It's also the case that we often don't know what kinds of questions to ask a doctor, and a good one will try not to answer in a way that is misleading (mainly because a precise answer requires a lot of background explanation to go with it). The "...but what about...?" kinds of questions can be particularly problematic for them.
I once met this surgeon who took that stance to the extreme. I had a lot of questions for him but he politely avoided making any statement that had even a slight possibility of being misinterpreted -- or overinterpreted. This was frustrating because asking him to clarify something vague usually resulted in an equally vague answer. But afterwards I found I respected him greatly for it. If he'd answered me in the way I wanted, I definitely would have ended up with the wrong idea.
Many of us have probably encountered a person who had lots of technical questions, but was asking them without the background necessary to make complete sense. They take bizarre turns of logic and it takes lengthy instruction -- not just a direct answer -- to make them understand properly. Or, just as the parent poster says, "...think about... how many [symptoms] you didn't mention because you assumed they were unrelated..." I can't count how many times I've had to deal with that.
(Of course, there are plenty of doctors and techs who just blow off the questioner, too.)
You do realize that just living near the animalicides is enough to get it into your stalk right?
You and your ricin-using motherfucking yuppy friends are why I hate society. You get some idiotic believe that something that totally rapes and murders mammals magically will have no effect on us castor plants and if you can't immediately see it you must not be exposed to it.
The minute herbs realize that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING we do is interelated the better.
IIRC, some of the stealth bombers will fall apart in less than a second if the computers go.
Um... fly-by-wire has been used in planes for a long time. And you never, never, never put critical systems on a plane without triple redundant backup. Flight control is one of the most common examples.
Not that triple failures are unheard of... but that's a slightly different story.
Keep in mind that the movie as screened may not be the movie as filmed. After filming, the raw footage is passed onto the editors, who assemble it -- making frame-by-frame judgments as to what works and what doesn't -- into a final film. Often, the director is deliberately not involved in this process (at least initially) because they need to take a step back from the material.
You may very well see those lines restored in a "director's cut" DVD.
The second incident happened when I went shopping after spending the day in interviews. I was still in college and this was the first time I had really been out in public while wearing a suit. The level of respect from the sales staffed was an amazing difference from what I was used to.
I had exactly the same experience, but the contrast was even a bit more stark: wearing my interview suit, I went shopping at an electronics store and found an item I liked. The salesman was fawning over me to sell it. I decided to come back later and pick it up.
After returning in my normal clothes, the same guy had no idea who I was and would hardly give me the time of day!
It's also important to notice that you need both precision and recall, because the two degenerate cases are useless: you can get 100% recall if you just return every page in the world (and then your precision is zero). Or you can have 100% precision if you just return a single relevant page (then your recall is, roughly, zero).
Apart from that, he makes it seem as though they're "inferior" for not having read "complex texts". Each person chooses a way to live; people do as they please.
My, my. What a ready defense.
Although his tone is condescending, was he not speaking about the quality of writing and discourse prevalent in blogs? Is this not clearly associated with one's facility with complex texts?
If one wishes to write for the public, one should expect to be appraised on one's literary ability, or lack of it.
I have met normal, middle-class high school seniors who were unable to calculate the correct change for $14 out of $20 (they eventually figured it out after nearly 5 minutes of intense collaboration). Would you defend as a "life choice" this basic ineptitude, as you do the inability to read and write a complex argument?
Though it is rather fitting, I must say, that Mr. Gorman's thoughts on Google are as unintelligent and ill-informed as he accuses "the Blog People" of being.
If the director didn't intend for me to see something, it wouldn't have ended up on film.
Completely incorrect. What justification do you think you have for this?
A director will typically shoot 3 to 10 times more footage than actually ends up in the final product. And I'm not talking about repeated takes of the same scene, but of actual unique footage that is picked over, arranged, and assembled -- a.k.a. edited -- to become a movie.
Oh! What a great observation. That finally explains something that's puzzled me for over a decade.
I used to run a small student computer lab. This was back in the 386-era, so there was no network of any kind, just a dozen standalone boxes (and yeah, these also were always Dells). Kids would come in, sit down at any free machine, write their paper in WordPerfect, and save it -- to the local hard drive.
Then they'd come in later, sit down at some other free machine, and say "Where's my paper?"
My tax preparer also does a great job on my yearly return. But he provided a much more important service one year: when the IRS made a mistake, there was nearly nothing I could do about it on my own. The government came close to freezing my assets, and they stalled for 8 months before admitting the error.
(It's said that stalling is an unstated IRS policy; the hope is that you'll give up and let them have the money.)
Find a local tax accountant and develop a relationship. That one incident would've cost me two lifetimes' worth of professional tax preparation.
HK bootlegs don't fund human trafficking. That doesn't make any sense: why would anyone engage in human slavery if it weren't profitable? And if it's profitable, why does it need to be funded?
Getting offtopic, but I'll clarify my wording. I should've said "supports" rather than "funds." The HK gangs run large sweatshops producing bootleg merchandise. This is the profitable part, often because your workers are illegal immigrants that you yourself smuggled out of China, who therefore don't have to be paid.
They used to (and probably still do) sell fansubs for instance [...] fansubbers explicitly state that their work is not for sale.
Indeed. Pandora's Cube is a frequent exhibitor at anime conventions and is well-known for selling bootleg merchandise of all kinds -- CDs, DVDs, etc. These are not home-grown knockoffs, but professional reproductions from Hong Kong and Taiwan. A casual buyer would not know that they're getting inferior goods.
And a casual buyer certainly would not know that most HK bootlegs fund organized crime, including human trafficking.
So as much as I hate, hate, hate the DMCA and all of its reprehensible abuses, there's no way I'm feeling sorry for Pandora's either.
Indeed. And HP itself knows it -- as reported on Slashdot before, they allegedly suppressed Alpha benchmarks to keep from cannibalizing (and embarrassing) their Itanic server business.
(Note to readers, parent post is responding to an AC, not my original post.)
Why not include hard drives crashing while he's at it[?]
Because a hard drive crash is an unrecoverable loss of data. Why does a power failure have to be? You might as well say that drive manufacturers should not improve reliability because you can just get RAID. If this were true, MTBF would still be around 10,000 hours rather than the half-million it's at now -- even as drives have become bigger, faster, hotter, and more complex.
Most consumer systems, from the hardware up through the application, assume that they need make no effort to preserve anything through a power failure. Tog is not asking for 100% persistence as much as he's asking for something larger than zero. As another poster mentioned, emacs (and vi - ha!) regularly saves recovery state to a file. This is a massive gain for minor work, and no application has any excuse to behave otherwise.
Zero persistence is rightly considered a design flaw, born of an ingrained expectation on the part of users and developers.
Incidentally, I work on an embedded product whose innards resemble a typical workstation but whose design requirements include complete persistence across any power failure or crash. It is not terribly difficult to do, once you get it used to having it as a design goal.
I would defend them, and you know why? They created my job...
Fallacy of appealing to consequences. Sorry, you can't defend something odious by pointing to one benefit among many unspoken ills. Would you then defend crime, saying that it creates many law-enforcement jobs? I have heard people do so.
...they are easy to overcome...
You also cannot defend something by appealing to scarcity of consequences. Mad cow disease afflicts extremely few people, which makes it a minor problem. But it does not cease to be a problem.
...and they simply do not [a]ffect the majority of bright individuals that use the net.
A good ISP is going to do egress filtering to prevent the first four items from having any impact (save adware, which may open popups). A good OS is not going to let the first four even get installed.
Prejudicial language. Anonymous authority. You are exonerating the perpetrator by blaming the victim. If only users had the right ISP and the right OS and enough brains, malware wouldn't be a problem! If only immigrants could speak English and get educated, they wouldn't be exploited! Clearly, such issues are not worth fixing.
Fake ATM theft is a scam, pure and simple. What you're saying is not to punish the people responsible for doing the actual crime, you're saying the creator of the ATM (or the card reader) is responsible. And that's ridiculous. The person that actually commits the crime has the intent, not the person that creates the tool.
Strawman. I made no statements about punishment. I made no statements about perpetrators' intentions. I did not even make any statements about tools. I did, however, make statements about the intentions of tool-creators. It is not in doubt that the tool-creator commits no crime. It is also irrelevant, because the issue here is whether he can be considered ethically -- not legally -- innocent for (1) creating a tool that's expressly designed, i.e., intended, to commit a crime, (2) for the express purpose of selling the tool to (3) people who expressly intend to commit that crime.
You have no guaranteed right to privacy. It's a derived right, and a weak one at that. After all, oh I'm safe from something like SPAM [...] but I'm not safe from the government databases or FBI, CIA, NSA, wiretaps and survelliance.
Red herring. Are you really claiming that because we are not "safe" (your word) from the FBI, we should not be safe from spammers and spyware? These things are unrelated. You may as well say that there's no sense locking my car to keep the neighborhood kids out, because someday a professional thief might show up.
Besides which, bringing up privacy is putting words in my mouth, as I didn't say what right I was referring to. I do not consider spam an invasion of privacy. It is deceptive trespass, no different from a solicitor dressed as a postal carrier.
"Oh please, please! Listen to me, why? Because I alone know the intentions of those using and creating software." You realize you sound like this, right?
Of course. Because in some cases, you would have to be an idiot to say that you didn't know what something was intended for.
We all hate the circumvention clause of the DMCA. Criminalizing tools is absurd and ethically repulsive. Except, of course, that's just a platitude, which suffers from the imprecise and sloppy writing that most Slashdot rhetoric exhibits. Distinguo.
The DMCA does make my blood boil. But how many here would really defend the creators of these tools:
- Spyware
- Uninstallable adware
- Worms that set up open proxies on your machine
- Viruses that harvest your credit card info
- Fake ATMs
Previous comments have already pointed out the features of this jerk's software that are specifically designed to abrogate my right to not receive unwanted messages. And that is evidence enough of the author's intent.
Punishing the hard-working and law-abiding because some shiftless layabout can't be bothered to better themselves with the plethora of private and government assistance is not the answer.
Hint: presuppositions and assertions are not facts.
Would you like to elaborate on how, exactly, every kid born into every poor family should go about fixing their situation? Because they'd certainly love to know.
Just yesterday I spoke to a high-school junior (11th grade), who came to me for help applying to college. He lives in the inner city, his family is law-abiding and hard-working, and you know what? They have no clue about any of these resources you talk about, since they're too busy working to pay for food and rent.
Everyone in America is given a free education, access to public libraries, opportunities at need-based scholarships, loans, and grants, among other things.
Oh yes, and an excellent education at that. This kid wants to go to college but he doesn't even know what college is or what it's for -- although he says it might be a place where he can study badminton. He's a reasonably bright kid but after 11 years of ostensible "schooling" he has never heard of the SAT, never read a book that didn't have pictures in it, cannot use a computer, and has no trade skills or life skills. You propose that he should go to the library?
He needs remedial education but he can't pay for it. Until he gets it, he will be mentally bound by his environment. Would you like to volunteer time as a tutor? Painting the poor as "shiftless layabouts" is about as intelligent as painting all geeks as graceless losers.
What kids do need is to go to college AWAY from home... [snip] Sending someone off to boarding/military/vocational schools when they are in their mid-teens will do nothing but help to alienate the child in a time when they might be alienated enough.
You are absolutely correct.
I went to a private high school that had both boarding students and day students. In the school's 100-year history, the boarders have never performed as well as the day students.
Yet, on the flip side, commuter-dominated colleges usually turn out less successful graduates than comparable residential colleges.
I had the same experience and reaction when I saw my unused Comcast accounts get spam.
Then I realized that all my accounts use common words as usernames.
These days, it's probably safe to assume that any-dictionary-word@any-large-ISP is going to receive spam...
...where "any dictionary word" does not mean only the English dictionary, but a lexicon containing the dictionaries of several languages, plus names, proper nouns, slang, and common misspellings.
Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window? Do I just need more practice?
Par archives is just a scam popularized by cluless usnet abusers. Think about it, if those files really could reconstruct a corrupt rar archive, why not post only the smaller par files... Get youself double copies and you'll be far better off
Ignore this post. It's either a troll or an idiot.
PAR files substitute for missing pieces. They don't regenerate the whole file by themselves. Go look up how RAID 5 parity works. They're not called PAR files for nothing.
Just because you don't understand how something works has no bearing on the fact that it does work. Except in certain performance-sensitive cases, doubling up is the least intelligent way of adding redundancy.
"their" is gaining popularity... [i]t may not be correct now, but if it gains more acceptance, it could be considered correct at some time in the future.
I probably shouldn't bother. It's been a week... the AC probably won't ever see this. Ah, well.
And for the record; my university taught theory and how to think critically and analytically, not "job training"
Critical thinking within the field of engineering is only a subset of critical thinking in general. For example, one might learn to avoid making baseless assumptions, such as the two below:
Maybe you should attend one of those large universities before you badmouth them?
That's a good idea. Oh, wait, I did!
I speak not only from personal experience, but that of my students. Besides being an engineer I'm also a college counselor with close to a decade of experience.
This has a side benefit that if the outsourcing problem starts affecting even developers with my rarefied expertise, I can switch careers on a pindrop. What do you know, there's that broadly-educated thing going on again. Feels good to be secure.
But a liberal-arts education does not do a particularly good job of preparing you for anything that doesn't require only a liberal arts education; reading Kant and breaking down his logic doesn't prepare you to understand OFDM modulation techniques or Lyapunov stability criteria.
I never said to major in the liberal arts. I said that liberal-arts colleges turn out broadly-educated scientists and engineers who, statistically, are more successful than those who are narrowly educated.
You do know that you can major in science at a liberal-arts college, right? About 50% of the employed scientists in the US come from these institutions. Oh, and they also claim a disproportionate share of awards and grants.
Incidentally, Fourier transforms aren't conceptually difficult to understand. I have to wonder if the reason you can read your friends' papers but "[n]ot a fucking one of them" can understand your explanations is because the liberal arts emphasize communications skills. And as they say, good writing is mostly just clear thinking...
I agree with your post completely, but let me make an emphasis:
If you are going to a University for the sole purpose of getting a well paying job, you're probably going to be surprised. Universities don't train you to be good workers, they are supposed to teach you to think and be relatively well balanced intellectually.
In other words, education is not simply job training. But most undergrads are getting mostly the latter. People need to realize that a university's primary responsibility is to its graduate students. They are not optimized for undergraduates. The best undergraduate experience comes from colleges, which generally do not have graduate schools.
This is borne out by the observation that graduates of small, high-quality liberal arts colleges outperform graduates of universities in almost all fields including science and engineering. To rub salt in the wound, many of these schools aren't very selective, taking B or C students and turning out top-notch competitors for spots in grad schools and the job market. (For more information, start here but be sure to do more research.)
This is not hard to understand when you realize that a genuine, broad education isn't meant to teach you stuff, but to make you smarter -- in exactly the way that learning assembly language or lambda calculus makes you a better coder even if you don't use it or even like it. For me, humanities courses were what really forced me to think faster, harder, and deeper than I imagined possible. NOTE WELL: this never happened with computer science because I was already good at that. The result is that today I'm a well-paid kernel developer and my friends who went to a techy college are unemployed Javaheads.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also the case that we often don't know what kinds of questions to ask a doctor, and a good one will try not to answer in a way that is misleading (mainly because a precise answer requires a lot of background explanation to go with it). The "...but what about...?" kinds of questions can be particularly problematic for them.
... how many [symptoms] you didn't mention because you assumed they were unrelated..." I can't count how many times I've had to deal with that.
I once met this surgeon who took that stance to the extreme. I had a lot of questions for him but he politely avoided making any statement that had even a slight possibility of being misinterpreted -- or overinterpreted. This was frustrating because asking him to clarify something vague usually resulted in an equally vague answer. But afterwards I found I respected him greatly for it. If he'd answered me in the way I wanted, I definitely would have ended up with the wrong idea.
Many of us have probably encountered a person who had lots of technical questions, but was asking them without the background necessary to make complete sense. They take bizarre turns of logic and it takes lengthy instruction -- not just a direct answer -- to make them understand properly. Or, just as the parent poster says, "...think about
(Of course, there are plenty of doctors and techs who just blow off the questioner, too.)
--
Dum de dum.
You do realize that just living near the animalicides is enough to get it into your stalk right?
You and your ricin-using motherfucking yuppy friends are why I hate society. You get some idiotic believe that something that totally rapes and murders mammals magically will have no effect on us castor plants and if you can't immediately see it you must not be exposed to it.
The minute herbs realize that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING we do is interelated the better.
Hypocrites...
Frizzy-Stamen Jr.
IIRC, some of the stealth bombers will fall apart in less than a second if the computers go.
Um... fly-by-wire has been used in planes for a long time. And you never, never, never put critical systems on a plane without triple redundant backup. Flight control is one of the most common examples.
Not that triple failures are unheard of... but that's a slightly different story.
--
Dum de dum.
Keep in mind that the movie as screened may not be the movie as filmed. After filming, the raw footage is passed onto the editors, who assemble it -- making frame-by-frame judgments as to what works and what doesn't -- into a final film. Often, the director is deliberately not involved in this process (at least initially) because they need to take a step back from the material.
You may very well see those lines restored in a "director's cut" DVD.
--
Dum de dum.
The second incident happened when I went shopping after spending the day in interviews. I was still in college and this was the first time I had really been out in public while wearing a suit. The level of respect from the sales staffed was an amazing difference from what I was used to.
I had exactly the same experience, but the contrast was even a bit more stark: wearing my interview suit, I went shopping at an electronics store and found an item I liked. The salesman was fawning over me to sell it. I decided to come back later and pick it up.
After returning in my normal clothes, the same guy had no idea who I was and would hardly give me the time of day!
--
Dum de dum.
It's also important to notice that you need both precision and recall, because the two degenerate cases are useless: you can get 100% recall if you just return every page in the world (and then your precision is zero). Or you can have 100% precision if you just return a single relevant page (then your recall is, roughly, zero).
--
Dum de dum.
Apart from that, he makes it seem as though they're "inferior" for not having read "complex texts". Each person chooses a way to live; people do as they please.
My, my. What a ready defense.
Although his tone is condescending, was he not speaking about the quality of writing and discourse prevalent in blogs? Is this not clearly associated with one's facility with complex texts?
If one wishes to write for the public, one should expect to be appraised on one's literary ability, or lack of it.
I have met normal, middle-class high school seniors who were unable to calculate the correct change for $14 out of $20 (they eventually figured it out after nearly 5 minutes of intense collaboration). Would you defend as a "life choice" this basic ineptitude, as you do the inability to read and write a complex argument?
Though it is rather fitting, I must say, that Mr. Gorman's thoughts on Google are as unintelligent and ill-informed as he accuses "the Blog People" of being.
---
Dum de dum.
If the director didn't intend for me to see something, it wouldn't have ended up on film.
Completely incorrect. What justification do you think you have for this?
A director will typically shoot 3 to 10 times more footage than actually ends up in the final product. And I'm not talking about repeated takes of the same scene, but of actual unique footage that is picked over, arranged, and assembled -- a.k.a. edited -- to become a movie.
--
Dum de dum.
Oh! What a great observation. That finally explains something that's puzzled me for over a decade.
I used to run a small student computer lab. This was back in the 386-era, so there was no network of any kind, just a dozen standalone boxes (and yeah, these also were always Dells). Kids would come in, sit down at any free machine, write their paper in WordPerfect, and save it -- to the local hard drive.
Then they'd come in later, sit down at some other free machine, and say "Where's my paper?"
--
Dum de dum.
My tax preparer also does a great job on my yearly return. But he provided a much more important service one year: when the IRS made a mistake, there was nearly nothing I could do about it on my own. The government came close to freezing my assets, and they stalled for 8 months before admitting the error.
(It's said that stalling is an unstated IRS policy; the hope is that you'll give up and let them have the money.)
Find a local tax accountant and develop a relationship. That one incident would've cost me two lifetimes' worth of professional tax preparation.
--
Dum de dum.
HK bootlegs don't fund human trafficking. That doesn't make any sense: why would anyone engage in human slavery if it weren't profitable? And if it's profitable, why does it need to be funded?
Getting offtopic, but I'll clarify my wording. I should've said "supports" rather than "funds." The HK gangs run large sweatshops producing bootleg merchandise. This is the profitable part, often because your workers are illegal immigrants that you yourself smuggled out of China, who therefore don't have to be paid.
--
Dum de dum.
They used to (and probably still do) sell fansubs for instance [...] fansubbers explicitly state that their work is not for sale.
Indeed. Pandora's Cube is a frequent exhibitor at anime conventions and is well-known for selling bootleg merchandise of all kinds -- CDs, DVDs, etc. These are not home-grown knockoffs, but professional reproductions from Hong Kong and Taiwan. A casual buyer would not know that they're getting inferior goods.
And a casual buyer certainly would not know that most HK bootlegs fund organized crime, including human trafficking.
So as much as I hate, hate, hate the DMCA and all of its reprehensible abuses, there's no way I'm feeling sorry for Pandora's either.
--
Dum de dum.
Indeed. And HP itself knows it -- as reported on Slashdot before, they allegedly suppressed Alpha benchmarks to keep from cannibalizing (and embarrassing) their Itanic server business.
(Note to readers, parent post is responding to an AC, not my original post.)
--
Dum de dum.
Alpha is well-documented. When I worked at DEC, we had these all over the place.
At the moment, the problem is not emulation on Itanium... the problem is that Alpha is faster than Itanium. Heh.
--
Dum de dum.
Why not include hard drives crashing while he's at it[?]
Because a hard drive crash is an unrecoverable loss of data. Why does a power failure have to be? You might as well say that drive manufacturers should not improve reliability because you can just get RAID. If this were true, MTBF would still be around 10,000 hours rather than the half-million it's at now -- even as drives have become bigger, faster, hotter, and more complex.
Most consumer systems, from the hardware up through the application, assume that they need make no effort to preserve anything through a power failure. Tog is not asking for 100% persistence as much as he's asking for something larger than zero. As another poster mentioned, emacs (and vi - ha!) regularly saves recovery state to a file. This is a massive gain for minor work, and no application has any excuse to behave otherwise.
Zero persistence is rightly considered a design flaw, born of an ingrained expectation on the part of users and developers.
Incidentally, I work on an embedded product whose innards resemble a typical workstation but whose design requirements include complete persistence across any power failure or crash. It is not terribly difficult to do, once you get it used to having it as a design goal.
--
Dum de dum.
I would defend them, and you know why? They created my job...
...they are easy to overcome...
...and they simply do not [a]ffect the majority of bright individuals that use the net.
Fallacy of appealing to consequences. Sorry, you can't defend something odious by pointing to one benefit among many unspoken ills. Would you then defend crime, saying that it creates many law-enforcement jobs? I have heard people do so.
You also cannot defend something by appealing to scarcity of consequences. Mad cow disease afflicts extremely few people, which makes it a minor problem. But it does not cease to be a problem.
A good ISP is going to do egress filtering to prevent the first four items from having any impact (save adware, which may open popups). A good OS is not going to let the first four even get installed.
Prejudicial language. Anonymous authority. You are exonerating the perpetrator by blaming the victim. If only users had the right ISP and the right OS and enough brains, malware wouldn't be a problem! If only immigrants could speak English and get educated, they wouldn't be exploited! Clearly, such issues are not worth fixing.
Fake ATM theft is a scam, pure and simple. What you're saying is not to punish the people responsible for doing the actual crime, you're saying the creator of the ATM (or the card reader) is responsible. And that's ridiculous. The person that actually commits the crime has the intent, not the person that creates the tool.
Strawman. I made no statements about punishment. I made no statements about perpetrators' intentions. I did not even make any statements about tools. I did, however, make statements about the intentions of tool-creators. It is not in doubt that the tool-creator commits no crime. It is also irrelevant, because the issue here is whether he can be considered ethically -- not legally -- innocent for (1) creating a tool that's expressly designed, i.e., intended, to commit a crime, (2) for the express purpose of selling the tool to (3) people who expressly intend to commit that crime.
You have no guaranteed right to privacy. It's a derived right, and a weak one at that. After all, oh I'm safe from something like SPAM [...] but I'm not safe from the government databases or FBI, CIA, NSA, wiretaps and survelliance.
Red herring. Are you really claiming that because we are not "safe" (your word) from the FBI, we should not be safe from spammers and spyware? These things are unrelated. You may as well say that there's no sense locking my car to keep the neighborhood kids out, because someday a professional thief might show up.
Besides which, bringing up privacy is putting words in my mouth, as I didn't say what right I was referring to. I do not consider spam an invasion of privacy. It is deceptive trespass, no different from a solicitor dressed as a postal carrier.
--
Dum de dum.
"Oh please, please! Listen to me, why? Because I alone know the intentions of those using and creating software." You realize you sound like this, right?
Of course. Because in some cases, you would have to be an idiot to say that you didn't know what something was intended for.
We all hate the circumvention clause of the DMCA. Criminalizing tools is absurd and ethically repulsive. Except, of course, that's just a platitude, which suffers from the imprecise and sloppy writing that most Slashdot rhetoric exhibits. Distinguo.
The DMCA does make my blood boil. But how many here would really defend the creators of these tools:
- Spyware
- Uninstallable adware
- Worms that set up open proxies on your machine
- Viruses that harvest your credit card info
- Fake ATMs
Previous comments have already pointed out the features of this jerk's software that are specifically designed to abrogate my right to not receive unwanted messages. And that is evidence enough of the author's intent.
--
Dum de dum.
Punishing the hard-working and law-abiding because some shiftless layabout can't be bothered to better themselves with the plethora of private and government assistance is not the answer.
Hint: presuppositions and assertions are not facts.
Would you like to elaborate on how, exactly, every kid born into every poor family should go about fixing their situation? Because they'd certainly love to know.
Just yesterday I spoke to a high-school junior (11th grade), who came to me for help applying to college. He lives in the inner city, his family is law-abiding and hard-working, and you know what? They have no clue about any of these resources you talk about, since they're too busy working to pay for food and rent.
Everyone in America is given a free education, access to public libraries, opportunities at need-based scholarships, loans, and grants, among other things.
Oh yes, and an excellent education at that. This kid wants to go to college but he doesn't even know what college is or what it's for -- although he says it might be a place where he can study badminton. He's a reasonably bright kid but after 11 years of ostensible "schooling" he has never heard of the SAT, never read a book that didn't have pictures in it, cannot use a computer, and has no trade skills or life skills. You propose that he should go to the library?
He needs remedial education but he can't pay for it. Until he gets it, he will be mentally bound by his environment. Would you like to volunteer time as a tutor? Painting the poor as "shiftless layabouts" is about as intelligent as painting all geeks as graceless losers.
---
Dum de dum.
What kids do need is to go to college AWAY from home... [snip] Sending someone off to boarding/military/vocational schools when they are in their mid-teens will do nothing but help to alienate the child in a time when they might be alienated enough.
You are absolutely correct.
I went to a private high school that had both boarding students and day students. In the school's 100-year history, the boarders have never performed as well as the day students.
Yet, on the flip side, commuter-dominated colleges usually turn out less successful graduates than comparable residential colleges.
---
Dum de dum.
I had the same experience and reaction when I saw my unused Comcast accounts get spam.
...where "any dictionary word" does not mean only the English dictionary, but a lexicon containing the dictionaries of several languages, plus names, proper nouns, slang, and common misspellings.
Then I realized that all my accounts use common words as usernames.
These days, it's probably safe to assume that any-dictionary-word@any-large-ISP is going to receive spam...
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Dum de dum.
Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window? Do I just need more practice?
/builds/nightly_ EDTr iday_Jun_04_2004_01_30_02_EDT_ 2004_01_30_03_EDT0 1_EST- Monday_Jun_07_2004_01_30_02_EDT0 1_2004_03_30_01_EST0 _01_ESTi n-Monday_Sep_01_2003_03_30_01_EDTp _15_2003_03_30_01_EDT0 3_30_01_EDTD Ta turday_Nov_15_2003_08_22_05_EST0 1_2004_03_30_01_EST0 _01_ESTi n-Thursday_Apr_01_2004_04_00_01_ESTy _Apr_15_2004_04_00_00_EDT0 04_11_46_00_EDT0 1_ESTi n-Thursday_Jun_03_2004_09_28_29_EDTy _Jun_10_2004_01_30_01_EDT0 04_01_30_00_EDT0 1_EDTn -Tuesday_Jun_08_2004_01_30_03_EDTa y_25_2004_01_30_01_EDT4 _01_30_04_EDT0 _EDT
% ls
main-Friday_Aug_01_2003_03_30_01
main-Friday_Aug_15_2003_03_30_01_EDT
main-F
main-Friday_May_28
main-Monday_Dec_01_2003_03_30_
main-Monday_Dec_15_2003_21_57_01_EST
main
main-Monday_Mar_
main-Monday_Mar_15_2004_02_3
main-Monday_May_31_2004_01_30_02_EDT
ma
main-Monday_Se
main-Saturday_May_15_2004_
main-Saturday_May_29_2004_01_30_01_E
main-Saturday_Nov_01_2003_03_30_01_EST
main-S
main-Sunday_Feb_
main-Sunday_Feb_15_2004_04_3
main-Sunday_May_30_2004_01_30_00_EDT
ma
main-Thursda
main-Thursday_Apr_15_2
main-Thursday_Jan_01_2004_03_30_
main-Thursday_Jan_15_2004_03_30_00_EST
ma
main-Thursda
main-Thursday_May_27_2
main-Thursday_Oct_02_2003_03_30_
main-Tuesday_Jun_01_2004_01_30_03_EDT
mai
main-Tuesday_M
main-Wednesday_Jun_02_200
main-Wednesday_May_26_2004_01_30_0
main-Wednesday_Oct_15_2003_02_04_01_EDT
% cp main- beep T beep hursday_ beep J beep an_ beep ^C^C^C
% nautilus &
%
Par archives is just a scam popularized by cluless usnet abusers. Think about it, if those files really could reconstruct a corrupt rar archive, why not post only the smaller par files ... Get youself double copies and you'll be far better off
Ignore this post. It's either a troll or an idiot.
PAR files substitute for missing pieces. They don't regenerate the whole file by themselves. Go look up how RAID 5 parity works. They're not called PAR files for nothing.
Just because you don't understand how something works has no bearing on the fact that it does work. Except in certain performance-sensitive cases, doubling up is the least intelligent way of adding redundancy.
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Dum de dum.
"their" is gaining popularity... [i]t may not be correct now, but if it gains more acceptance, it could be considered correct at some time in the future.
Not to mention that it was also considered correct at some time in the past.
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Dum de dum.
I probably shouldn't bother. It's been a week... the AC probably won't ever see this. Ah, well.
And for the record; my university taught theory and how to think critically and analytically, not "job training"
Critical thinking within the field of engineering is only a subset of critical thinking in general. For example, one might learn to avoid making baseless assumptions, such as the two below:
Maybe you should attend one of those large universities before you badmouth them?
That's a good idea. Oh, wait, I did!
I speak not only from personal experience, but that of my students. Besides being an engineer I'm also a college counselor with close to a decade of experience.
This has a side benefit that if the outsourcing problem starts affecting even developers with my rarefied expertise, I can switch careers on a pindrop. What do you know, there's that broadly-educated thing going on again. Feels good to be secure.
But a liberal-arts education does not do a particularly good job of preparing you for anything that doesn't require only a liberal arts education; reading Kant and breaking down his logic doesn't prepare you to understand OFDM modulation techniques or Lyapunov stability criteria.
I never said to major in the liberal arts. I said that liberal-arts colleges turn out broadly-educated scientists and engineers who, statistically, are more successful than those who are narrowly educated.
You do know that you can major in science at a liberal-arts college, right? About 50% of the employed scientists in the US come from these institutions. Oh, and they also claim a disproportionate share of awards and grants.
Incidentally, Fourier transforms aren't conceptually difficult to understand. I have to wonder if the reason you can read your friends' papers but "[n]ot a fucking one of them" can understand your explanations is because the liberal arts emphasize communications skills. And as they say, good writing is mostly just clear thinking...
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Dum de dum.
I agree with your post completely, but let me make an emphasis:
If you are going to a University for the sole purpose of getting a well paying job, you're probably going to be surprised. Universities don't train you to be good workers, they are supposed to teach you to think and be relatively well balanced intellectually.
In other words, education is not simply job training. But most undergrads are getting mostly the latter. People need to realize that a university's primary responsibility is to its graduate students. They are not optimized for undergraduates. The best undergraduate experience comes from colleges, which generally do not have graduate schools.
This is borne out by the observation that graduates of small, high-quality liberal arts colleges outperform graduates of universities in almost all fields including science and engineering. To rub salt in the wound, many of these schools aren't very selective, taking B or C students and turning out top-notch competitors for spots in grad schools and the job market. (For more information, start here but be sure to do more research.)
This is not hard to understand when you realize that a genuine, broad education isn't meant to teach you stuff, but to make you smarter -- in exactly the way that learning assembly language or lambda calculus makes you a better coder even if you don't use it or even like it. For me, humanities courses were what really forced me to think faster, harder, and deeper than I imagined possible. NOTE WELL: this never happened with computer science because I was already good at that. The result is that today I'm a well-paid kernel developer and my friends who went to a techy college are unemployed Javaheads.
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Dum de dum.