Not to mention the USGS is very unlikely to have data on Canada outside of 10-15 miles of the border. (8-)
JGH
Re:"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 1
All news is spin. You can't present the news without presenting spin -- true objectivity doesn't exist. Everybody has their own agenda to sell. And after reading your links, I find those websites (guerrillanews/mediachannel) are just as biased as Fox and CNN, just in different ways. Same with the BBC.
Do I have a solution? No. I try to watch a variety of sources, even the ones you don't like, synthesize them, and come to your own opinion. That's all anybody can do.
Well, it does so happen that the average US soldier has more firepower at his/her beck and call then most troops of other nations.
But I think you're skating on very thin ground when you state that US troops are more prone to friendly fire incidents than other nations. You just don't hear about other nations' problems because they don't make it into the US press.
However, if the F-22 is stealthy, how do you see it to target it? And if you're flying in a huge 707, how do you prevent the F-22 from zapping you with a bunch of AMRAAMs from BVR? (Or, resurrect the idea of the Phoenix missile, and pop'em from even longer range. )
I don't think the concept of air power is dead yet.
After wading through everything that's been posted, I think that's the conclusion -- it doesn't matter how good your code is beyond a certain point. It just has to be 'pretty good', because that's where most consumers will make the buy decision.
Argue the point all you want, but the people buying stuff don't really give a damn about all this software engineering stuff. They just want something that will write letters and balance the books and help distract them a little from their lives, and they don't care if it's particularly efficient or fast, or uses a cute new optimizing algorithm, just as long as it gets the job done. There are exceptions, but not enough to make a real difference.
That's how Microsoft succeeded -- not by engineering, but by business practices. Whether that's moral or not is left as an exercise to the reader. The level of success can be explained by the billions of dollars that Bill Gates has. To challenge this, you must either a) be better than Microsoft in business, or b) you must educate the public that 'Pretty Good' isn't good enough.
To quote Charles Osgood from 'Pretty Good':
...
There once was a pretty good nation,
Pretty proud of the greatness it had,
But which learned much too late,
If you want to be great,
Pretty good is, in fact, pretty bad.
> People need to stop glibly saying that you should just use Linux - Windows is the best quality software available, and people should pay for it accordingly
You should probably say "Windows is the most popular, most supported OS around..."
I'm from a Chinese background, as opposed to Korean, but the same caveat as to being raised in North America (though I'm one of those damned Canadians. (8-) ) But, it's got the same feel as
mOdQuArK! described.
There's one other factor on top of what was mentioned -- conformity. If you're lower on the 'totem pole' so to speak, you follow the directions and the orders of the person above you. It ties in with 'face' -> it's bad if you show disrepect for somebody, but it's really bad if that somebody is your boss, manager, teacher, supervisor, anybody who has higher status than you. Thus, they're more likely to follow team orders, at least openly. But they feel all the same feeling as everybody else -- it's just hidden more, and usually controlled better.
I think this viewpoint is the problem with the 'Net these days. Because of all the problems with the 'Net, our response has been to turn turtle -- hunker down behind our firewalls, and ignore the anarchy outside. We justify it in a lot of ways -- we don't have time to deal with it, there's nothing I can do about it, etc.
But as long as we let these people play outside, they'll eventually find a way in. You can't beat these people by defence alone. And by ignoring the logs (I'm assuming you don't even do automated scanning?) you might miss the signs that somebody is probing. In which case, your first sign that somebody is attacking you and the world is crashing down around you. (And do you really believe that the FBI is a threat to most hackers?)
> I feel that if you know full well that those > links go to prohibited material, > you should be held accountable.
But, how do I prove that I don't know that those links go to prohibited material? I can't prove I don't know something, except by stating I didn't. That's pretty weak evidence versus a printout of a website linking to a bunch of stuff that I may have thought was legal, but actually wasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the USGS is very unlikely to have data on Canada outside of 10-15 miles of the border. (8-)
JGH
All news is spin. You can't present the news without presenting spin -- true objectivity doesn't exist. Everybody has their own agenda to sell. And after reading your links, I find those websites (guerrillanews/mediachannel) are just as biased as Fox and CNN, just in different ways. Same with the BBC.
Do I have a solution? No. I try to watch a variety of sources, even the ones you don't like, synthesize them, and come to your own opinion. That's all anybody can do.
Well, it does so happen that the average US soldier has more firepower at his/her beck and call then most troops of other nations.
But I think you're skating on very thin ground when you state that US troops are more prone to friendly fire incidents than other nations. You just don't hear about other nations' problems because they don't make it into the US press.
However, if the F-22 is stealthy, how do you see it to target it? And if you're flying in a huge 707, how do you prevent the F-22 from zapping you with a bunch of AMRAAMs from BVR? (Or, resurrect the idea of the Phoenix missile, and pop'em from even longer range. )
I don't think the concept of air power is dead yet.
After wading through everything that's been posted, I think that's the conclusion -- it doesn't matter how good your code is beyond a certain point. It just has to be 'pretty good', because that's where most consumers will make the buy decision.
Argue the point all you want, but the people buying stuff don't really give a damn about all this software engineering stuff. They just want something that will write letters and balance the books and help distract them a little from their lives, and they don't care if it's particularly efficient or fast, or uses a cute new optimizing algorithm, just as long as it gets the job done. There are exceptions, but not enough to make a real difference.
That's how Microsoft succeeded -- not by engineering, but by business practices. Whether that's moral or not is left as an exercise to the reader. The level of success can be explained by the billions of dollars that Bill Gates has. To challenge this, you must either a) be better than Microsoft in business, or b) you must educate the public that 'Pretty Good' isn't good enough.
To quote Charles Osgood from 'Pretty Good':
...
There once was a pretty good nation,
Pretty proud of the greatness it had,
But which learned much too late,
If you want to be great,
Pretty good is, in fact, pretty bad.
It worked well enough to keep'em all alive regardless of the problems they had in their
processes. *shrug*
--
You should probably say "Windows is the most popular, most supported OS around..."
Popularity != Quality
There's one other factor on top of what was mentioned -- conformity. If you're lower on the 'totem pole' so to speak, you follow the directions and the orders of the person above you. It ties in with 'face' -> it's bad if you show disrepect for somebody, but it's really bad if that somebody is your boss, manager, teacher, supervisor, anybody who has higher status than you. Thus, they're more likely to follow team orders, at least openly. But they feel all the same feeling as everybody else -- it's just hidden more, and usually controlled better.
I think this viewpoint is the problem with the 'Net these days. Because of all the problems with the 'Net, our response has been to turn turtle -- hunker down behind our firewalls, and ignore the anarchy outside. We justify it in a lot of ways -- we don't have time to deal with it, there's nothing I can do about it, etc.
But as long as we let these people play outside, they'll eventually find a way in. You can't beat these people by defence alone. And by ignoring the logs (I'm assuming you don't even do automated scanning?) you might miss the signs that somebody is probing. In which case, your first sign that somebody is attacking you and the world is crashing down around you. (And do you really believe that the FBI is a threat to most hackers?)
JGH
> links go to prohibited material,
> you should be held accountable.
But, how do I prove that I don't know that those links go to prohibited material? I can't prove I don't know something, except by stating I didn't. That's pretty weak evidence versus a printout of a website linking to a bunch of stuff that I may have thought was legal, but actually wasn't.