The ADTI report is written to be read by politicians; the rebuttals I've seen are written to be read by techies. I do hope that anybody who's sending one of these rebuttals to their congresscritter does an editing pass first, though.
... doesn't actually fit into the universe established by the movies. The aliens, the technology, the relationship between Leia and Luke, the presence of Darth Vader WITHOUT billions of stormtroopers... none of it matches. I thought it was rather odd even at the time I read it (1980 or so, before TESB released).
I think that it's unique in this respect; later "Star Wars" novels seem to be carefully tucked into some sort of master plan.
The "information superhighway" analogy, always misleading, is even more so when you start talking about "net traffic cops". A more accurate one would be "the Internet library," and a troop of "net censors." What, you say, that analogy makes the idea sound really bad? Well, that's because the idea is really bad.
Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction
Believing in one of these things doesn't necessarily mean that you have a poor understanding of science.
Well, yes, it does, because there is a huge body of evidence that says ESP does not work, that psychic powers do not exist, and that nobody has ever been abducted by aliens. Sorry, but there is such a thing as negative evidence; you need a large number of trials before you can be confident in it, but we have those.
There are even several demonstrated causes for people to claim that these things exist; "trying to steal money", "pandering for attention", and "claimant is delusional" are three of the more common ones.
C and C++ are not ideas. They are *languages*. The ideas that C and C++ implement-- things like macro expansion, block execution control, scope, inheritance-- all can be explained to average people, if they're willing to think a bit.
Likewise, Knuth is not an idea; it is a compilation of many, many seperate ideas. I'm willing to bet that any of the individual ideas expressed in Knuth could be explained to people with no special knowledge of computers; I know that I've successfully explained the "buddy system" memory allocator to my nine-year-old.
That's a very nice phrase, but enough of a correlation *does* allow you to deduce a causative relationship. Parroting it in situations like this just reveals your own foolishness, in the same way that saying that evolution isn't "proven" because it's "just" a theory does.
Anyway, the pathway from "smoke particles in lungs" to "hideous tumors consuming your living flesh" is well-documented at every step, and has been for decades.
Momentum transfer. The photons come from the sun, they bounce off the sail, it makes the sail go. Although, really, the Bernoulli effect is just momentum transfer too.
Lots of people honestly don't care about what project they're working on. Most people actively enjoy being interrupted-- it makes them feel important. Most people like work that isn't challenging.
The thing is, these people aren't geeks. And since you obviously are one, you never meet them. Talk to a secretary at someplace like Boeing sometime.
I can't say that I'm surprised about it. Yahoo's been buying up all of these not-really-for-profit services for a couple of years now, and now they're in the scrambling-to-make-them-pay-for-themselves part of things. Of course, none of the services they provide are actually worth any *money* to speak of... I keep wondering how long they've got.
Y'all remember "slamming?" That fun practice where Phone Company X would just go in and magically switch you to use their long-distance service without even mentioning it to you, and you wouldn't find out until the bill showed up?
So, this isn't all that bad... not that they wouldn't LIKE to be, but they don't get to.
Their older system, SLM, was about equivalent to cvs, and perhaps slightly better. Its main trouble was ease of use; the first time I ever had to use SLM, it took me a week to get it set up because the documentation was wrong and I was in a remote location.
Their newer version control is called "Source Depot", and it's got a really cool trick: transactional checkins. Add two files, change three others, and delete one, all in a single operation. Once again, ease of use, poor documentation, and lack of training are real killers, which is a shame because the system is SO DAMNED COOL if you only understand it.
Remember, very few musicians make enough money to earn a living off of selling copies of music now. It's possible that one of these new things will turn out to make playing music a good way to pay the rent, but even if none of them do, musicians won't be worse off. The people who would benefit from most of the ideas the author sets forth are listeners.
Oh, and middlemen... we'll get a whole new set of middlemen providing the catalogs, lyrics, running the live webcasts, etc, and they'll make out like bandits. One way or another, faceless corporate goons will suck up ninety percent of your music-listening dollar.
Supposed "review" link in parent is goatse.cx
on
Java RMI
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· Score: 1
Mail order! HobbyLink Japan has the Char-G, I know. Shipping charges are high, but the prices are low, and if you get a couple of friends together you can all go in on a single big order.
It's pretty much the same thing that they do to the insides of a live frog.
How Would the Telcos Pervert This One?
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Why ADCo?
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· Score: 1
Obviously, the existence of ADCos would be dependent on government regulation-- that's no surprise, without regulation we'd all still be paying AT&T two bucks a month to lease our phones.
So, given regulations designed to allow ADCos to exist, how would the Baby Bells pervert such regulations to maintain their stranglehold on the phone lines in their areas? No, I don't have an answer to this question; I just know that the Bells' executives would spend plenty-o-time trying to think of ways to do it.
Nobody ever proposed using the Arrow as a launch vehicle for satellites. The missile bay was RELATIVELY large, but not nearly big enough for something that could fire itself to orbit-- it was for air-to-air missiles, something with about the same form factor as the Phoenix missiles carried by F-14s.
I'm encouraged to see this happening, although it's also a rather scary thing for me since I'm one of those self-taught folks. Nearly every large project I've worked on would have benefited if the people working on it were formally trained as software engineers; the way things are now, most projects lack important things like unit tests, prototyping, etc.
One thing that I wonder is, how are they going to cope with the way software engineering scales? There are millions of little programs out there written by somebody's little brother that produce the weekly report just the way Bob in accounting likes them. There are tens of thousands of companies out there getting useful work done on systems that were put together out of standard components by some consultant in a couple of weeks. There are, perhaps, a couple of thousand projects out there that are complex enough that it's really worth bringing out a Real Software Engineer or two to run them.
I suspect that eventually we'll need two seperate professions, call 'em "Software Engineers" and "MCSEs" or something. It'll be kind of like working with electricity, where you've got EEs to design complicated things, and electricians that do stuff like wiring your house.
Sure, porn sites would use this system. Remember, they're in place to make money. They make money by getting people to pay them to look at their photos of doggies in latex or whatever. They do not make money when nine-year-old Billy wanders into their sites, and Billy's parents find him drooling at the latex doggies... far from it.
If killing Bush would make our society freer, would I be justified in killing bush?
The only trouble with using this question as an argument against the statement that "the ends justifies the means," is that it doesn't work. I can't think of a way in which killing Dubya would make any society more free, and several ways in which it would make the USA less free.
Now, if you'd said, "If going back in time and killing Hitler in 1936..."
oh. wait. That would be perfectly justifiable. I and lots of other people would be perfectly happy if you did that, precisely because it would work; no maniacal dictator in charge of Germany, no loony plan to conquer all of Europe, no six-million-odd Jews getting exterminated in camps...
Huh. Guess the end does justify the means, after all.
The government of the United States was created to uphold several principles; these are enumerated in the Preamble to the Constitution. (C'mon, everybody, sing it with me! "We the PEEEOPLE, in order to form a more perfect union..." Yeah, that.)
Generally, we've found that following the procedures outlined in the Constitution is the most effective way to do this. However, our history shows that sometimes, disobeying the law is the right way. The case for the government itself doing this can be found in the words of several presidents, Lincoln and FDR being the most prominent examples. The case for individuals is effectively laid out by Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience," and in the works of Martin Luther King Jr.
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The ADTI report is written to be read by politicians; the rebuttals I've seen are written to be read by techies. I do hope that anybody who's sending one of these rebuttals to their congresscritter does an editing pass first, though.
... doesn't actually fit into the universe established by the movies. The aliens, the technology, the relationship between Leia and Luke, the presence of Darth Vader WITHOUT billions of stormtroopers... none of it matches. I thought it was rather odd even at the time I read it (1980 or so, before TESB released).
I think that it's unique in this respect; later "Star Wars" novels seem to be carefully tucked into some sort of master plan.
The "information superhighway" analogy, always misleading, is even more so when you start talking about "net traffic cops". A more accurate one would be "the Internet library," and a troop of "net censors." What, you say, that analogy makes the idea sound really bad? Well, that's because the idea is really bad.
I mean, they're right there, and you're supposed to keep them clean and properly sharpened anyway...
Just remember, if you're Jewish, to use the "meat" untensils, not the "milk" ones.
Well, yes, it does, because there is a huge body of evidence that says ESP does not work, that psychic powers do not exist, and that nobody has ever been abducted by aliens. Sorry, but there is such a thing as negative evidence; you need a large number of trials before you can be confident in it, but we have those.
There are even several demonstrated causes for people to claim that these things exist; "trying to steal money", "pandering for attention", and "claimant is delusional" are three of the more common ones.
C and C++ are not ideas. They are *languages*. The ideas that C and C++ implement-- things like macro expansion, block execution control, scope, inheritance-- all can be explained to average people, if they're willing to think a bit.
Likewise, Knuth is not an idea; it is a compilation of many, many seperate ideas. I'm willing to bet that any of the individual ideas expressed in Knuth could be explained to people with no special knowledge of computers; I know that I've successfully explained the "buddy system" memory allocator to my nine-year-old.
That's a very nice phrase, but enough of a correlation *does* allow you to deduce a causative relationship. Parroting it in situations like this just reveals your own foolishness, in the same way that saying that evolution isn't "proven" because it's "just" a theory does.
Anyway, the pathway from "smoke particles in lungs" to "hideous tumors consuming your living flesh" is well-documented at every step, and has been for decades.
Momentum transfer. The photons come from the sun, they bounce off the sail, it makes the sail go. Although, really, the Bernoulli effect is just momentum transfer too.
I have a compilation of all ten Amber books in trade format; I believe it has almost exactly 1100 pages. So, yep, short little books.
Lots of people honestly don't care about what project they're working on. Most people actively enjoy being interrupted-- it makes them feel important. Most people like work that isn't challenging.
The thing is, these people aren't geeks. And since you obviously are one, you never meet them. Talk to a secretary at someplace like Boeing sometime.
I can't say that I'm surprised about it. Yahoo's been buying up all of these not-really-for-profit services for a couple of years now, and now they're in the scrambling-to-make-them-pay-for-themselves part of things. Of course, none of the services they provide are actually worth any *money* to speak of... I keep wondering how long they've got.
Y'all remember "slamming?" That fun practice where Phone Company X would just go in and magically switch you to use their long-distance service without even mentioning it to you, and you wouldn't find out until the bill showed up?
So, this isn't all that bad... not that they wouldn't LIKE to be, but they don't get to.
Their older system, SLM, was about equivalent to cvs, and perhaps slightly better. Its main trouble was ease of use; the first time I ever had to use SLM, it took me a week to get it set up because the documentation was wrong and I was in a remote location.
Their newer version control is called "Source Depot", and it's got a really cool trick: transactional checkins. Add two files, change three others, and delete one, all in a single operation. Once again, ease of use, poor documentation, and lack of training are real killers, which is a shame because the system is SO DAMNED COOL if you only understand it.
Remember, very few musicians make enough money to earn a living off of selling copies of music now. It's possible that one of these new things will turn out to make playing music a good way to pay the rent, but even if none of them do, musicians won't be worse off. The people who would benefit from most of the ideas the author sets forth are listeners.
Oh, and middlemen... we'll get a whole new set of middlemen providing the catalogs, lyrics, running the live webcasts, etc, and they'll make out like bandits. One way or another, faceless corporate goons will suck up ninety percent of your music-listening dollar.
Fuckin' goatse.cx...
Mail order! HobbyLink Japan has the Char-G, I know. Shipping charges are high, but the prices are low, and if you get a couple of friends together you can all go in on a single big order.
The 'net has no single "heart," any more than the world does. How could it?
It's pretty much the same thing that they do to the insides of a live frog.
Obviously, the existence of ADCos would be dependent on government regulation-- that's no surprise, without regulation we'd all still be paying AT&T two bucks a month to lease our phones.
So, given regulations designed to allow ADCos to exist, how would the Baby Bells pervert such regulations to maintain their stranglehold on the phone lines in their areas? No, I don't have an answer to this question; I just know that the Bells' executives would spend plenty-o-time trying to think of ways to do it.
I'd better get to work on downloading alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* RIGHT NOW.
Nobody ever proposed using the Arrow as a launch vehicle for satellites. The missile bay was RELATIVELY large, but not nearly big enough for something that could fire itself to orbit-- it was for air-to-air missiles, something with about the same form factor as the Phoenix missiles carried by F-14s.
I'm encouraged to see this happening, although it's also a rather scary thing for me since I'm one of those self-taught folks. Nearly every large project I've worked on would have benefited if the people working on it were formally trained as software engineers; the way things are now, most projects lack important things like unit tests, prototyping, etc.
One thing that I wonder is, how are they going to cope with the way software engineering scales? There are millions of little programs out there written by somebody's little brother that produce the weekly report just the way Bob in accounting likes them. There are tens of thousands of companies out there getting useful work done on systems that were put together out of standard components by some consultant in a couple of weeks. There are, perhaps, a couple of thousand projects out there that are complex enough that it's really worth bringing out a Real Software Engineer or two to run them.
I suspect that eventually we'll need two seperate professions, call 'em "Software Engineers" and "MCSEs" or something. It'll be kind of like working with electricity, where you've got EEs to design complicated things, and electricians that do stuff like wiring your house.
Sure, porn sites would use this system. Remember, they're in place to make money. They make money by getting people to pay them to look at their photos of doggies in latex or whatever. They do not make money when nine-year-old Billy wanders into their sites, and Billy's parents find him drooling at the latex doggies... far from it.
The only trouble with using this question as an argument against the statement that "the ends justifies the means," is that it doesn't work. I can't think of a way in which killing Dubya would make any society more free, and several ways in which it would make the USA less free.
Now, if you'd said, "If going back in time and killing Hitler in 1936..."
oh. wait. That would be perfectly justifiable. I and lots of other people would be perfectly happy if you did that, precisely because it would work; no maniacal dictator in charge of Germany, no loony plan to conquer all of Europe, no six-million-odd Jews getting exterminated in camps...
Huh. Guess the end does justify the means, after all.
The government of the United States was created to uphold several principles; these are enumerated in the Preamble to the Constitution. (C'mon, everybody, sing it with me! "We the PEEEOPLE, in order to form a more perfect union..." Yeah, that.)
Generally, we've found that following the procedures outlined in the Constitution is the most effective way to do this. However, our history shows that sometimes, disobeying the law is the right way. The case for the government itself doing this can be found in the words of several presidents, Lincoln and FDR being the most prominent examples. The case for individuals is effectively laid out by Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience," and in the works of Martin Luther King Jr.