforcement to prevent it...but then, the inherent problems in fighting basic economics are clearly not a concern, here.
Not if we put pressure on companies to use less oil by rasing the tax on it, to offset the negative externalities of using it.
Conservation efforts will have offsetting economic benefits.
Complete speculation. This is no more or less irrational than someone claiming that climate change will have offsetting environmental benefits.
No speculation, there is plenty of data showing that environmental regulations have nearly always lead to reductions in cost. Fancy that, beign more efficient is cheaper. Who woulda thunk it?
Now you go off on a tangent about Greenpeace, obviously trying to discredit all environmentalists, including the author of the original post, by linking them to some kook. One environmentalist is a nutbag, therefore they all are, and we don't have to listen to any of them, eh?
Funny, I always thought it was the appeals to Do Nothing that skipped the real cost-benefit analysis by cherry picking their figures. Economic harm is trumped, while any economic growth due to new industries and better efficiency is glossed over. The possibility of some kind of sliver lining to climate change is bandied about while the real costs in terms of pollution, environmental destruction, human suffering and death are ignored. That's not a real cost benefit analysis! That's starting from the assumption that there must be a cost, and working backwards to find the "proof."
In closing, you characterize any concerns raised about climate change as "caterwauling." You then go on to imply that not a single person who raises those concerns ever has a "reasoned response," and all they are doing is "waving a bloody shirt."
You come across as someone who has already made up their mind, and will engage in any kind of sophistry to convince others that youn are right.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, in America and other places with high income inequality. It doesn't seem to be true in really poor countries, where even starving people seem to stick together. Why do you suppose that is?
It is important to remember that no matter how horrific the crime, it happens for a reason. Those reasons are only rarely completely internal to the criminal. Calling somone a bastard, while a reasonable response to such horrors, isn't helpful. It amounts to throwing up one's hands and saying, 'the devil made him do it.' It's not an explanation, but an expression of emotion. In order to come to grips with crime, we must put aside emotion and analyze the root causes dispationately. I say this as a victim of violent crime who was permaently handicapped in an attack.
Income inequality drives crime. When everyone is poor, no one steals from each other. When everyone is rich, everyone steals from each other, but there are rules. When some people are very, very rich and some are poor, the poor feel justified in evening out the unfairness through direct action. If everyone had their basic needs met, I don't think income inequality would matter as much. But as long as some people are desperare and feel they are being screwed, and they can find an easy target in a rich person, there will be crime.
After all, porn is only really interesting for a few minutes at a time.
This leads to the clearest, most accurate definition of porn there is: If it no longer interests you after you come, it's porn.
This is slashdot, after all.. Hentai is about as close to real women majority here has gotten so far.
/. has been around for a long time. I'm willing to bet the majority of people here are over 25. They do not live in their mother's basement. Many of them are married and many of those have children. We're not a bunch of geeky kids any more. For chrissake, people are starting to call me sir! I hate to kill the stereotype of the typical slashdot virgin, but I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people here get as much sex as any other married person.
Okay,
Still, it's a funny stereotype, and we geeks are a self-deprecating bunch. I'd be willing to bet we'll still be joking about beign virgins when we're sixty with a half dozen grandkids.
You have laid out the differences between the fields very clearly. CS has always seemed to be winging it compared to engineering. Given enough time, CS will become like any other engineering field.
You know, I think you are the first person on /. who gets the meaning behind my handle.
This is a very important point, one I allude to in my comment. Engineers have tradition to go on, thousands of years of experience with what works and what doesn't. Cs is too new, we're in a stage like that of Egyptian engineers when they first started putting up the pyramids. "Okay, so a 45 degree angle didn't work, lets try 37..." Give us a few thousand years like you guys have had and I think we'll do okay ;)
Don't get rid of computer science. Theorists are needed in all fields. Breakthrough advances rarely come from the applied sciences. But I really do wish we CS types could take some lessons from the engineering guys, who have a much longer history.
One reason I love OSS is that its goal is to standardize and reuse code. I hate reinventing the wheel over and over again just because of some dumb non-disclosure clause.
I think part of the problem is that computer programming takes a special blend of language, mathematical and logical ability. The type of person who is good at all three and thus a great programmer is different from the type of person who is drawn to engineering.
Now it sounds like I'm dissing engineers but I don't mean to disrespect them or IT people. What I mean is that engineering requires a certain kind of very methodical personality. Computer science requires more of an ability to think outside the box, to see problems in new and unexpected ways.
Ah, you are an actual thinker then. Well that's different. My hat is off to you and thanks for the reasoned response. The one thing that I have to say is that, while a Nations's economy has an impact on an arbitrary measure such as "quality of life," such measures do not corolate with human happiness. Quality of life measures things that are irrelevant to real human happiness. Does having a wide screen TV really make anyone happier in the long run? I think not. In fact, economic factors, except in extreme cases has very little to do with self-reported human happiness. People in some of the poorest places in the world report happiness and life satisfaction levels as high or higher than people in industrialized nations. Factors that do have a high corellation to happiness include genetics, having a spouse, community, and religion.
I both agree and disagree with you. It is not only detrimental to society to believe that all humans are purely selfish and mercenary, it is not true. Recent experiments in economics have shown that the majority of people will, given the opportunity, value fairness and reciprocity more than pure self interest. It is our high level ability to cooperate with each other that sets us apart from other animals.
However, there are a small minority of people who will always act selfishly, and the higher up you go in business or politics, the more of these people you will find. It is not uncommon to find large corporations doing things like this at all. So while I agree with you that complete cynicism hurts individuals and society, I also think that in big business the crap has risen to the top. In general, the high level business person focused on "doing what's right", "giving back to the community", and "providing quality and value" is the exception, not the rule.
In fact, as a general rule I would say that business people who love the business they are in more than money will never rise to the highest levels. Rather unfortunate, but understandable. Our economic system is based on the falsehood of "selfish actor" theory. Of course it is going to promote selfishness.
When I came up with those names, I pictured Troy saying them. Dammit, Phil Hartman, why'd you have to marry a crazy murdering alchoholic bitch?
*Sigh*
In other disciplines, the engineers ARE math guys. Face it, compared to other engineering types, software engineers and programmers are SLOPPY. This is because engineering has thousands of years worth of spectacular cork-ups with enormous death tolls to look back on, and engineering students are (I'm guessing, IANAE) shown horrific, traffic-safetyesque movies like Blood on the Protractor, Slide Rule Massacre, and London Bridge is Falling Down, Killing Litle Johnny's Entire Family.
Maybe we CS types need our own safety movies, perhaps When Buffers Attack!, Threads: Your Parallel Friends or Quagmires of Debugging DOOM?, or maybe Metric or Imperial: You Mean there's a Difference? Or maybe we need to recognize that many of us have the same awesome responsibility that other engineers do of protecting human lives from the consequences of our mistakes. I'm told that this point is hammered home in engineering schools, why not in CS departments?
Nah, not really serious. I should have made that more clear. And he probably has done more for the environment than I have. At first I thought he was just lazy, but I'm not so young that I don't know what it feels like to get old, so I apologized.
Oh, well that's fine then. Sorry I was so strident. Hey, caring about shit is what the young are for anyway, right? I'm getting old enough myself that I can see The Big Tired on my horizon, so I better not cast stones.
Judicious use of DDT would more than likely have minimal environmental impact, but the problem seems to be in convincing people that just because a little is good, a lot isn't better. Online in general doesn't handle tounge in cheek well. I like to use the winky ;) or toungy :P smiley to indicate I'm just kidding in situations where it might not be clear.
Or "Clarence Thomas." Use the one that makes you happy and leave me out of it.
Right. I'm gonna go with 'Long Dong Silver' because the thought of me someday meeting Justica Thomas and calling him Long Dong makes me giggle.
"Hey! Long Dong! Over here! Justice Silver, I'm talking to you! Yeah, that Anita chick was HOT! I'd tap that."
Well, privilege defines the difference: if an unprivileged app can be hacked in such a way as to escalate privileges, that is the fault of the OS, no matter what the app did wrong. If it can be hacked only so that a remote user can execute arbitrary commands with the privilege of the process they hacked, that is the fault of the app.
Well, fuck it, I was all set to come at you like a spider monkey but at least you did something. That's more than most people do. Anyway, you may be right that you're safe for the next two years. I'm just sayin' the day will come, before you die, when you will be forced to consider this your problem, because it is. Nothing gives you the right to go around polluting and wasting energy, sorry, I and everyone else on the planet have the right, nay, the moral obligation to stop you from ruining it for the rest of us.
It's as if I said, "I made not pissing in your well a priority for a long time, and now I'm old and I'm going to piss in your well if I damn well feel like it." Sorry, we are not going to let you piss in our well, old or not. It doesn't matter one bit how long you didn't piss in the well, it's not like you get to save up pissing in the well points and trade them all in on your death bed.
I always appreciate being called a young whippersnapper now that I'm closer to 40 than 30. But I do remember DDT, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and thin eggshells. Bird populations have rebounded after removing DDT from the US market. Although they are not now resistant, mosquitos were already building up a hefty tolerance to DDT by the time it was removed. That was one reason DDT was being so over-applied: it wasn't working anymore.
This is only a handful of tropical diseases, not all of which can be controlled through DDT, which itself is not the cure-all you make it out to be. You do know that DDT is legal in most countries where these diseases are currently a problem, right? Are you really trying to say that the spread of tropical diseases due to global warming would not be an issue if only we used more pesticides? Because, as idiotic as that statement is, it really sounds like that is what you are trying to say. I hope for your sake that you aren't that dumb, and I'm just misinterpreting things.
That last statement of yours is such a non-sequiter, it just baffles me. It sounds as if you are trying to troll me but have no idea of what pushes my buttons and are just lashing out at random.
It is one of the major jobs of an OS to keep one out-of-control app from hosing your entire machine, whether that app is out of control due to hacking, user error, or other bugs. If your PHP app has a problem on a good OS, the attacker may be able to change files owned by the apache user, while on a bad OS they might undetectably rootkit your machine.
I think the mistake you are making is assuming that if these global climate change deniers really knew how bad things are going to get, they would want to do something. They don't want change and they will do or say anything in order to put off having to change. Whether or not disaster is on it's way is completely irellevant to these people. They just don't want to have to do anything, and endlessly pointing fingers like a bunch of five year olds is a perfect way to put off foing anything.
It's like when you want to put a child to bed, but they don't want to go. They will argue and argue, but they don't really care about winning. All they care about is the fact that one more minute of arguing is one more minute they don't have to go to bed.
Unfortunately, for the developmentally challenged among us who are stuck at your level of moral reasoning, the only answer is, "because bigger more powerful people are going to MAKE you do it." Whine about your rights and freedoms all you want, but whether you care or not is irrelevant. Some of us aren't as old as you and will be having to live on this planet after you are gone. You are making this our problem, so we are GOING to make it yours, old man.
Wow, way to ignore the main point. Malaria may be easy to control, especially (apparantly) if one does not mind dispensing calcium supplements to birds. Malaira is not the only tropical diseas? Got a plan for West Nile virus? Dengue fever? Lymphatic filariasis? Ebola? Leishmaniasis? African trypanosomiasis? Lobomycosis? Schistosomiasis? Tuberculosis? Labrea Fever? Any of those? What, you've never heard of most of those? You will. Let's just hope it isn't in the context of you or one of your lved ones dying from one of them.
So you are denying that CO2 has an effect on climate? And you are saying that that is what all those research hours have been spent on, finding out whether CO2 has an effect? He says CO2 has an effect, and you pull out the ridiculous straw man, accusing him of making a statement he never made. Nice opening salvo, there.
Not if we put pressure on companies to use less oil by rasing the tax on it, to offset the negative externalities of using it.
No speculation, there is plenty of data showing that environmental regulations have nearly always lead to reductions in cost. Fancy that, beign more efficient is cheaper. Who woulda thunk it?
Now you go off on a tangent about Greenpeace, obviously trying to discredit all environmentalists, including the author of the original post, by linking them to some kook. One environmentalist is a nutbag, therefore they all are, and we don't have to listen to any of them, eh?
Funny, I always thought it was the appeals to Do Nothing that skipped the real cost-benefit analysis by cherry picking their figures. Economic harm is trumped, while any economic growth due to new industries and better efficiency is glossed over. The possibility of some kind of sliver lining to climate change is bandied about while the real costs in terms of pollution, environmental destruction, human suffering and death are ignored. That's not a real cost benefit analysis! That's starting from the assumption that there must be a cost, and working backwards to find the "proof."
In closing, you characterize any concerns raised about climate change as "caterwauling." You then go on to imply that not a single person who raises those concerns ever has a "reasoned response," and all they are doing is "waving a bloody shirt."
You come across as someone who has already made up their mind, and will engage in any kind of sophistry to convince others that youn are right.