Lumpy is a idiotic troll, and whoever voted him up should feel bad, but during the height of the Iraq occupation they were taking anything they could get to pass their QA. And they had to keep lowering the tests. Simply put, they had to hire X amount of people for a shit job nobody wanted. People desperate for work fit the bill.
Historically, the poor get sent to war. Ideally though, yeah, the military wants the best of the best. And they usually get made into officers and get the fuck out of areas where bullets are flying.
What exactly did you expect the Navy to do, shoot it out of the water?
Pft. Tell the sub to stop dicking around or we'll blow you out of the water. They could have moved to protect THE THING THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING. They could have followed standard operating procedure for when a ship comes too close to their space.
There's [no] reason to think they didn't know where it was the entire time.
Other than collectively shitting their pants and looking like fools, sure. And other than it's a known weakness. But sure, sure, they were just playing it cool. Because OF COURSE there'd be no way that our military could possibly be embarrassed... (SARCASM)
But Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s submarine force, tells us not to be to hard on the sub-hunters:
Noah, I have no inside information on this event, but it is very difficult to detect a quiet diesel submarine and the Song–class submarines are quality submarines. Operating in international waters in the vicinity of a US battle group is perfectly normal — good operational training.
The Chinese very well could have staged this event to make a point about the vulnerability of the Battle Group to submarine attack. The US Navy is fully aware of [those] vulnerabilities
The Chinese are building a credible submarine force which will make it very difficult for the US Navy to maintain sea control dominance in or near coastal waters off of China.
And wikipedia weighs in:
Reports claim that the submarine had been undetected until it surfaced.[14][15][16]
Lemme see, the meat from those three citations are:
According to the defense officials, the Chinese Song-class diesel-powered attack submarine shadowed the Kitty Hawk undetected and surfaced within five miles of the carrier Oct. 26.
The submarine remained undetected by the carrier and the accompanying warships until after it surfaced.
With no explaination about how they know that. And last one is a dead link. So either the Washing Times is mis-reporting or an official admitted it went undetected. Considering the massive embarrasment it caused the people who were supposed to detect incoming subs, I'd say they weren't just playing it cool.
Because captains are expensive, and captains lead lesser officers. There's a hierarchical pyramid. It doesn't work if it's a rectangle. If you have 50 generals, 50 captains, 50 lieutenants, and 50 privates, who leads who? Does everyone have just a single person under them? Do the bulk of officers not actually lead anyone? In short, they don't need to be top heavy.
Plus you have the culture that the best stay and the rest LEAVE. So you don't have incompetent officers. Or at least, you know, it helps with that.
It's this giant, nuclear powered single point of failure that the enemy has had a lot of time to think about.
10. We have 10 Nimitz-class carriers. With 3 Ford-class ones being built.
And the counter to Carriers, and ships in general, are submarines. And yes, the Chinese have been showboating dicks about it and manage to surface an electric sub within an alarming distance to our carrier group. Maybe they got lucky, but it's really only an option for a brown water navy, as nuclear engines are too loud to get away with that. And who knows, our sonar might have gotten better since then.
Also, you know, NUKES. Oh, yeah, that's right, the entire point of our massive show of naval force and it's ability to stand off against other first-world nations has been obsolete since ICBM's took over. Does everyone really forget this so easily?
(Also also, simple speedboats loaded with explosives and a suicide crew, see the Millenium Challenge where one such retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper who is the type who thinks these things manage to take a third-world force and hand our simulated asses to us. )
But no, carriers allow us to project some force onto third world nations pretty much as soon as they can scoot to the nearest port.
Some Chinese guy is going to plug a Mac into it, type furiously, and destroy the North American Empire. Then what?
Nevermind that the AF's active remotely-piloted combat aircraft outnumber its active manned bomber inventory by about 2-to-1.
I can kind of understand only counting active aircraft, by why are you comparing combat aircraft to bombers? Why not, you know, compare remotely-piloted combat aircraft to manned combat aircraft.
Also... they way they label "militant combatants" now a days would probably get my $60 toy with a camera on it classified as combat aircraft. Comparing the capabilities of the B-2 to my quadcopter is laughable.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
And all that doesn't do a damned thing to country the thrust of the main idea that Air-force has a bunch of ego maniacs desperately trying to hold onto their out-dated jobs. It's like the battleship at any point past the start of WWII.
I mean, you're right, the point of silicon valley is to innovate, make new businesses, and change the world. Oh, and make a fuck-ton of money. But the business side of that involves a lot of... well.... bullshit. You're a VC with the job of finding people with an idea worth investing in. That is naturally going to attract a lot of fakers. Pure scam artists. It's your job to filter those out. And by and far you do. But it's a wide spectrum with a sliding scale from pure lies, to honest people with lousy ideas, to genuine game-changers that just need a buck to get off the ground. It's the bullshit gradient. And everyone has a little. It's an arms race of bullshitters against bull-shit-callers (whose real motive is to make money for themselves rather then make money for investors).
It's impractical, yes, but it's not a matter of maturity. It's business culture. The game, so to speak, is specifically made with rules to encourage competition and attracts those with economically aggressive tendencies. You know, sociopaths. You get the same thing on Wall street. And the BUSINESS of tech start-ups, is totally a fashion show drenched in bullshit, sprinkled with fraud, and big fat check of a cherry on top. And the political world is in a similar but not exactly the same scenario. They play all sorts of games with who does what and what other people think of them. It's literally their job to care about that stuff. It's politics.
And you're a geek. We epically and truly don't care about all that. We just want to get shit done and make awesome things, right? Well, go out and be involved in the politics of a language standard, or a hackerspace, and you'll find that a lot of the bullshit that politicians do to placate people, and steer people towards the goal they want is actually pretty useful. And try starting a business and you'll find that it's not as much of a meritocracy as one would hope and it has more to do with who you know, who will scratch your back, and who you can convince to buy in.
And there are a lot of perfectly mature professionals working in the fashion industry.
And if Steam would let me play my fucking games whenever I left the house or a storm took out our connection, I'd call it good too. As it is, the DRM is just a bit too much for me. Which is why I moved onto good old games.
They're wearing suits. Some of them wear it well. Others are sheep in wolf-pelts.
They are there to help the suits bullshit other suits into giving them money.
One aspect of that, as an aside, is actually making something. That part could be done just as easily be done by engineers across the globe, but they already have the engineers in suits right there. And they already told everyone that he'd be making it anyway. But no, primarily the engineers are there to wear suits.
Uh, it can work at Valve. Because Valve has a LUDICROUS amount of cash. They're getting money for nothing because they have Steam. They managed to seduce the users with easy digital downloads and seduced the content owners with a promise of DRM. It's simply a better way of doing things. This is really bloody obvious, but getting that sweetspot of wooing both sides into letting you be their middleman was tight landing spot. Valve did it. And now they dominate digital distribution of gaming. Making Valve a game distribution company rather than a game developer who can't count to three.
This let's them have a profit per employee which is simply ludicrous... and I wish I could find that number... damn. Anyway, they're flush with cash with no end in sight.
Of course a flat structure can work when money isn't an issue. If, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if you're productive or not, yeah, all sorts of crazy management structures can work. The "Let everyone eat cake all day" structure can work as long as you have Steam printing money for you.
And I say this as a strong believer in alternative management structures. That co-op tomato plant down in Florida where there is no management? Fantastic. I've worked at places where the management has been good, where it's been missing in action, and where it actively worked against the people getting things done. Democracy is horribly inefficient and committees are grueling, but I think it's a better choice than having a few people on top. But Valve is not a good example of the possibilities of alternative management, simply because they have too much money.
Geeks, the technical side of the things, can be decentralized. Yay future. But a large swath of what suits do, the business side of things, is all about interpersonal relationships, body language, shmoozing, and bullshitting. Things that don't get serialized over wires very well. That said the Internet does a fantastic job of filtering out all that crap.
Even the geeks in silicon valley are doing a lot of business work. Selling their idea, getting people interested, and providing a veneer of competence to an otherwise bullshit business model.
Also, the money that gets a 40-50something a decent lifestyle in "other parts of the country" will let you live like a lord with a fiefdom out in the equally connected 3rd-world nations. And if you think the suits with all the money in Silicon Valley would give equal pay between people working in-town, vs out-of-state, vs out-of-country, you're delusional.
As long as that doesn't mean that kids lose the right to vote, smoke, watch porn, comment on the right way to code things, and get a job.
Kids are generally immature, inexperienced, and dumb. They do not have the rights that adults have. To say that someone is a kid dismisses their input. It's an insult. It's agism. And it's just as bad as the line "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".
But yeah, the voice of experience is often valuable. No one is saying we should dismiss the input of old people. And in the exact same way, you shouldn't dismiss the input of young people.
Now go play with your blocks child, the adults are talking.
What is this? Some sort of smear campaign to make everyone who is angry about the NSA wiretaps to come off as a wingnut veteran hater?
No dude. No. There are some US troops that have committed war-crimes. Like improperly executing prisoners or murdering civilians. But those cases are extreme minorities. It's impossible to know but I'd hope we report and court-marshal most of it.
Actions like following orders to torture prisoners is balls to the walls wrong. And it breaks oaths. And is against some conventions. But they're not war-crimes. Neither is being overly agressive when i There is also a difference between man-slaughter and murder. And screaming about war-crimes when it was a case of accidental death makes you (and me by my proximity to you) look like a fool. Stop that.
War crimes are generally on a larger scale though. A drunk grunt raping a local is a crime, but not won't be prosecuted as a war-crime. And no one of consequence will push for it to be a war-crime. The people who are guilty of war-crimes are the ones giving the orders. While the troops following said orders are guilty of other things, the charge of war-crimes goes up the chain. The idea that, since our military is voluntary, and anyone that joins during a clusterfuck like Iraq is guilty of condoning said clusterfuck is... closer to the mark. But there are a lot of good people that sign up so they can stop those sort of atrocities and keeping the dumb green punks from shooting up villages. The whole war may be atrocious, but the battles don't have to be, and we need good people to strive for that.
I do support the troops. Bring them home. The people to blame for the colossal fuckup of Iraq (and Vietnam) are the generals and the politicians. In short: blame Bush.
and shoot their way through the local populace
Ludicrous hyperbole. Seriously, you're just degrading the stance against the NSA's illegal surveillance.
Was Iraq invading the USA? Was Afghanistan? The people who fly the drones, are they fighting people who are attacking the USA?
The answer to all these things is clearly no
Correct, and yet that doesn't mean that every action connected to the unjustified wars is a war-crime. And the troops fighting Bush's folly are not, inherently, war-criminals.
That shows you what people really think of the military.
It shows you what they think of Bush's USE OF our military. I protested invading Iraq, and I protested our occupation of Iraq, but in no-way-shape-or-form have I protested the existence of our military. (...as long as you don't count the CIA as "military".)
Seriously, I don't remember why I gave you that little green dot, but I have to take it back now.
What do you say to the families that depended on child labor to support the family? They said they can't stay in business without putting the children to work. And the business feeds the children.
It's a bit of a strawman, but the parallels are there. It's bad for everyone in the long run to make put children to labor, it'd be a lot better for society to them to get some learning and not suffer the horrible abuse that historically came with child labor. Sure, your friend is employing 53 people. But in today's age, going without insurance means going without healthcare. Which means that everything that's serious is an ER visit rather than "hey you should have those pulled sometime in the next year". Which is really fucking expensive to everyone else.
It's understood that there needs to be the bottom rung of the ladder for the have-nots. They need their niche to fill, and, well, shitty jobs for them to do. But we don't want companies that grow off employing the bottom rung. If your friend is at the point where he's employing 50+ people, his company is big enough to start treating them like real employees.
Think about it like if he was a slum lord. Sure, they provide a service that the poor need. Historically, they were evil abusive pricks. At least, the ones that made money and expanded were.
It's like being a slum lord. Sure, they're giving the poor some place to live, which they need. But historically they're evil abusive pricks that need laws regulating their behavior.
How can any employer think that workers w/o health insurance work better than those who do?
When the work is menial, the training short, and the replacements are plentiful then the cost of giving two shits about any state of your employees is more than the cost of firing them and getting new ones.
For certain industries and types of work, the bosses really don't care if you "stay with the company". And they can have systems in place that if you miss days, or slow down on the job, they simply take it out of your paycheck. That reduces the incentive to keep you healthy, as any illness impacts the worker, rather than the employer.
Governments are different. They can't really fire their citizens. Not... exactly.
If you think that all jobs struggle to attract talent and everyone has the option to move to a better job with better benefits, I think it's time for you to go mingle in different social circles.
This. I can't stress enough that this is the ringing bell of truth.
Our healthcare system has to change. That's for sure. Obama promised a lot. But by the time the econopocalypse creeped back from doomsday levels, what he proposed was not healthcare reform, but health insurance reform.
(Which, hey, is also desperately needed. This bullshit with pre-existing conditions and the ways that health insurance companies absolutely screw people over and kill them has to stop. There are some really good measures in the bill that would fix some of the more glaring issues. )
But it doesn't address the root of the problem. Tack on "medical" to anything and the price jumps a factor of 10x to 100x. And all the places that buy medial equipment, or hire medical staff, or hand out sterilized medical two by fours for therapeutic beatings are spending "other people's money". There's absolutely no consideration about the cost of this stuff. Indeed, the worry that they'd be sued for using the $2 syringe instead of the $25 syringe makes them prefer the expensive option. And the fact that they earn a percentage of the total cost of the transaction doesn't hurt.
No the "rest of you" were telling us that he was a secret muslim terrorist hiding his birth cirtificate because it would show how he was planning to round up all the whiteys into FEMA camps and handing out their stolen wealth to the blacks and latinos while sucking the balls of Yemen, Crotkovia, and the Taliban.
Those of us that were paying attention noticed that as a senator during the race he voted to give the telecom companies retroactive immunity in the warrantless wiretapping fiasco. That put a big damper on my enthusiasm for him, but he was still LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than McCain and his psycho-crazy-VP choice from hell. It was also pretty indicative of his future policy.
And all that aside, he is WAY better than Bush. In some ways. And those ways are MASSIVLEY important. Now, Obama might be toeing the line to his corporate overlords and erroding civil rights just as much as Bush did, but he didn't unilaterally launch a pointless war costing trillions of dollars, thousands of US lives, and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of civilian deaths. I just can't quite state how collosal of a fuckup invading Iraq was. Seriously. For all the spying that's happening under Obama's watch, he didn't launch any wars. This makes him vastly different and better.
Well there's your problem. Debugging with printf statements is not the way to go about it. Hey, sometimes it's the best way, it really is. If you want to glance at the behavior of something for a quick test, sure. Usually I'd prefer a log file, but it's a pretty minor difference.
But no, they make real debuggers. Have for a while now. You should learn to use them. DBG isn't that bad to figure out. You know, if you develop in C.
And I don't agree with Viol8. Of course you had problems with pointers at some point. Everyone does. The bloody syntax is horrible for one. & and *? come on. And there are a lot of ways to screw up memory management. I honestly don't even bother trying to debug that sort of mess without Valgrind. But at the end of college if you STILL can't wrap your head around memory addresses, yeah, it's time to move to management.
And this?
since you can't obviously differentiate between run of the mill bugs and bugs caused by incompetence.
Ugh, see fear #1. Yeah, you get these sort of co-workers now and then. Real pain to work with. Egos the size of the Hindenburg. And they will spit fire, spew smoke, and unleash a torrent of rage before they admit that they made a mistake. On pretty much anything.
He's right about the libraries though. C has just about as much support on most everything that other languages do. You never see anyone writing html parsers in python just to pull a webpage just like you never see anyone doing that in C.
Ultimately, the programming language choice is just so much fashion. The essence of programming is universal for all languages, and the flavor one this language or that is pretty inconsequential.
Do you mean submitter SpicyBrown, German politician Malte Spitz, Director of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, or NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander? Or the general media and NSA apologists?
Because Spitz never used the term. SpicyBrown is probably misusing the term. Clapper doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. And Alexander is probably spewing bullshit. And I'd give even money that the general media and NSA apologists don't have a clue what metadata entails.
You know what? Thanks. I'm not actually paranoid enough, or have anything worth the effort of hiding, to run SELinux, but it's a warm fuzzy blanket of ideological goodness that it exists. It comforts me that there are people more paranoid than myself and social enough to share their efforts with the world. When the slipping and sliding into a police state seems inevitable and the errosion of personal and consumer rights continues and no one really owns anything anymore and everyone seems content running handheld devices that they can't really modify, the fact that things like SELinux exist make me realize that it's going to be ok. That there are knowledgeable people out there actively defending the ability of commoners to be secure against... everyone. So thank you. I know it's probably a thankless job and you get assailed by paranoid people distrusting you and being inherently hostile. It just comes with the territory, they mean well.
Yeah, this disabled guy at the hackerspace asked for some help with a piece of code that was somehow affiliated with Ben Heck. Just some arduino stuff to have a joystick move his wheelchair around.
It was pretty ugly. Apparently the guy can't code worth a damn. I mean, if it actually originated from Ben Heck. The whole thing was kinda surreal. I have no idea if I should laugh when the guy in a wheelchair makes a cripple joke.
But Ben has that mover and shaker attitude that gets you on TV and minor celebrity status. It's a skill, and one that geeks don't usually foster because it's tied to CHA rather than INT. And everyone knows that's a dumpstat.
Well yeah, other than playing civilizations colonizing ancient earth, turning population points into additional cities, trading resources like iron and bronze between other players, starvation killing off population, the tech tree... and the bulk of the actual EFFECTS from the tech tree like astronomy letting you get across oceans, yeah, you know, totally unrelated.
In any case it was close enough that MicroProse bought the rights to it. Which means that Sid isn't a cheating scumbag, as the original game designer made a buck. And Sid and co. certainly made improvements that meshed well with the medium. And Sid was a brilliant guy that worked on a lot of early games that were damned good. But he gets a lot of credit for something that he, you know, stole.
One of the most repeated and touted inspirations for Sid Meier's Civilization is the earlier Avalon Hill board game of the same name, designed by Francis Tresham for Hartland Trefoil in Britain. While Meier had no doubt heard of the game prior to 1990 through his connections with Bruce Shelley, he insists that the influence is not as strong as some claim. "I had not played that before I did Civilization," says Meier. "I played it later. I remember there were some cards and trading. It was more ancient; it didn't really come into any sort of modern or medieval times."
But connections, however thin, were there: Bruce Shelley had not only worked for Avalon Hill, the American publisher of Tresham's Civilization, but he created the American localization of Tresham's 1929 railroad game, a game which served as an admitted inspiration for Meier's earlier Railroad Tycoon. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shelley was intimately familiar with Tresham's Civilization. "I had played it many times," recalls Shelley. "I believe Sid had a copy of the game and looked at the components. I owned the original board game, but don't recall if I brought it into the office."
The game makers out there would most certainly like my money just as much as the next shmucks. And they've found plenty of shmucks who don't really care about property rights. So that's what they do. And Valve has done a much better job than, say, all that Starforce shenanigians, Spore, SimCity, and the clusterfuck that was Micosoft's plans for the Xbone. There's bad DRM and then there's jaw-droppingly-bad DRM.
Here's the part I want to stress though: there is a market for games which do not treat their users like criminals. I spend a sizeable chunk of money on gaming. I'm a gamer. I am (a part of) your target audience. And if you want my money, you will treat me with respect. Ie, there's a reason that the Humble Bundle made so much money and Good Old Games is awesome.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear why. Which tradeoff is the real killer, and why do the benefits not outweigh?
It's the inability to play my games. That's the killer, the deal-breaker. It's massively frustrating and I dunno, kinda feels like betrayal. That they're really serving the corporate overlords before serving me. And that's who DRM is selling to. Valve doesn't give a shit about piracy. It's not their games that are being pirated. DRM does nothing for the consumer. DRM comforts the game-makers in an effort to assure them they're not being ripped off. Even though they are being ripped off. The idea is that DRM will make them get ripped off less. And hopefully more so than the amount of users that get turned away by the DRM (which, you know, includes me).
While I understand the concern about selling and trading games, and it irks my consumer's rights vibe, it's really not an issue for me. The amount of money is negligible, and for a good game I'm cool with simply buying my friend a new copy.
No, it's when I get home for lunch or finally get the child to sleep, and I have that precious half-hour to myself and fire up my current game of choice. And it's just not there. All my gear is running fine, and it's just something on the DRM's side that doesn't go through. That absolutely poisons the relationship I have with the game-makers. It's like you order a beer, get a mug, and for some reason the whole thing is sealed shut. You can't have your drink, the bartender is ignoring you, and you don't really want to just wait around. The appropriate thing to do would be to smash the thing, declare this "drinking rights managements" thing is bullshit, pour the contents into a real mug, and drink what you paid for. That's an analogy for getting a pirated copy sans DRM. And I've done that. Sometimes the pirated copy is more user-friendly than the official copy.
Also, your bartender can tell you whatever they want, but they can't stop you from walking out of the bar with or without your beer. Presuming it's, you know, a bottle. They still own their mugs of course. And all that doesn't stop them from calling the cops to arrest you for walking around with an open container of booze. Know your rights, know the laws. Otherwise you just keep spreading FUD.
I dunno, I really liked Seven Cities of Gold. But I wouldn't say it's much like Civ. There is an aspect of exploring in Civ, and that's probably what they were talking about. And back then, "it has a map you fill in" is close enough to be just like each other. But 7CG's gameplay was substantially different.
Slashdot Mirror
Lumpy is a idiotic troll, and whoever voted him up should feel bad, but during the height of the Iraq occupation they were taking anything they could get to pass their QA. And they had to keep lowering the tests. Simply put, they had to hire X amount of people for a shit job nobody wanted. People desperate for work fit the bill.
Historically, the poor get sent to war. Ideally though, yeah, the military wants the best of the best. And they usually get made into officers and get the fuck out of areas where bullets are flying.
What exactly did you expect the Navy to do, shoot it out of the water?
Pft. Tell the sub to stop dicking around or we'll blow you out of the water. They could have moved to protect THE THING THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING. They could have followed standard operating procedure for when a ship comes too close to their space.
http://defensetech.org/2006/11/14/behind-the-kitty-hawk-incident-updated/
There's [no] reason to think they didn't know where it was the entire time.
Other than collectively shitting their pants and looking like fools, sure. And other than it's a known weakness. But sure, sure, they were just playing it cool. Because OF COURSE there'd be no way that our military could possibly be embarrassed... (SARCASM)
But Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s submarine force, tells us not to be to hard on the sub-hunters:
Noah, I have no inside information on this event, but it is very difficult to detect a quiet diesel submarine and the Song–class submarines are quality submarines. Operating in international waters in the vicinity of a US battle group is perfectly normal — good operational training.
The Chinese very well could have staged this event to make a point about the vulnerability of the Battle Group to submarine attack. The US Navy is fully aware of [those] vulnerabilities
The Chinese are building a credible submarine force which will make it very difficult for the US Navy to maintain sea control dominance in or near coastal waters off of China.
And wikipedia weighs in:
Reports claim that the submarine had been undetected until it surfaced.[14][15][16]
Lemme see, the meat from those three citations are:
According to the defense officials, the Chinese Song-class diesel-powered attack submarine shadowed the Kitty Hawk undetected and surfaced within five miles of the carrier Oct. 26.
The submarine remained undetected by the carrier and the accompanying warships until after it surfaced.
With no explaination about how they know that.
And last one is a dead link.
So either the Washing Times is mis-reporting or an official admitted it went undetected. Considering the massive embarrasment it caused the people who were supposed to detect incoming subs, I'd say they weren't just playing it cool.
Because captains are expensive, and captains lead lesser officers. There's a hierarchical pyramid. It doesn't work if it's a rectangle. If you have 50 generals, 50 captains, 50 lieutenants, and 50 privates, who leads who? Does everyone have just a single person under them? Do the bulk of officers not actually lead anyone? In short, they don't need to be top heavy.
Plus you have the culture that the best stay and the rest LEAVE. So you don't have incompetent officers. Or at least, you know, it helps with that.
It's this giant, nuclear powered single point of failure that the enemy has had a lot of time to think about.
10. We have 10 Nimitz-class carriers. With 3 Ford-class ones being built.
And the counter to Carriers, and ships in general, are submarines. And yes, the Chinese have been showboating dicks about it and manage to surface an electric sub within an alarming distance to our carrier group. Maybe they got lucky, but it's really only an option for a brown water navy, as nuclear engines are too loud to get away with that. And who knows, our sonar might have gotten better since then.
Also, you know, NUKES. Oh, yeah, that's right, the entire point of our massive show of naval force and it's ability to stand off against other first-world nations has been obsolete since ICBM's took over. Does everyone really forget this so easily?
(Also also, simple speedboats loaded with explosives and a suicide crew, see the Millenium Challenge where one such retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper who is the type who thinks these things manage to take a third-world force and hand our simulated asses to us. )
But no, carriers allow us to project some force onto third world nations pretty much as soon as they can scoot to the nearest port.
Some Chinese guy is going to plug a Mac into it, type furiously, and destroy the North American Empire. Then what?
We Nuke Them All.
Nevermind that the AF's active remotely-piloted combat aircraft outnumber its active manned bomber inventory by about 2-to-1.
I can kind of understand only counting active aircraft, by why are you comparing combat aircraft to bombers? Why not, you know, compare remotely-piloted combat aircraft to manned combat aircraft.
Also... they way they label "militant combatants" now a days would probably get my $60 toy with a camera on it classified as combat aircraft. Comparing the capabilities of the B-2 to my quadcopter is laughable.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
And all that doesn't do a damned thing to country the thrust of the main idea that Air-force has a bunch of ego maniacs desperately trying to hold onto their out-dated jobs. It's like the battleship at any point past the start of WWII.
. . . I think you're letting your agism show.
I mean, you're right, the point of silicon valley is to innovate, make new businesses, and change the world. Oh, and make a fuck-ton of money. But the business side of that involves a lot of... well.... bullshit. You're a VC with the job of finding people with an idea worth investing in. That is naturally going to attract a lot of fakers. Pure scam artists. It's your job to filter those out. And by and far you do. But it's a wide spectrum with a sliding scale from pure lies, to honest people with lousy ideas, to genuine game-changers that just need a buck to get off the ground. It's the bullshit gradient. And everyone has a little. It's an arms race of bullshitters against bull-shit-callers (whose real motive is to make money for themselves rather then make money for investors).
It's impractical, yes, but it's not a matter of maturity. It's business culture. The game, so to speak, is specifically made with rules to encourage competition and attracts those with economically aggressive tendencies. You know, sociopaths. You get the same thing on Wall street. And the BUSINESS of tech start-ups, is totally a fashion show drenched in bullshit, sprinkled with fraud, and big fat check of a cherry on top. And the political world is in a similar but not exactly the same scenario. They play all sorts of games with who does what and what other people think of them. It's literally their job to care about that stuff. It's politics.
And you're a geek. We epically and truly don't care about all that. We just want to get shit done and make awesome things, right? Well, go out and be involved in the politics of a language standard, or a hackerspace, and you'll find that a lot of the bullshit that politicians do to placate people, and steer people towards the goal they want is actually pretty useful. And try starting a business and you'll find that it's not as much of a meritocracy as one would hope and it has more to do with who you know, who will scratch your back, and who you can convince to buy in.
And there are a lot of perfectly mature professionals working in the fashion industry.
And if Steam would let me play my fucking games whenever I left the house or a storm took out our connection, I'd call it good too. As it is, the DRM is just a bit too much for me. Which is why I moved onto good old games.
They're wearing suits. Some of them wear it well. Others are sheep in wolf-pelts.
They are there to help the suits bullshit other suits into giving them money.
One aspect of that, as an aside, is actually making something. That part could be done just as easily be done by engineers across the globe, but they already have the engineers in suits right there. And they already told everyone that he'd be making it anyway. But no, primarily the engineers are there to wear suits.
It does seem that a flat structure can work
Uh, it can work at Valve. Because Valve has a LUDICROUS amount of cash. They're getting money for nothing because they have Steam. They managed to seduce the users with easy digital downloads and seduced the content owners with a promise of DRM. It's simply a better way of doing things. This is really bloody obvious, but getting that sweetspot of wooing both sides into letting you be their middleman was tight landing spot. Valve did it. And now they dominate digital distribution of gaming. Making Valve a game distribution company rather than a game developer who can't count to three.
This let's them have a profit per employee which is simply ludicrous... and I wish I could find that number... damn. Anyway, they're flush with cash with no end in sight.
Of course a flat structure can work when money isn't an issue. If, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if you're productive or not, yeah, all sorts of crazy management structures can work. The "Let everyone eat cake all day" structure can work as long as you have Steam printing money for you.
And I say this as a strong believer in alternative management structures. That co-op tomato plant down in Florida where there is no management? Fantastic. I've worked at places where the management has been good, where it's been missing in action, and where it actively worked against the people getting things done. Democracy is horribly inefficient and committees are grueling, but I think it's a better choice than having a few people on top. But Valve is not a good example of the possibilities of alternative management, simply because they have too much money.
Because silicon valley is for the suits.
Geeks, the technical side of the things, can be decentralized. Yay future. But a large swath of what suits do, the business side of things, is all about interpersonal relationships, body language, shmoozing, and bullshitting. Things that don't get serialized over wires very well. That said the Internet does a fantastic job of filtering out all that crap.
Even the geeks in silicon valley are doing a lot of business work. Selling their idea, getting people interested, and providing a veneer of competence to an otherwise bullshit business model.
Also, the money that gets a 40-50something a decent lifestyle in "other parts of the country" will let you live like a lord with a fiefdom out in the equally connected 3rd-world nations. And if you think the suits with all the money in Silicon Valley would give equal pay between people working in-town, vs out-of-state, vs out-of-country, you're delusional.
As long as that doesn't mean that kids lose the right to vote, smoke, watch porn, comment on the right way to code things, and get a job.
Kids are generally immature, inexperienced, and dumb. They do not have the rights that adults have. To say that someone is a kid dismisses their input. It's an insult. It's agism. And it's just as bad as the line "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".
But yeah, the voice of experience is often valuable. No one is saying we should dismiss the input of old people. And in the exact same way, you shouldn't dismiss the input of young people.
Now go play with your blocks child, the adults are talking.
The average veteran in the USA is a war criminal.
Dude, What?
What is this? Some sort of smear campaign to make everyone who is angry about the NSA wiretaps to come off as a wingnut veteran hater?
No dude. No. There are some US troops that have committed war-crimes. Like improperly executing prisoners or murdering civilians. But those cases are extreme minorities. It's impossible to know but I'd hope we report and court-marshal most of it.
Actions like following orders to torture prisoners is balls to the walls wrong. And it breaks oaths. And is against some conventions. But they're not war-crimes. Neither is being overly agressive when i There is also a difference between man-slaughter and murder. And screaming about war-crimes when it was a case of accidental death makes you (and me by my proximity to you) look like a fool. Stop that.
War crimes are generally on a larger scale though. A drunk grunt raping a local is a crime, but not won't be prosecuted as a war-crime. And no one of consequence will push for it to be a war-crime. The people who are guilty of war-crimes are the ones giving the orders. While the troops following said orders are guilty of other things, the charge of war-crimes goes up the chain. The idea that, since our military is voluntary, and anyone that joins during a clusterfuck like Iraq is guilty of condoning said clusterfuck is... closer to the mark. But there are a lot of good people that sign up so they can stop those sort of atrocities and keeping the dumb green punks from shooting up villages. The whole war may be atrocious, but the battles don't have to be, and we need good people to strive for that.
I do support the troops. Bring them home. The people to blame for the colossal fuckup of Iraq (and Vietnam) are the generals and the politicians. In short: blame Bush.
and shoot their way through the local populace
Ludicrous hyperbole. Seriously, you're just degrading the stance against the NSA's illegal surveillance.
Was Iraq invading the USA? Was Afghanistan? The people who fly the drones, are they fighting people who are attacking the USA?
The answer to all these things is clearly no
Correct, and yet that doesn't mean that every action connected to the unjustified wars is a war-crime. And the troops fighting Bush's folly are not, inherently, war-criminals.
That shows you what people really think of the military.
It shows you what they think of Bush's USE OF our military. I protested invading Iraq, and I protested our occupation of Iraq, but in no-way-shape-or-form have I protested the existence of our military. (...as long as you don't count the CIA as "military".)
Seriously, I don't remember why I gave you that little green dot, but I have to take it back now.
What do you say to the families that depended on child labor to support the family?
They said they can't stay in business without putting the children to work. And the business feeds the children.
It's a bit of a strawman, but the parallels are there. It's bad for everyone in the long run to make put children to labor, it'd be a lot better for society to them to get some learning and not suffer the horrible abuse that historically came with child labor. Sure, your friend is employing 53 people. But in today's age, going without insurance means going without healthcare. Which means that everything that's serious is an ER visit rather than "hey you should have those pulled sometime in the next year". Which is really fucking expensive to everyone else.
It's understood that there needs to be the bottom rung of the ladder for the have-nots. They need their niche to fill, and, well, shitty jobs for them to do. But we don't want companies that grow off employing the bottom rung. If your friend is at the point where he's employing 50+ people, his company is big enough to start treating them like real employees.
Think about it like if he was a slum lord. Sure, they provide a service that the poor need. Historically, they were evil abusive pricks. At least, the ones that made money and expanded were.
It's like being a slum lord. Sure, they're giving the poor some place to live, which they need. But historically they're evil abusive pricks that need laws regulating their behavior.
How can any employer think that workers w/o health insurance work better than those who do?
When the work is menial, the training short, and the replacements are plentiful then the cost of giving two shits about any state of your employees is more than the cost of firing them and getting new ones.
For certain industries and types of work, the bosses really don't care if you "stay with the company". And they can have systems in place that if you miss days, or slow down on the job, they simply take it out of your paycheck. That reduces the incentive to keep you healthy, as any illness impacts the worker, rather than the employer.
Governments are different. They can't really fire their citizens. Not... exactly.
If you think that all jobs struggle to attract talent and everyone has the option to move to a better job with better benefits, I think it's time for you to go mingle in different social circles.
This. I can't stress enough that this is the ringing bell of truth.
Our healthcare system has to change. That's for sure. Obama promised a lot. But by the time the econopocalypse creeped back from doomsday levels, what he proposed was not healthcare reform, but health insurance reform.
(Which, hey, is also desperately needed. This bullshit with pre-existing conditions and the ways that health insurance companies absolutely screw people over and kill them has to stop. There are some really good measures in the bill that would fix some of the more glaring issues. )
But it doesn't address the root of the problem. Tack on "medical" to anything and the price jumps a factor of 10x to 100x. And all the places that buy medial equipment, or hire medical staff, or hand out sterilized medical two by fours for therapeutic beatings are spending "other people's money". There's absolutely no consideration about the cost of this stuff. Indeed, the worry that they'd be sued for using the $2 syringe instead of the $25 syringe makes them prefer the expensive option. And the fact that they earn a percentage of the total cost of the transaction doesn't hurt.
No the "rest of you" were telling us that he was a secret muslim terrorist hiding his birth cirtificate because it would show how he was planning to round up all the whiteys into FEMA camps and handing out their stolen wealth to the blacks and latinos while sucking the balls of Yemen, Crotkovia, and the Taliban.
Those of us that were paying attention noticed that as a senator during the race he voted to give the telecom companies retroactive immunity in the warrantless wiretapping fiasco. That put a big damper on my enthusiasm for him, but he was still LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than McCain and his psycho-crazy-VP choice from hell. It was also pretty indicative of his future policy.
And all that aside, he is WAY better than Bush. In some ways. And those ways are MASSIVLEY important. Now, Obama might be toeing the line to his corporate overlords and erroding civil rights just as much as Bush did, but he didn't unilaterally launch a pointless war costing trillions of dollars, thousands of US lives, and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of civilian deaths. I just can't quite state how collosal of a fuckup invading Iraq was. Seriously. For all the spying that's happening under Obama's watch, he didn't launch any wars. This makes him vastly different and better.
Sorry, I have no idea.
every time you stick in more than one printf,
Well there's your problem. Debugging with printf statements is not the way to go about it. Hey, sometimes it's the best way, it really is. If you want to glance at the behavior of something for a quick test, sure. Usually I'd prefer a log file, but it's a pretty minor difference.
But no, they make real debuggers. Have for a while now. You should learn to use them. DBG isn't that bad to figure out. You know, if you develop in C.
And I don't agree with Viol8. Of course you had problems with pointers at some point. Everyone does. The bloody syntax is horrible for one. & and *? come on. And there are a lot of ways to screw up memory management. I honestly don't even bother trying to debug that sort of mess without Valgrind. But at the end of college if you STILL can't wrap your head around memory addresses, yeah, it's time to move to management.
And this?
since you can't obviously differentiate between run of the mill bugs and bugs caused by incompetence.
Ugh, see fear #1. Yeah, you get these sort of co-workers now and then. Real pain to work with. Egos the size of the Hindenburg. And they will spit fire, spew smoke, and unleash a torrent of rage before they admit that they made a mistake. On pretty much anything.
He's right about the libraries though. C has just about as much support on most everything that other languages do. You never see anyone writing html parsers in python just to pull a webpage just like you never see anyone doing that in C.
Ultimately, the programming language choice is just so much fashion. The essence of programming is universal for all languages, and the flavor one this language or that is pretty inconsequential.
Do you mean submitter SpicyBrown, German politician Malte Spitz, Director of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, or NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander? Or the general media and NSA apologists?
Because Spitz never used the term. SpicyBrown is probably misusing the term. Clapper doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. And Alexander is probably spewing bullshit. And I'd give even money that the general media and NSA apologists don't have a clue what metadata entails.
You know what? Thanks. I'm not actually paranoid enough, or have anything worth the effort of hiding, to run SELinux, but it's a warm fuzzy blanket of ideological goodness that it exists. It comforts me that there are people more paranoid than myself and social enough to share their efforts with the world. When the slipping and sliding into a police state seems inevitable and the errosion of personal and consumer rights continues and no one really owns anything anymore and everyone seems content running handheld devices that they can't really modify, the fact that things like SELinux exist make me realize that it's going to be ok. That there are knowledgeable people out there actively defending the ability of commoners to be secure against... everyone. So thank you. I know it's probably a thankless job and you get assailed by paranoid people distrusting you and being inherently hostile. It just comes with the territory, they mean well.
Huh, thanks. Digging this stuff up is surprisingly hard.
The more I read that the more I lament that business suits and corporations own the artwork of my youth.
Yeah, this disabled guy at the hackerspace asked for some help with a piece of code that was somehow affiliated with Ben Heck. Just some arduino stuff to have a joystick move his wheelchair around.
It was pretty ugly. Apparently the guy can't code worth a damn. I mean, if it actually originated from Ben Heck. The whole thing was kinda surreal. I have no idea if I should laugh when the guy in a wheelchair makes a cripple joke.
But Ben has that mover and shaker attitude that gets you on TV and minor celebrity status. It's a skill, and one that geeks don't usually foster because it's tied to CHA rather than INT. And everyone knows that's a dumpstat.
Well yeah, other than playing civilizations colonizing ancient earth, turning population points into additional cities, trading resources like iron and bronze between other players, starvation killing off population, the tech tree... and the bulk of the actual EFFECTS from the tech tree like astronomy letting you get across oceans, yeah, you know, totally unrelated.
In any case it was close enough that MicroProse bought the rights to it. Which means that Sid isn't a cheating scumbag, as the original game designer made a buck. And Sid and co. certainly made improvements that meshed well with the medium. And Sid was a brilliant guy that worked on a lot of early games that were damned good. But he gets a lot of credit for something that he, you know, stole.
Here's a citation. If that'll help:
One of the most repeated and touted inspirations for Sid Meier's Civilization is the earlier Avalon Hill board game of the same name, designed by Francis Tresham for Hartland Trefoil in Britain. While Meier had no doubt heard of the game prior to 1990 through his connections with Bruce Shelley, he insists that the influence is not as strong as some claim. "I had not played that before I did Civilization," says Meier. "I played it later. I remember there were some cards and trading. It was more ancient; it didn't really come into any sort of modern or medieval times."
But connections, however thin, were there: Bruce Shelley had not only worked for Avalon Hill, the American publisher of Tresham's Civilization, but he created the American localization of Tresham's 1929 railroad game, a game which served as an admitted inspiration for Meier's earlier Railroad Tycoon. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shelley was intimately familiar with Tresham's Civilization. "I had played it many times," recalls Shelley. "I believe Sid had a copy of the game and looked at the components. I owned the original board game, but don't recall if I brought it into the office."
The game makers out there would most certainly like my money just as much as the next shmucks. And they've found plenty of shmucks who don't really care about property rights. So that's what they do. And Valve has done a much better job than, say, all that Starforce shenanigians, Spore, SimCity, and the clusterfuck that was Micosoft's plans for the Xbone. There's bad DRM and then there's jaw-droppingly-bad DRM.
Here's the part I want to stress though: there is a market for games which do not treat their users like criminals. I spend a sizeable chunk of money on gaming. I'm a gamer. I am (a part of) your target audience. And if you want my money, you will treat me with respect. Ie, there's a reason that the Humble Bundle made so much money and Good Old Games is awesome.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear why. Which tradeoff is the real killer, and why do the benefits not outweigh?
It's the inability to play my games. That's the killer, the deal-breaker. It's massively frustrating and I dunno, kinda feels like betrayal. That they're really serving the corporate overlords before serving me. And that's who DRM is selling to. Valve doesn't give a shit about piracy. It's not their games that are being pirated. DRM does nothing for the consumer. DRM comforts the game-makers in an effort to assure them they're not being ripped off. Even though they are being ripped off. The idea is that DRM will make them get ripped off less. And hopefully more so than the amount of users that get turned away by the DRM (which, you know, includes me).
While I understand the concern about selling and trading games, and it irks my consumer's rights vibe, it's really not an issue for me. The amount of money is negligible, and for a good game I'm cool with simply buying my friend a new copy.
No, it's when I get home for lunch or finally get the child to sleep, and I have that precious half-hour to myself and fire up my current game of choice. And it's just not there. All my gear is running fine, and it's just something on the DRM's side that doesn't go through. That absolutely poisons the relationship I have with the game-makers. It's like you order a beer, get a mug, and for some reason the whole thing is sealed shut. You can't have your drink, the bartender is ignoring you, and you don't really want to just wait around. The appropriate thing to do would be to smash the thing, declare this "drinking rights managements" thing is bullshit, pour the contents into a real mug, and drink what you paid for. That's an analogy for getting a pirated copy sans DRM. And I've done that. Sometimes the pirated copy is more user-friendly than the official copy.
Also, your bartender can tell you whatever they want, but they can't stop you from walking out of the bar with or without your beer. Presuming it's, you know, a bottle. They still own their mugs of course. And all that doesn't stop them from calling the cops to arrest you for walking around with an open container of booze. Know your rights, know the laws. Otherwise you just keep spreading FUD.
I dunno, I really liked Seven Cities of Gold. But I wouldn't say it's much like Civ. There is an aspect of exploring in Civ, and that's probably what they were talking about. And back then, "it has a map you fill in" is close enough to be just like each other. But 7CG's gameplay was substantially different.