You refer to tanning beds in your sig, and in your profile url, so you're clearly pretty interested in them. At the same time, you're postulating a kind of vast conspiracy against UV exposure, which somehow even involves people who don't stand to benefit from it. I think I have plenty of information to judge you on, and so does anyone else reading your posts. If my conclusions are wrong, you're going to have to explain why.
.NET encompasses the API (actually a huge set of APIs), as well as a virtual machine (known as the Common Language Runtime, CLR), as well as a set of languages (like C# and VB.NET) and a whole lot of infrastructure designed to support those languages and the applications written in them. Such a system can certainly be made portable, and Java did that (but with a single official programming language) before.NET came along. But you're probably correct that the Windows-specificity of.NET means that making it truly portable is a dubious proposition, on many levels. In a sense,.NET is the new version of the Windows API.
BTW, any programmer worth his salt shouldn't have had a problem understanding what.NET is. However, Microsoft needed to market it beyond that group because.NET was so central to the future direction of Windows. The confusion you noticed was the result of that rather challenging marketing problem.
To use the ob. car analogy: it's as though a car company tried to sell a new range of vehicles by pointing out how they all use the same chassis, and promoting the wonderful characteristics of Chassis 2.0. No-one who's not a car manufacturer really cares. The additional problem with.NET is that not only didn't customers care, they didn't even understand what was being described. At least in the car case, most people have some idea what a chassis is.
I think you will find a deaf ear here when it comes to UV.
Most people who really do take time to look at the facts will come to the conclusion that use of tanning beds is a pretty unattractive proposition. If nothing else, the skin damage effect is pretty well documented, and is more likely to get through to the people who are most interested in tanning, i.e. the appearance-obsessed who have been indoctrinated with a particular standard of beauty which, interestingly, is actually quite unnatural for caucasians. a particular
I have spent years trying to educate people that UV exposure is nature and healthy if none without burning and in moderation.
You mean "convince", not "educate". Although a lot depends on what you consider "in moderation". But if you believe in UV exposure in moderation, the best place to get it from is the sun, not tanning beds, because by your own argument, that's what we're evolved to deal with:
Saying that any UV is deadly, after we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to it (and even NEED it to produce vitamin D), smacks of bad science.
That's a very unscientific appeal to common sense, which also happens to be completely irrelevant. With things like this, we're evolved to be able to survive to breeding age, and what happens after that doesn't matter much from an evolutionary perspective. People in their forties and fifties with wrinkly, leathery, sagging skin used to be quite common, and that was caused by sun exposure (and often also smoking). Skin remains much healthier, much longer now among people who have reduced sun exposure.
BTW, I don't know of any reputable source that says "any UV is deadly", so you're arguing against a straw man there. Most of the articles I read seem quite balanced to me. A lot of them are by people like dermatologists, who don't have any direct stake in the "zero UV industry" you mention -- if anything, their jobs would be more secure if they encouraged their patients to get UV exposure. So your conspiracy theory doesn't really track. Think about the cigarette companies -- once the science of smoking became known, the doctors didn't cooperate and continue to claim that smoking was healthy. So you're going to have to try much harder to extricate yourself from the company of the good old tobacco industry, with which you have far more in common than you're willing to admit. You both sell something that people don't need, that is actively damaging to their health.
I dealt with the alleged irony issue in another response. It doesn't affect my point.
Your definition of government is far broader than the one I was using, so what you're saying and what I'm saying aren't entirely at odds. I'm simply referring to what government departments themselves tend to do with technology, internally. Take a look at software projects at, to pick three nice juicy examples, the FBI, the IRS, and the FAA. If you don't already know, the software systems that have been developed in those agencies over the past decade or so together represent a multi-billion dollar catastrophe. That was the kind of thing I was referring to, in deliberately absolute and general terms to make a point, which is that it is far more likely that such projects will result in failure when they are commissioned and managed by goverments alone.
As to your broad view of what "government" means, you need to be careful of losing useful distinctions. Governments and corporations are two distinct things, for example, even if mutually dependent. "All tech" is certainly not of government origin by any useful definition of "government" that I can think of, for example.
Arpanet succeeded because of the involvement of universities, which most government technology projects don't have the benefit of. Perhaps I should have mentioned that option as a possible fix: governments and universities collaborating on multi-hundred-million-dollar technology projects, what could go wrong?
Government is always behind with technology (with one exception, below). When government catches up with technology that everyone else is using, they do it badly and it costs far too much.
The one exception is that sometimes, governments will try a new technological approach before anyone else has tried it. In those cases, the approach being tried is always a bad idea.
There's no solution, although strict regulations on government use of technology might be a good idea. I'd suggest taxes, but that doesn't make any sense...
You might be interested to read Two Kinds of Judgement, which discusses this issue in some depth and explains why you shouldn't take such rejection too personally.
Management sees the Bottom Line Price and tends not to listen to IT telling them that, no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX.
In management's defense, this is Oz we're talking about. I assume there was beer involved. And sheilas. When yer stonkered, even AIX can start looking pretty attractive.
what extra you are getting by being mad at a dead person
It's the same as the reason we express sorrow when someone worthy of respect and love dies. Expressing sorrow is of no benefit to the person that's died, but it's meaningful to the people who remain. The same is true of expressing anger at the person who died, it's just that it's meaningful in different ways. You said that dancing on a grave is not a sign of being social to each other, but that's not correct. If many people are doing it, those people are being social, and it can be a bonding experience for a group, and reaffirm their beliefs and values.
What's such social impact upon the ones around us by saying such things?
That's the important question. The social impact of saying that even in death, someone who did bad things is not worthy of respect should, ideally, be quite a powerful message to those still living. However, I fear that the message is heavily diluted by the existence of the taboo about speaking ill of the dead. It would be interesting to examine the history of that taboo, because it's certainly not universal. It seems to mainly benefit those who do bad things, so it's not clear why some people believe in it so strongly. I have yet to see a good explanation of the rationale behind it.
Still, I do wonder why not thinking further than that and wondering why you would be mad at a dead person, what's going to change for you in life and if it is really letting you feel better?
Expressing anger can be healthy. For myself, I don't like what Valenti stood for but I haven't made any statements about desecrating his grave or anything like that. But my position is that if people feel strongly enough to say such things, the response should not be "you're not allowed to say that"; rather, anyone who feels upset by such comments should defend Valenti on his merits. If they can't do that, then it doesn't seem as though they have anything useful to contribute, because it's hardly a valid response to someone else's anger to say "you shouldn't feel that way". Very often, people who feel angry about something are demonstrating a stronger sense of values and social justice than the person who doesn't show, or tries to suppress such emotion.
Who writes this shit? Did the writer actually spend two seconds imagining a player swinging the cell phone like a tennis racket or golf club?
No, but I'm guessing you did, and now you're working through the disillusionment. Hang in there bro, you'll be able to swing your cellphone once they perfect the cellphone-mounted motion-stabilized holographic projector!
Perhaps "PC heritage" was the wrong term. I was really thinking "microcomputer heritage", going back to the days of the S-100 bus, Apple, and the countless other pre-PC machines. That was before hard disks were common, let alone LANs, and macro viruses were not an issue until much later. Many of the people involved at that time were busy reinventing things from scratch, starting at the most rudimentary level. They mostly ignored any lessons that might have been had from software on bigger iron, because they had no experience with it.
Microsoft was a part of that time and inherited that attitude and ran with it, but it didn't originate the attitude. There's no question that later, they should have known better in a technical responsibility sense. In a pure business sense, though, it may have worked in their favor in various ways to ignore security.
As for Xenix, Microsoft acquired a license to that from SCO, they didn't develop it in-house. Despite Gates himself pushing it, it didn't gain traction. Any lessons that might have been learned from it were lost because not enough people within Microsoft were exposed to it.
My point is that Microsoft's approach to security isn't entirely a conscious choice: they began creating their monoculture back in a time when security wasn't a serious issue, so to move beyond that is difficult, because they don't really know any other world than the one they created.
I'm not saying that other operating systems couldn't do a better job too, but security is one (huge) area where Microsoft really and truly sucks - and it isn't something they can solve overnight, either. It seems ingrained in their philosophy and permeates all aspects of Windows (and other products).
It's the PC heritage, going back to the days when no-one in the non-Unix PC world gave the slightest thought to security, because you could get away with it back then. It's a difficult mindset to change, because if you don't learn to program thinking in secure terms, security tends to be an afterthought, which of course doesn't work so well.
What with the people who cannot interact anymore because they are dead?
Those people had a whole lifetime to worry about that. I'm not a big fan of the deathbed conversion - it's all very well for someone who is acknowledging their sins and repenting, but it doesn't really help the people who suffered as a result of those sins. It only encourages bad behavior if people feel they can act however they wish and be forgiven for it later, no matter what they do.
Does that mean that person lost respect forever and ever even when he cannot undo his actions towards you?
If you want to be respected in this life, you have to act in a way deserving of respect. Are you suggesting that after someone's death, we should respect them no matter what they did during their life? There have been some pretty bad people in this world who are now dead - do you respect them all? I'm curious about what that respect really means. What about other people, who acted better? What does our respect for them mean, if we respect everyone no matter what they did?
Still knowing, this person will never be able to correct his actions; why not offer him some peace instead?
One reason is to avoid giving other people the impression that they can act without consequences. If you are so inclined, you might choose to forgive someone for their actions, but often that doesn't happen until after you've worked through your anger towards them, which is partly what's happening in this thread. But even if you forgive them, it doesn't mean you have to respect them the way you would respect someone who had done good deeds.
I mostly agree someone will earn respect by having a good basis of interaction; but; isn't this too deep-edged?
I don't know what you think should be the alternative. We certainly respect some people more than others, in life and in death. I don't see a problem with our respect for "bad" people being very low, indistinguishable from zero. I don't know Valenti well enough to know whether he deserves that, but there have certainly been some people who do, in my opinion.
According to Carroll, another passage said, "as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting."
This is probably what triggered the police to take it seriously. It could definitely be interpreted as a thinly-veiled threat, particularly in conjunction with the rest of the material in the essay.
The problem is that the teacher did, literally, "ask for it" -- if the student had censored himself, he would have been violating the rules of the assignment. Under the circumstances, the teacher should have known better, and taken some responsibility for the situation, and for resolving it sensibly.
In your value system, me asking you to moderate your taunting of someone else's death might be turning down a "dark, dark road".
No, your questioning my humanity because I have different values from you is turning down a dark, dark road. The same road that leads people to justify killing other people who believe differently than they do. The same road that leads to the justification of genocide (people in the group being targetted "should be given a sub-human status.")
You might want to ponder why, after arguing how free you are to have a different opinion, you assume that I share yours on the subject.
I don't assume that at all. For all I know, you honestly believe that people who have different values from you are sinners that will go to hell, and that you should do all you can to help them get there. Heaven knows there are enough such people on Slashdot. However, I gave you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that you might have some of the humanity which you've questioned in me, and that you might be able to recognize that your behavior is not so different from the behavior of the people you're so righteously claiming are violating your standards of decency. You have violated my standards of decency, for no better reason than that you were frustrated by your inability to express yourself.
If you want people who may have different values from you to share or even just understand your perspective, you need to at least be able to explain that perspective, not just list the rules you live by as though everyone should automatically recognize their absolute validity.
You've made categorical statements like "Common decency is..." and "you don't verbally dance on his grave...", and alluded to reasons ("There's a reason why...") without actually explaining those reasons. My conclusion is that like many people, you're following rules someone else made for you, which you take for granted but don't understand well enough to articulate. That's pretty common, but again, you shouldn't expect others to automatically accept those those rules unless you can at least verbalize their rationale.
(As an aside, you also draw some parallels which don't necessarily hold, e.g. that the taboo against actually desecrating graves should extend equally to discussing the idea in a way that's clearly not intended literally.)
As a reminder that there are people with different value systems from yours, read this comment. Do you think those people are "too detached from the real world to care about their human side", as you accused me of being?
You may not agree with those who are metaphorically dancing on Valenti's grave, but they're not forcing you to join them. You, on the other hand, seem to want them to follow the same rules you follow, and when they don't, or even when someone questions the reasons behind your rules, your response borders on questioning their very humanity.
In my value system, questioning the humanity of those with different values than you is a big no-no, which historically has led to all sorts of bad outcomes. You might want to ponder how your plea for decency turned into a step down such a dark, dark road.
Judging by how you go into semantics instead of realising the practical and completely natural limits to a common philosophy, I'd say you're too detached from the real world to care about your human side anyway.
That's pretty judgemental for someone who's lecturing people about not having sufficient respect for life. I have respect for the people who interact with me respectfully. Not only do I care about my human side, I care about the human side of other people who I respect. However, I don't believe that people who have actively gone out of their way to harm and exploit me, my friends, or my fellow humans, are deserving of such respect.
My foray into semantics was an attempt to try to learn from you what you meant by "respect for life", and how that related to the current situation. Sorry if that upset you somehow.
You don't have to respect the person. Just respect life. [...] Respect for life is something any decent person has for anyone.
That's interesting, but what does it mean to "respect life", and are we not doing so sufficiently in this case? If we don't respect the person, and believe that the world is better off with him dead, are we somehow not respecting life by saying so?
In any case, most people's respect for life is limited. We all eat plants, most of us eat animals, and most of us support, either actively or passively, the semi-organized killing of people in wars. So life is clearly not entirely sacrosanct, to most of us.
I've demonstrated my respect for Jack Valenti's life in the fact that I didn't personally kill him, but that's really as far as it goes. Beyond that basic courtesy, everything else needs to be earned, if you're a thinking being with some degree of what we think of as free will.
Respect the lives of others as you expect them to respect yours.
If I behaved like Jack Valenti, I would expect exactly the level of respect I see here. In fact, I find that encouraging. Don't be wishy-washy, giving everyone a gold star just because they happen to be alive. Respect is earned.
Slashdot Mirror
You refer to tanning beds in your sig, and in your profile url, so you're clearly pretty interested in them. At the same time, you're postulating a kind of vast conspiracy against UV exposure, which somehow even involves people who don't stand to benefit from it. I think I have plenty of information to judge you on, and so does anyone else reading your posts. If my conclusions are wrong, you're going to have to explain why.
.NET encompasses the API (actually a huge set of APIs), as well as a virtual machine (known as the Common Language Runtime, CLR), as well as a set of languages (like C# and VB.NET) and a whole lot of infrastructure designed to support those languages and the applications written in them. Such a system can certainly be made portable, and Java did that (but with a single official programming language) before .NET came along. But you're probably correct that the Windows-specificity of .NET means that making it truly portable is a dubious proposition, on many levels. In a sense, .NET is the new version of the Windows API.
.NET is. However, Microsoft needed to market it beyond that group because .NET was so central to the future direction of Windows. The confusion you noticed was the result of that rather challenging marketing problem.
.NET is that not only didn't customers care, they didn't even understand what was being described. At least in the car case, most people have some idea what a chassis is.
BTW, any programmer worth his salt shouldn't have had a problem understanding what
To use the ob. car analogy: it's as though a car company tried to sell a new range of vehicles by pointing out how they all use the same chassis, and promoting the wonderful characteristics of Chassis 2.0. No-one who's not a car manufacturer really cares. The additional problem with
a particularYou mean "convince", not "educate". Although a lot depends on what you consider "in moderation". But if you believe in UV exposure in moderation, the best place to get it from is the sun, not tanning beds, because by your own argument, that's what we're evolved to deal with:That's a very unscientific appeal to common sense, which also happens to be completely irrelevant. With things like this, we're evolved to be able to survive to breeding age, and what happens after that doesn't matter much from an evolutionary perspective. People in their forties and fifties with wrinkly, leathery, sagging skin used to be quite common, and that was caused by sun exposure (and often also smoking). Skin remains much healthier, much longer now among people who have reduced sun exposure.
BTW, I don't know of any reputable source that says "any UV is deadly", so you're arguing against a straw man there. Most of the articles I read seem quite balanced to me. A lot of them are by people like dermatologists, who don't have any direct stake in the "zero UV industry" you mention -- if anything, their jobs would be more secure if they encouraged their patients to get UV exposure. So your conspiracy theory doesn't really track. Think about the cigarette companies -- once the science of smoking became known, the doctors didn't cooperate and continue to claim that smoking was healthy. So you're going to have to try much harder to extricate yourself from the company of the good old tobacco industry, with which you have far more in common than you're willing to admit. You both sell something that people don't need, that is actively damaging to their health.
I dealt with the alleged irony issue in another response. It doesn't affect my point.
Your definition of government is far broader than the one I was using, so what you're saying and what I'm saying aren't entirely at odds. I'm simply referring to what government departments themselves tend to do with technology, internally. Take a look at software projects at, to pick three nice juicy examples, the FBI, the IRS, and the FAA. If you don't already know, the software systems that have been developed in those agencies over the past decade or so together represent a multi-billion dollar catastrophe. That was the kind of thing I was referring to, in deliberately absolute and general terms to make a point, which is that it is far more likely that such projects will result in failure when they are commissioned and managed by goverments alone.
As to your broad view of what "government" means, you need to be careful of losing useful distinctions. Governments and corporations are two distinct things, for example, even if mutually dependent. "All tech" is certainly not of government origin by any useful definition of "government" that I can think of, for example.
Arpanet succeeded because of the involvement of universities, which most government technology projects don't have the benefit of. Perhaps I should have mentioned that option as a possible fix: governments and universities collaborating on multi-hundred-million-dollar technology projects, what could go wrong?
Government is always behind with technology (with one exception, below). When government catches up with technology that everyone else is using, they do it badly and it costs far too much.
The one exception is that sometimes, governments will try a new technological approach before anyone else has tried it. In those cases, the approach being tried is always a bad idea.
There's no solution, although strict regulations on government use of technology might be a good idea. I'd suggest taxes, but that doesn't make any sense...
You might be interested to read Two Kinds of Judgement, which discusses this issue in some depth and explains why you shouldn't take such rejection too personally.
Ah, you're just being a big sook!
That would be cowardly, and he's too honorable for that. Truly, a Slashdot hero.
I know how the RIAA can achieve reliability - it's easy, really. All they need to do is...
Wait, what am I doing? On second thought, they can kiss my skinny pasty-white nerd ass.
Or what if you're about to crash into the car in front of you and you want to call them to warn them?
Perhaps "PC heritage" was the wrong term. I was really thinking "microcomputer heritage", going back to the days of the S-100 bus, Apple, and the countless other pre-PC machines. That was before hard disks were common, let alone LANs, and macro viruses were not an issue until much later. Many of the people involved at that time were busy reinventing things from scratch, starting at the most rudimentary level. They mostly ignored any lessons that might have been had from software on bigger iron, because they had no experience with it.
Microsoft was a part of that time and inherited that attitude and ran with it, but it didn't originate the attitude. There's no question that later, they should have known better in a technical responsibility sense. In a pure business sense, though, it may have worked in their favor in various ways to ignore security.
As for Xenix, Microsoft acquired a license to that from SCO, they didn't develop it in-house. Despite Gates himself pushing it, it didn't gain traction. Any lessons that might have been learned from it were lost because not enough people within Microsoft were exposed to it.
My point is that Microsoft's approach to security isn't entirely a conscious choice: they began creating their monoculture back in a time when security wasn't a serious issue, so to move beyond that is difficult, because they don't really know any other world than the one they created.
Sun's new CEO is the driving force behind this. Quite a change from Scott McNealy.
The problem is that the teacher did, literally, "ask for it" -- if the student had censored himself, he would have been violating the rules of the assignment. Under the circumstances, the teacher should have known better, and taken some responsibility for the situation, and for resolving it sensibly.
If you want people who may have different values from you to share or even just understand your perspective, you need to at least be able to explain that perspective, not just list the rules you live by as though everyone should automatically recognize their absolute validity.
You've made categorical statements like "Common decency is..." and "you don't verbally dance on his grave...", and alluded to reasons ("There's a reason why...") without actually explaining those reasons. My conclusion is that like many people, you're following rules someone else made for you, which you take for granted but don't understand well enough to articulate. That's pretty common, but again, you shouldn't expect others to automatically accept those those rules unless you can at least verbalize their rationale.
(As an aside, you also draw some parallels which don't necessarily hold, e.g. that the taboo against actually desecrating graves should extend equally to discussing the idea in a way that's clearly not intended literally.)
As a reminder that there are people with different value systems from yours, read this comment. Do you think those people are "too detached from the real world to care about their human side", as you accused me of being?
You may not agree with those who are metaphorically dancing on Valenti's grave, but they're not forcing you to join them. You, on the other hand, seem to want them to follow the same rules you follow, and when they don't, or even when someone questions the reasons behind your rules, your response borders on questioning their very humanity.
In my value system, questioning the humanity of those with different values than you is a big no-no, which historically has led to all sorts of bad outcomes. You might want to ponder how your plea for decency turned into a step down such a dark, dark road.
My foray into semantics was an attempt to try to learn from you what you meant by "respect for life", and how that related to the current situation. Sorry if that upset you somehow.
That's interesting, but what does it mean to "respect life", and are we not doing so sufficiently in this case? If we don't respect the person, and believe that the world is better off with him dead, are we somehow not respecting life by saying so?
In any case, most people's respect for life is limited. We all eat plants, most of us eat animals, and most of us support, either actively or passively, the semi-organized killing of people in wars. So life is clearly not entirely sacrosanct, to most of us.
I've demonstrated my respect for Jack Valenti's life in the fact that I didn't personally kill him, but that's really as far as it goes. Beyond that basic courtesy, everything else needs to be earned, if you're a thinking being with some degree of what we think of as free will.