I think I've run across this concept before. You need to review my last post.
I was hoping for a wittier. ..
You need to review the definition of wit.
. ..rebutal.
You need to review the definition of Date's Incoherence Principle.
Congratulations, 6320 posts and you are only the second person I've felt the need to explictly invoke the above on.
I have no idea why my education is even being brought in to this conversation. ..
Because if you aren't up to speed on what the words you use mean and/or display obvious ignorance about specialized fields and/or have troubles making responses logically descended from what you are responding to and/or logically connected to each other you either have to come up to speed or I have to invoke Date's Incoherence Principle.
I really cannot see my way clear to spending a page or two per sentence to deal with your post's confusions, particularly since the evidence suggests that the only likely response is even more confusion to deal with.
Can someone explain to me what the deal with computer education is?
The deal is that it is something that, generally, sucks so badly it has left you confused. This isn't actually because you are confused, but rather because they are confused.
You, unfortunately, know too much to make any sense of them. I am not a computer scientist. I am a physicist by training and an engineer by practice. I too understand the difference between the two. I feel your pain. My head hurts.
The short, pithy version of how it got this way is, "Idiots with money."
According to testimony given here Prof. Matloff is one of the rare exceptions.
Beyond crazy math stuff, what to computer scientists do?
They do crazy stuff with atoms too.
. ..you should at least know what the FSB on your current mobo is... Right?
Let's try to get them up to speed on analytical logic before we go approaching far out stuff like that, but convincing the Java dudes that p's and q's are not objects is a pretty tough sell.
I'll have to ask you to define "handpicked" and "elite."
So far as I can tell the AC's accusation is a strawman. I teach all who apply. Some can afford to pay me, and pay me well. Some cannot afford to pay me at all and we work something out.
My science students may come from the ghetto and attend the local community college, or they may come from Beverly Hills or East Hampton and attend Skidmore or RPI.
Or they may be Cub Scouts. Or just some kid in the park who sees me sawing at a bit of wild bamboo with a piece of rock and wonders what the hell I'm doing. I'll take time out to explain it to her, and explain it well.
One of my violin students is a "borderline autistic" whose divorced mother cannot afford to pay me anything at all right now, although she cooks a mean rice and bean casserole. I can't think of any way he could be defined as "elite." He has no money, little talent and is developmentally disabled.
I teach him because he wants to play violin, and the only qualifier I attached to who I would teach is personal interest. We have fun. His mother is thrilled simply because she's never seen him have fun before.
You cannot teach the coerced. The lightbulb has to want to change, or we're simply both wasting our time, of which I have precious little. I have a guitar student tonight and some knitting to finish on a deadline. And I'd really like to get in some fiddling in Washington Square Park this weekend. This is proximate to City College, but they're well noted for not having any ivory towers lying about. They don't even have a campus.
But if they've got a violin student there who wants to know the difference between baroque, Donegal and Sligo styles, I'm sure we can work something out.
My brother used to own a bowling alley. If you can bowl all you want for free you get at least decent at it. I don't know how I'd compare with Jesus. I've never bowled with Jesus. I'm a Buddhist.
. ..is there anything this guy doesn't do?
Play double reeds or walk on water, although I have a theoretical understanding of how to accomplish both. Learning to make oboes is on my to do list for next winter, I'm too busy messing about with flutes and horns right now, but I think I'll just stick to messing about with boats on the whole water top thing.
Many of us "hardcore" sim racers actually scratch build chassis using real car parts and construction techniques.
And it turns out a Lotus 49 or Surtees T7 with the engine and wheels off fits very nicely in a corner of the living room. They be tiny little things. The tin top people have it a bit rougher with the space issue and usually fake it.
The biggest problem is that it can be so much fun building them that it distracts you from your driving time.:)
You've been given a gift and all you can do is look it in the mouth.
But if you aren't begging, you retain your ability to choose. The Trojans might well have been advised not only to examine the teeth, but have a very careful look all the way down the throat of their gift horse.
In fact, that's why we call an entire class of "gift" programs "Trojan Horse."
I mean, if nearly all 108 of them regarded rifling through the files of nut-jobs planning on poisoning the NYC water supply or shutting down nuclear plant cooling systems in California, I would take that as compelling evidence that something very much like the PATRIOT Act (with a little tweaking to improve safeguards of personal rights) is probably a Good Thing to have in place.
There are a few relevant questions here.
First off, it isn't enough to know that all 108 were nutjobs. What was the relevance of the PATRIOT Act to their survielence? The answer might well be none, in which case the act only serves to remove civil liberties from the innocent while adding nothing to the legitimate investigation of criminal activity.
Another, and more troublesome question is, how do you know they were actually nutjobs if there has been no judicial review, no legal representation, no finding of fact and no trial? No public record whatsoever.
"Did all of these people turn out to be nutjobs?"
"Ummmm, Yeah, they did. That's the ticket. Just ask my wife, Morgan Fairchild. ..whom I've slept with."
Is this not the very problem with secret "law enforcement" activity?
Remember that law enforcement itself is even responsible for defining what "suspicion" and "terrorist" activity are. Afghanistan makes heroin. You are "suspected" of selling heroin. Therefore you are suspected of being a terrorist.
See how easy it is?
And the last question is, what if the 109th person isn't a nutjob at all, it's you, what will you say?
Personally I think it is kind of sad that my fellow students wouldn't know what a web server, or a mail server, or a router was if it bit them in the ass(on any operating system even).
Contrariwise to the impression some might get from my above post there is a reason why we make students take physics labs, other than annoying them by making them right lab papers.
You don't really understand something until you have touched it with your own hands. That's why there are so many "interpretations" of quantum physics. Everybody understands the results of the experiments, they're really pretty simple and straightforward, but nobody really knows what they "mean" because you can't touch it.
I have no particular love for ivory tower academics either, which is why I choose to teach privately.
That's ok, neither am I. A very lovely young lady "sir"ed me on the street the other day (to compliment my violin playing, as it happens) which was rather a blow to my old heart.
. ..my current theoretical focus is formalising the underpinnings of AI...
Ooooooh, man! Are we going to have fights. You should try to track down some of my old posts on AI. They're just as, well, "curmudgeonly" as the one to which you are responding.
I see I've gathered a troll moderation. That really isn't a valid moderation, although I expected some such, because the mods aren't offered the option of "curmudgeonly," so I guess they have to do the best they can.
Anyway, I like such fights. They'll be fun. If some moron who made a killing in auto mechanics ever drops a bag of money on me I'll look you up.
Companies make money by producing goods and services.
This is completely and naively incorrect. Companies make money by selling goods and services at a profit.
Electronic dowsing rod companies and companies that sell magic as medicine often make very good profits, although the quality of the "goods and services" are not only not science, they are a disgrace to humanity.
Profit is a null concept in science.
So, with that said, many of those apps writers you speak poorly of are actually computer scientists.
You need to review the definition of science.
This is a sharp contrast from violin players who, in truth, do not have such a high requirement on having college degrees.
You need to review the hiring practices of those who employ violinists.
I find it hard to believe your claim that you are a teacher.
You need to review the definition of teacher.
Teachers in public and private schools in the United States do not "pick and choose" who they teach and do not teach courses to.
You need to review the practices of schools.
If you tried to remove a student from your class you'll end up getting removed yourself.This only leaves private teaching.
When my sixth grade French teacher tried to remove me, permanantly, from her class, I was removed. She was not. It worked out best, for her, for me, and most particularly for the class.
This only leaves private teaching.
You need to review the very post to which you are responding.
In short, I think you need to review your education. It seems to have left some holes.
Q.E.D.
You may, of course, choose to deal with this by vigorously defending the quality of your education, but if you're smart (and I have no reason to believe you are not just because you have been let down by your educators) you will instead choose to deal with it by fixing your education.
I freely admit that I relied on a secondary source for that, a news article. Always a risky thing to do and something I myself typically caution against.
I will hold that statement in abeyance until I can track down a primary source to cite.
Trust me, if you knew how mechanics were treated, and I mean good mechanics, you would not have made that statement.
I have worked as a mechanic. In fact I worked my way through college as a mechanic (well, not exactly through college, as I was on a full scholarship, including books, but I have always enjoyed working and making my own money), although I think of myself as a craftsman. I no longer work as a mechanic except for a few personal customers, because it is impossible to be a craftsman in the mainline commercial way of doing things.
How this fact in any way contradicts my assertion that auto mechanics ought to have a few brain cells is beyond my few braincells to fathom.
Questions are not ridiculous. Questions are the seeking of knowledge. I have no way of knowing whether the question is "ridiculous" until I have had it answered.
I'm glad to know this information about Prof. Matloff, but I wish he had managed to inculcate you with the above. It would give me more personal confidence in your assessment of him.
And we could use a few more doctors and stuff. An auto mechanic with more than half a brain cell would be a pleasant thing to run into now and again as well. Who the hell decided that being a moron was actually one of the desirable qualities of someone who has to perform complex diagnostics and then fix the problem?
Parents like to decide what their kids are "going to be" when they're about minus 5 years old. This makes growing up hell on the poor kid who wants to be a concert violinst, but whose parents have him down to be a doctor, balanced by a kid who loves biology, but is forced to practice the hateful violin 6 hours a day.
The process is so pervasive that even kids who "grow up and make their own decision" often don't really, because they aren't actually taught how to make decisions of that nature in the first place.
Quite frankly, the one thing we're up to arses in is apps programers, and, ironically, the one thing in the computer field we're desperately short of right now is computer scientists.
And it's the universities getting into bed with companies like Microsoft and Intel that have resulted in computer science being mistaken for apps programming.
So my question to Norm Matloff is. ..
"Is your own house in order?"
Are you, a CS professor, teaching real computer science, or are you teaching programming and calling it computer science at the behest of Intel?
You're right. The competition isn't a valid measure of where the US stands in the tech world. It stands in the fact that we are no longer the number one nation for publishing original computer science papers. We aren't even number two anymore. Japanese kids aren't coming to Boston and Berkeley anymore for the CS educations, they're going to Bejing.
Word is out. We've lost it. We're on the way down The rats started abondoning the ship years ago, but as Van Loon noted when talking about the Roman Empire, empires that have been fallen for hundreds of years are rarely aware of the fact.
I too, like the grandparent, teach privately. I do not, however, take just anybody. Beyond a certain point I'll only work with people, both kids and adults, who I believe are personally involved in the subject. Not who's parents have decided that computer "science" is a good job field for them because they see a lot of ads for Java programmers in the papers.
I do not piss and moan if a kid isn't interested in programming. I try my damndest to find that out, and then direct them to something they are interested in. As it happens, I teach violin too. It's better for everybody that way, and not just the kid.
Because one kid who lives for computer science is worth more than an entire university full of kids who are there because it's a good job field. We are falling behind in the sciences because we no longer focus on that one kid and give him the training and facilities he needs to do brilliant work, but we crank out less than worthless Java apps programmers to satisfy the commercial concerns (yes, that may well mean you, even if you find the concept insulting) by the bucketful.
And one kid who lives to play the violin, but isn't very technically proficient, is going to make more music worth listening to than a whole symphony orchestra full of technically perfect, but bored out of their skulls, orchestra pit monkeys.
Tell ya what, give me 12 kids who have been properly trained as computer scientists and love the field, six theorists and six empiricists, none of whom know a lick of "practical" programming, and just enough capital to set up shop with workbenchs from Sears and computers cobbled together from odd parts, but not enough to hand out free Ferraris to everybody, and in five years the 13 of us will knock all of China on its arse.
But I can't tell you in advance what our output is going to be, because I haven't a frickin' clue and that's the bloody point.
Not that anyone around here would care anyway. Build a better mousetrap, give it away for free; and they'll still buy the latest braindead clusterfuck from Oracle.
I think maybe I'll take another crack at learning Portuguese.
In the international method of communication one would hope you would be correct.
But I'm afraid in the American method you are not. The grandparent's post was a simple, factual statement of the point of view of the "opposition" party; and it was to them that my own post was directed.
Even VoIP has to come out of the Internet at some point and into a conventional telco exchange, right?
Wrong. To interface with POTS the statement is a tautology, but there is nothing inherent about sending voice over IP that requires POTS.
Stop thinking "telephone" and start thinking "voice communications."
People will, however, hate you for doing that, because they can't charge you an extra $25/mo., or regulate you, for "voice communications," because that power is already in your hands the instant you have an internet connection. I sit here in the US and talk to my friends in England and Germany just fine, and without involving the conventional phone companies or Vonage. The current structure is trying to use their inertia to leverage themselves into an industry that already has no raison d'etre.
But it's true, I don't "phone" them. I "internet" them.
Slashdot Mirror
Bookmarked.
KFG
Selling and production are seperate practices.
.
.rebutal.
.
I think I've run across this concept before. You need to review my last post.
I was hoping for a wittier. .
You need to review the definition of wit.
. .
You need to review the definition of Date's Incoherence Principle.
Congratulations, 6320 posts and you are only the second person I've felt the need to explictly invoke the above on.
I have no idea why my education is even being brought in to this conversation. .
Because if you aren't up to speed on what the words you use mean and/or display obvious ignorance about specialized fields and/or have troubles making responses logically descended from what you are responding to and/or logically connected to each other you either have to come up to speed or I have to invoke Date's Incoherence Principle.
I really cannot see my way clear to spending a page or two per sentence to deal with your post's confusions, particularly since the evidence suggests that the only likely response is even more confusion to deal with.
Life is short.
KFG
Can someone explain to me what the deal with computer education is?
.you should at least know what the FSB on your current mobo is... Right?
The deal is that it is something that, generally, sucks so badly it has left you confused. This isn't actually because you are confused, but rather because they are confused.
You, unfortunately, know too much to make any sense of them. I am not a computer scientist. I am a physicist by training and an engineer by practice. I too understand the difference between the two. I feel your pain. My head hurts.
The short, pithy version of how it got this way is, "Idiots with money."
According to testimony given here Prof. Matloff is one of the rare exceptions.
Beyond crazy math stuff, what to computer scientists do?
They do crazy stuff with atoms too.
. .
Let's try to get them up to speed on analytical logic before we go approaching far out stuff like that, but convincing the Java dudes that p's and q's are not objects is a pretty tough sell.
KFG
I'll have to ask you to define "handpicked" and "elite."
So far as I can tell the AC's accusation is a strawman. I teach all who apply. Some can afford to pay me, and pay me well. Some cannot afford to pay me at all and we work something out.
My science students may come from the ghetto and attend the local community college, or they may come from Beverly Hills or East Hampton and attend Skidmore or RPI.
Or they may be Cub Scouts. Or just some kid in the park who sees me sawing at a bit of wild bamboo with a piece of rock and wonders what the hell I'm doing. I'll take time out to explain it to her, and explain it well.
One of my violin students is a "borderline autistic" whose divorced mother cannot afford to pay me anything at all right now, although she cooks a mean rice and bean casserole. I can't think of any way he could be defined as "elite." He has no money, little talent and is developmentally disabled.
I teach him because he wants to play violin, and the only qualifier I attached to who I would teach is personal interest. We have fun. His mother is thrilled simply because she's never seen him have fun before.
You cannot teach the coerced. The lightbulb has to want to change, or we're simply both wasting our time, of which I have precious little. I have a guitar student tonight and some knitting to finish on a deadline. And I'd really like to get in some fiddling in Washington Square Park this weekend. This is proximate to City College, but they're well noted for not having any ivory towers lying about. They don't even have a campus.
But if they've got a violin student there who wants to know the difference between baroque, Donegal and Sligo styles, I'm sure we can work something out.
KFG
. . .he's freakin Jesus in bowling ability. . .
.is there anything this guy doesn't do?
My brother used to own a bowling alley. If you can bowl all you want for free you get at least decent at it. I don't know how I'd compare with Jesus. I've never bowled with Jesus. I'm a Buddhist.
. .
Play double reeds or walk on water, although I have a theoretical understanding of how to accomplish both. Learning to make oboes is on my to do list for next winter, I'm too busy messing about with flutes and horns right now, but I think I'll just stick to messing about with boats on the whole water top thing.
Sit down, KFG, go home!
At the moment that would be redundant.
KFG
Many of us "hardcore" sim racers actually scratch build chassis using real car parts and construction techniques.
:)
And it turns out a Lotus 49 or Surtees T7 with the engine and wheels off fits very nicely in a corner of the living room. They be tiny little things. The tin top people have it a bit rougher with the space issue and usually fake it.
The biggest problem is that it can be so much fun building them that it distracts you from your driving time.
KFG
You've been given a gift and all you can do is look it in the mouth.
But if you aren't begging, you retain your ability to choose. The Trojans might well have been advised not only to examine the teeth, but have a very careful look all the way down the throat of their gift horse.
In fact, that's why we call an entire class of "gift" programs "Trojan Horse."
KFG
I detect an air of superiority in your comments. . . Loser.
This is the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the giggle. I needed it.
KFG
"computer science is not computer programming."
It is seriously good to know that at least the spirit of Edsger Dijkstra is alive and well somewhere.
God bless the voices crying out in the wilderness.
KFG
I mean, if nearly all 108 of them regarded rifling through the files of nut-jobs planning on poisoning the NYC water supply or shutting down nuclear plant cooling systems in California, I would take that as compelling evidence that something very much like the PATRIOT Act (with a little tweaking to improve safeguards of personal rights) is probably a Good Thing to have in place.
.whom I've slept with."
.nothing.
There are a few relevant questions here.
First off, it isn't enough to know that all 108 were nutjobs. What was the relevance of the PATRIOT Act to their survielence? The answer might well be none, in which case the act only serves to remove civil liberties from the innocent while adding nothing to the legitimate investigation of criminal activity.
Another, and more troublesome question is, how do you know they were actually nutjobs if there has been no judicial review, no legal representation, no finding of fact and no trial? No public record whatsoever.
"Did all of these people turn out to be nutjobs?"
"Ummmm, Yeah, they did. That's the ticket. Just ask my wife, Morgan Fairchild. .
Is this not the very problem with secret "law enforcement" activity?
Remember that law enforcement itself is even responsible for defining what "suspicion" and "terrorist" activity are. Afghanistan makes heroin. You are "suspected" of selling heroin. Therefore you are suspected of being a terrorist.
See how easy it is?
And the last question is, what if the 109th person isn't a nutjob at all, it's you, what will you say?
And the answer to that is. .
KFG
Well, but if I knew him, I wouldn't have asked the question. :)
Sounds like I'd like to though.
KFG
Personally I think it is kind of sad that my fellow students wouldn't know what a web server, or a mail server, or a router was if it bit them in the ass(on any operating system even).
Contrariwise to the impression some might get from my above post there is a reason why we make students take physics labs, other than annoying them by making them right lab papers.
You don't really understand something until you have touched it with your own hands. That's why there are so many "interpretations" of quantum physics. Everybody understands the results of the experiments, they're really pretty simple and straightforward, but nobody really knows what they "mean" because you can't touch it.
I have no particular love for ivory tower academics either, which is why I choose to teach privately.
KFG
I'm not a kid any more
.my current theoretical focus is formalising the underpinnings of AI ...
That's ok, neither am I. A very lovely young lady "sir"ed me on the street the other day (to compliment my violin playing, as it happens) which was rather a blow to my old heart.
. .
Ooooooh, man! Are we going to have fights. You should try to track down some of my old posts on AI. They're just as, well, "curmudgeonly" as the one to which you are responding.
I see I've gathered a troll moderation. That really isn't a valid moderation, although I expected some such, because the mods aren't offered the option of "curmudgeonly," so I guess they have to do the best they can.
Anyway, I like such fights. They'll be fun. If some moron who made a killing in auto mechanics ever drops a bag of money on me I'll look you up.
KFG
Well, I just might give it a go then. If nothing else it will aid me with friends I already have, a few of which are fairly fluent in Esperanto.
Come to think of it, they might well aid me.
I've been slowly working my up from protosemitic languages though. It might take me a while to get there.
KFG
Companies make money by producing goods and services.
This is completely and naively incorrect. Companies make money by selling goods and services at a profit.
Electronic dowsing rod companies and companies that sell magic as medicine often make very good profits, although the quality of the "goods and services" are not only not science, they are a disgrace to humanity.
Profit is a null concept in science.
So, with that said, many of those apps writers you speak poorly of are actually computer scientists.
You need to review the definition of science.
This is a sharp contrast from violin players who, in truth, do not have such a high requirement on having college degrees.
You need to review the hiring practices of those who employ violinists.
I find it hard to believe your claim that you are a teacher.
You need to review the definition of teacher.
Teachers in public and private schools in the United States do not "pick and choose" who they teach and do not teach courses to.
You need to review the practices of schools.
If you tried to remove a student from your class you'll end up getting removed yourself.This only leaves private teaching.
When my sixth grade French teacher tried to remove me, permanantly, from her class, I was removed. She was not. It worked out best, for her, for me, and most particularly for the class.
This only leaves private teaching.
You need to review the very post to which you are responding.
In short, I think you need to review your education. It seems to have left some holes.
Q.E.D.
You may, of course, choose to deal with this by vigorously defending the quality of your education, but if you're smart (and I have no reason to believe you are not just because you have been let down by your educators) you will instead choose to deal with it by fixing your education.
KFG
source?
I freely admit that I relied on a secondary source for that, a news article. Always a risky thing to do and something I myself typically caution against.
I will hold that statement in abeyance until I can track down a primary source to cite.
KFG
Why don't you give Esperanto a try?
Is that well known in Brazil?
KFG
There are Einsteins out there sweeping floors and idiots that run successful corporations.
You have misconstrued my post and are preaching to the choir, brother.
KFG
Trust me, if you knew how mechanics were treated, and I mean good mechanics, you would not have made that statement.
I have worked as a mechanic. In fact I worked my way through college as a mechanic (well, not exactly through college, as I was on a full scholarship, including books, but I have always enjoyed working and making my own money), although I think of myself as a craftsman. I no longer work as a mechanic except for a few personal customers, because it is impossible to be a craftsman in the mainline commercial way of doing things.
How this fact in any way contradicts my assertion that auto mechanics ought to have a few brain cells is beyond my few braincells to fathom.
KFG
This question is downright ridiculous.
Questions are not ridiculous. Questions are the seeking of knowledge. I have no way of knowing whether the question is "ridiculous" until I have had it answered.
I'm glad to know this information about Prof. Matloff, but I wish he had managed to inculcate you with the above. It would give me more personal confidence in your assessment of him.
KFG
And we could use a few more doctors and stuff. An auto mechanic with more than half a brain cell would be a pleasant thing to run into now and again as well. Who the hell decided that being a moron was actually one of the desirable qualities of someone who has to perform complex diagnostics and then fix the problem?
.
Parents like to decide what their kids are "going to be" when they're about minus 5 years old. This makes growing up hell on the poor kid who wants to be a concert violinst, but whose parents have him down to be a doctor, balanced by a kid who loves biology, but is forced to practice the hateful violin 6 hours a day.
The process is so pervasive that even kids who "grow up and make their own decision" often don't really, because they aren't actually taught how to make decisions of that nature in the first place.
Quite frankly, the one thing we're up to arses in is apps programers, and, ironically, the one thing in the computer field we're desperately short of right now is computer scientists.
And it's the universities getting into bed with companies like Microsoft and Intel that have resulted in computer science being mistaken for apps programming.
So my question to Norm Matloff is. .
"Is your own house in order?"
Are you, a CS professor, teaching real computer science, or are you teaching programming and calling it computer science at the behest of Intel?
You're right. The competition isn't a valid measure of where the US stands in the tech world. It stands in the fact that we are no longer the number one nation for publishing original computer science papers. We aren't even number two anymore. Japanese kids aren't coming to Boston and Berkeley anymore for the CS educations, they're going to Bejing.
Word is out. We've lost it. We're on the way down The rats started abondoning the ship years ago, but as Van Loon noted when talking about the Roman Empire, empires that have been fallen for hundreds of years are rarely aware of the fact.
I too, like the grandparent, teach privately. I do not, however, take just anybody. Beyond a certain point I'll only work with people, both kids and adults, who I believe are personally involved in the subject. Not who's parents have decided that computer "science" is a good job field for them because they see a lot of ads for Java programmers in the papers.
I do not piss and moan if a kid isn't interested in programming. I try my damndest to find that out, and then direct them to something they are interested in. As it happens, I teach violin too. It's better for everybody that way, and not just the kid.
Because one kid who lives for computer science is worth more than an entire university full of kids who are there because it's a good job field. We are falling behind in the sciences because we no longer focus on that one kid and give him the training and facilities he needs to do brilliant work, but we crank out less than worthless Java apps programmers to satisfy the commercial concerns (yes, that may well mean you, even if you find the concept insulting) by the bucketful.
And one kid who lives to play the violin, but isn't very technically proficient, is going to make more music worth listening to than a whole symphony orchestra full of technically perfect, but bored out of their skulls, orchestra pit monkeys.
Tell ya what, give me 12 kids who have been properly trained as computer scientists and love the field, six theorists and six empiricists, none of whom know a lick of "practical" programming, and just enough capital to set up shop with workbenchs from Sears and computers cobbled together from odd parts, but not enough to hand out free Ferraris to everybody, and in five years the 13 of us will knock all of China on its arse.
But I can't tell you in advance what our output is going to be, because I haven't a frickin' clue and that's the bloody point.
Not that anyone around here would care anyway. Build a better mousetrap, give it away for free; and they'll still buy the latest braindead clusterfuck from Oracle.
I think maybe I'll take another crack at learning Portuguese.
KFG
No, you are wrong.
But. . . that is what I said.
KFG
In the international method of communication one would hope you would be correct.
But I'm afraid in the American method you are not. The grandparent's post was a simple, factual statement of the point of view of the "opposition" party; and it was to them that my own post was directed.
KFG
. . .of course they cannot have a vote against emergency military funding on their record. . .
Bullshit!
KFG
Even VoIP has to come out of the Internet at some point and into a conventional telco exchange, right?
Wrong. To interface with POTS the statement is a tautology, but there is nothing inherent about sending voice over IP that requires POTS.
Stop thinking "telephone" and start thinking "voice communications."
People will, however, hate you for doing that, because they can't charge you an extra $25/mo., or regulate you, for "voice communications," because that power is already in your hands the instant you have an internet connection. I sit here in the US and talk to my friends in England and Germany just fine, and without involving the conventional phone companies or Vonage. The current structure is trying to use their inertia to leverage themselves into an industry that already has no raison d'etre.
But it's true, I don't "phone" them. I "internet" them.
Free your mind and the rest will follow.
KFG