I'm going to auto-Godwin myself here, by referring to the Nuremberg principles.
It's a good thing they weren't "only following orders" then.
If you can be convicted of doing something wrong even though a duly constituted authority directly *ordered* you to do it, then how can you be free of liability/culpability if you do something wrong but you weren't explicitly instructed not to (by case or black-letter law)?
I think the Supremes got it wrong, here. I blame Justice Dianna Ross.
On the contrary, I'd have thought that any illegitimate act pursuant to a desire to strip children and 'inspect' those parts of their body we consider private could usefully be considered paedophilic.
I don't think it matters so much whether the libidinal payoff was that they got to see the girl's pants, or whether it was that they got to exercise their massive throbbing administrative power to force a minor to strip. I think it's arguably paedophilia in either case.
I'd pay to read the transcripts of the court case, anyway.
You may have inadvertantly undermined your own point. billg and his cohort made it in computing, but the google guys made it in the internets.
When did that gate open? I'd say 1994 isn't a bad arbitrary starting point. That'd make the google guys 21 at the time, which is consistent with the parent post's contention.
I'm glad you brought up William Gibson. Gibson's cyberpunk (neat coinage!) works were interesting, but the man himself couldn't even use a computer while he was writing them.
Contrast this with Stephenson, who clearly knows his stuff well enough to construct a cogent argument in a coherent world.
Reading Stephenson, I get the feeling he knows a lot more than he's telling me. Reading Gibson, I get the feeling he knows a lot less. (Ok, I stole that line, but it's still funny.)
Re:Sadly Stephenson is suffering from Dickens Synd
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
Once an author becomes really successful, as Stephenson rightfully is, editors refuse to push hard enough for cuts. Instead, like the later works of Dickens, we get overbearing and flabby books.
I have three words for you: "M. Night Shayamalan" (Ok, two words and one initial.)
The Sixth Sense was a masterpiece. It's just a shame it was his first movie, not the culmination of a succession of slowly improving movies, because we're robbed of the product of his development. Everything MNS has done since 6th Sense needed to be dragged out and shot in a ditch in pre-production.
Having said that, I don't get the same sense from Stephenson's books. They continue to give. I'm prepared to let him run with it. I feared he'd jumped the shark with Cryptonomicon, but System of the World had plenty of thought-fodder, and Anathem has so much more.
Re:one of his less self-indulgent works, actually
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
Perhaps if you'd read it in the early 90s, when it was written, when stuff like Second Life wasn't even a dream of a possibility, you'd get how remarkable a book it is.
All speculative fiction will age, sometimes it'll age badly (like Jules Verne) sometimes it'll age because reality will overtake its fiction.
These are novels of ideas. Characters, plot, are incidental. Like all good SF. If you read the hard SF guys like RL Forward, you'll see he actually writes 2d pneumatic blonde female characters in order to poke fun at the SF genre.
If Stephenson happens to write something literary, that's a bonus as long as his ideas are coherent, provocative, challenging. In Anathem, they are.
and don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker
"While the unfamiliar language is a projection of how historical linguistics might apply in the future, it also provides clues to the nature of life in Riddley's world (e.g., being "et" by wild dogs is a common fate), and creates suspense as the reader gradually becomes accustomed to the idiosyncratic narration, and comes to understand some of the references of which Riddley is unaware."
Re:ending - and - made up words
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
the made up words to me made the whole work as if I was an archeology student discovering some ancient book and having to learn a whole now language and new ideas...
Excellent analogy. Remember: "Language is Fossilized Poetry" - Emerson.
Re:*Possible Spoiler* An Actual Ending!!
on
Anathem
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· Score: 1
Not just the words, but the concepts. He introduces concepts and methodologies with which we're familiar (Occam's Razor, for example) with new and unusual names, so you have to re-think how they work in his context, and thereby are perhaps induced to re-thinking them in your own.
Vonnegut complained that 'literary' authors had a very low density of ideas - sometimes only one idea for a whole novel! Vonnegut's work (particularly the stuff with Kilgore Trout) had ideas crackling on every page, until something happened to him.
He wrote Slapstick (which's my favourite, and sort of autobiographical, apparently) and the critics hated it. He was reamed out, and he never seemed to recover. His novels from that point, although still very good, had fewer ideas.
I hope that never happens to Stephenson.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Mod this guy up, and the sibling post. It's a fascinating book.
If you've read half the book and haven't got that the monastic types are using the remnants of a dead language, dating from the time of a long-past world empire which spawned a religion, I doubt you'll understand how it goes from there, Fra (I mean, Bro.)
Science Fiction is a class of speculative fiction, it's often more about the times in which its written than the times and places in which it is set. Its virtue is that it allows us to see our own time and place in a new light.
I think this book is talking about what might have happened if religion and rationality had split in a different way in our own world.
Statistics: useful for what they hide as much as what they show.
300 caught / 43,000 "security officers" = 0.7%
But how many of the "security officers" have access to baggage? All, half, 600? We're not told.
How many airports in the US? 1000? Are there 430 baggage searchers per airport? Are there really 43K people in a position to steal from baggage? Really?
> Find me another Australian supplier willing to > provide Ubuntu or Debian or even Fedora > pre-installed, and forgo the Windows tax, on a > value-for-money low-power machine, and I would > gladly recommend that over Pioneer.
(1) Pioneer is not an 'Australian Supplier' of anything more than the opening of boxes - at *most* they assemble the laptops.
(2) Pioneer put a Ubuntu CD in a drive - the Ubuntu people do the rest.
(3) My direct and personal experience would suggest that there's very little 'value for money' in the Pioneer proposition.
(4) No manufacturer (or box opener, in this case) benefits from the MS tax.
My problem is with the poor quality of Pioneer's rebadged machines, and their terrible service.
I don't care if their owners are locals (which is questionable,) I don't care if they employ low-skill local drones to unpack and assemble. The offering is sub-standard, and wrapping themselves in the flag doesn't help make their low quality more palatable.
If you read the link I provided, you will see the Eee is their front runner, and I'm happy enough with that. (PS: although they don't employ local drones to follow the Ubuntu prompts, they do install Ubuntu.)
I'm kind of tired responding to what I presume is a pioneer employee trying to astroturf as an Anonymous Coward. To compare Dell and Pioneer is risible. Suggest you check your customer service records (assuming you keep them) if you have any more questions about my complaints about Pioneer.
> Sigh! A certain percentage of machines break, no matter who makes them or sells them.
Yes, and a competent vendor maintains a stock of spares and sufficient expertise to deal with those 'breakages.' Pioneer does not. I think it's fairly poor form to hijack the discussion as an A/C to push your(?) company's product as an A/C.
I assure you, Pioneer shill, if the DET in NSW buys a single Pioneer computer to supply to my kids' HS, or anybody else's kids' HS, I will scream blue and bloody murder all the way from the Minister to the local teachers' aides.
Not as harsh as being told by pioneer's "Business Development Manager" (of which they have a plethora) that their upstream supplier's business model relied upon heavily discounted new units and extreme profit on replacement parts *after* your expensive laptop died a week after warranty expired.
>>I wouldn't buy a toaster from those clowns.
> Apparently the Australian Government, however, does buy their stuff.
Who knows. They claim to be accredited, they probably are (since that'd be hard to fake and get away with.) Based on my personal experience, I would take any of their less verifiable claims with a grain of salt.
> You wouldn't be a competing supplier or importer by any chance, would you?
Absolutely not. No affiliation or commercial relationship with any vendors (except as a customer.)
> Or worse yet, a Windows-only supplier?
Shyeah, right, that's why I'm called 'Minix.'
> Just asking.
Just reporting my misfortune in ever dealing with Pioneer, that's the extent of my interest. I wouldn't ever buy from them again, and am dismayed that someone would recommend them as 'local suppliers.' In my experience, they just don't bring the goods.
You're missing one critical difference between open source software and Windows: The open source software tends to improve with each release. That can't really be said for Windows.
You speak as if school kids don't own school MS networks now. You clearly don't speak to kids about it.
To hear them brag, this FUD scenario occurs frequently right now under Windows. Not surprising really, I mean how hard could it be?
I'd rather the best and brightest were bragging about the new program they wrote, or the latest bug they fixed, than the new Windows 'sploit they used to 0wnz0rz the admin network (as they currently do.)
My daughters' school was recently infested by viruses - infected no doubt by some kid with a USB stick. It came home on their USB sticks, where we avoided it (as far as I know, because one never really knows how up-to-date the virus checker is.)
None of that could happen on a properly configured Linux machine.
You can't police kids' use of computers, and nobody can afford to completely protect or completely repair a Windows machine exposed to malware. Not even Steve Ballmer.
> The government could even be very smart here, and source the "Linux netbooks for education" from an Australian supplier:
> All of the Pioneer DreamBook Light computers can be purchased with Ubuntu pre-installed as an option. No Windows tax with Australian taxpayers money being paid un-necessarily to an American company. Local product, from a local company.
I was with you up to this point, but you're very mistaken about Pioneer.
Pioneer do no more than assemble and re-badge some fairly shoddy Taiwanese gear. They have no capacity to diagnose (let alone repair) the laptops they sell, any repairs go straight back to Taiwan. The cost of repair/replacement of a mobo exceeds 90% the cost of a replacement system.
This is in no sense a local product, and in no sense a quality product. I bought one high end laptop from them, it failed due to poor design, and they absolutely failed to deal properly with it - they have no stock of replacement mobos, they have no wholesale arrangements for replacement of failed mobos, they have no means of repairing them.
I wouldn't buy a toaster from those clowns.
Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment
on
Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
When I worked with Tcl I was still just learning to really think like a developer and understand the process on top of learning Tcl, which really is a fairly complicated language. I'm sure I would have far less trouble with it now that I've got a few years of full time, non-hobby development under my belt but I don't see any reason that I'd want to use it and find out.
Perhaps to see if you're missing something? It's significant that a lot of Tclers are old and battle-hardened. Perhaps there's something of enduring value to be found in Tcl, but it takes a while to recognise.
Your problem with lists, yeah, perhaps your problem is Quoting Hell? It can be easily avoided with simple good habits, but you have to learn them first.
Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment
on
Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Eval isn't as necessary since the new {*} syntactic element was added.
Unfamiliar syntax - every syntax is unfamiliar until you're familiar with it.
I don't find []-as-command-substitution-operator too vexing. If you have a syntax-aware editor. It's almost as expressive as lisp, but with less of the nesting hell.
Upvar/Uplevel are <b>fantastic</b> when you understand what they're used for. Uplevel enables tcl to be completely extensible - you can write new tcl language elements within tcl. For example, one can write a brand new <i>transaction</i> command which wraps its contents in a db transaction open/close pair, and catches errors to abort transactions. I really miss that when I have to code in other languages.
Tcl isn't for everyone. You need to be able to remember the difference between a function application, a quoted and an unquoted string. There are precisely 13 syntactic rules. It's surprising how many peoples' brains just don't work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
One small problem with calling the cops ... the kid wasn't even alleged to have been doing anything illegal.
So this is a situation in which the cops could not have searched the girl.
How the hell are these school admins walking free today?
I'm going to auto-Godwin myself here, by referring to the Nuremberg principles.
It's a good thing they weren't "only following orders" then.
If you can be convicted of doing something wrong even though a duly constituted authority directly *ordered* you to do it, then how can you be free of liability/culpability if you do something wrong but you weren't explicitly instructed not to (by case or black-letter law)?
I think the Supremes got it wrong, here. I blame Justice Dianna Ross.
On the contrary, I'd have thought that any illegitimate act pursuant to a desire to strip children and 'inspect' those parts of their body we consider private could usefully be considered paedophilic.
I don't think it matters so much whether the libidinal payoff was that they got to see the girl's pants, or whether it was that they got to exercise their massive throbbing administrative power to force a minor to strip. I think it's arguably paedophilia in either case.
I'd pay to read the transcripts of the court case, anyway.
You may have inadvertantly undermined your own point. billg and his cohort made it in computing, but the google guys made it in the internets.
When did that gate open? I'd say 1994 isn't a bad arbitrary starting point. That'd make the google guys 21 at the time, which is consistent with the parent post's contention.
I'm glad you brought up William Gibson. Gibson's cyberpunk (neat coinage!) works were interesting, but the man himself couldn't even use a computer while he was writing them.
Contrast this with Stephenson, who clearly knows his stuff well enough to construct a cogent argument in a coherent world.
Reading Stephenson, I get the feeling he knows a lot more than he's telling me. Reading Gibson, I get the feeling he knows a lot less. (Ok, I stole that line, but it's still funny.)
Once an author becomes really successful, as Stephenson rightfully is, editors refuse to push hard enough for cuts. Instead, like the later works of Dickens, we get overbearing and flabby books.
I have three words for you: "M. Night Shayamalan" (Ok, two words and one initial.)
The Sixth Sense was a masterpiece. It's just a shame it was his first movie, not the culmination of a succession of slowly improving movies, because we're robbed of the product of his development. Everything MNS has done since 6th Sense needed to be dragged out and shot in a ditch in pre-production.
Having said that, I don't get the same sense from Stephenson's books. They continue to give. I'm prepared to let him run with it. I feared he'd jumped the shark with Cryptonomicon, but System of the World had plenty of thought-fodder, and Anathem has so much more.
Perhaps if you'd read it in the early 90s, when it was written, when stuff like Second Life wasn't even a dream of a possibility, you'd get how remarkable a book it is.
All speculative fiction will age, sometimes it'll age badly (like Jules Verne) sometimes it'll age because reality will overtake its fiction.
These are novels of ideas. Characters, plot, are incidental. Like all good SF. If you read the hard SF guys like RL Forward, you'll see he actually writes 2d pneumatic blonde female characters in order to poke fun at the SF genre.
If Stephenson happens to write something literary, that's a bonus as long as his ideas are coherent, provocative, challenging. In Anathem, they are.
and don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker "While the unfamiliar language is a projection of how historical linguistics might apply in the future, it also provides clues to the nature of life in Riddley's world (e.g., being "et" by wild dogs is a common fate), and creates suspense as the reader gradually becomes accustomed to the idiosyncratic narration, and comes to understand some of the references of which Riddley is unaware."
the made up words to me made the whole work as if I was an archeology student discovering some ancient book and having to learn a whole now language and new ideas...
Excellent analogy. Remember: "Language is Fossilized Poetry" - Emerson.
Not just the words, but the concepts. He introduces concepts and methodologies with which we're familiar (Occam's Razor, for example) with new and unusual names, so you have to re-think how they work in his context, and thereby are perhaps induced to re-thinking them in your own.
It reminds me, too, of The Glass Bead Game.
Vonnegut complained that 'literary' authors had a very low density of ideas - sometimes only one idea for a whole novel! Vonnegut's work (particularly the stuff with Kilgore Trout) had ideas crackling on every page, until something happened to him.
He wrote Slapstick (which's my favourite, and sort of autobiographical, apparently) and the critics hated it. He was reamed out, and he never seemed to recover. His novels from that point, although still very good, had fewer ideas.
I hope that never happens to Stephenson.
Mod this guy up, and the sibling post. It's a fascinating book.
If you've read half the book and haven't got that the monastic types are using the remnants of a dead language, dating from the time of a long-past world empire which spawned a religion, I doubt you'll understand how it goes from there, Fra (I mean, Bro.)
Science Fiction is a class of speculative fiction, it's often more about the times in which its written than the times and places in which it is set. Its virtue is that it allows us to see our own time and place in a new light.
I think this book is talking about what might have happened if religion and rationality had split in a different way in our own world.
Honestly, what do they teach you kids these days?
Statistics: useful for what they hide as much as what they show.
300 caught / 43,000 "security officers" = 0.7%
But how many of the "security officers" have access to baggage? All, half, 600? We're not told.
How many airports in the US? 1000? Are there 430 baggage searchers per airport? Are there really 43K people in a position to steal from baggage? Really?
> Find me another Australian supplier willing to
> provide Ubuntu or Debian or even Fedora
> pre-installed, and forgo the Windows tax, on a
> value-for-money low-power machine, and I would
> gladly recommend that over Pioneer.
(1) Pioneer is not an 'Australian Supplier' of anything more than the opening of boxes - at *most* they assemble the laptops.
(2) Pioneer put a Ubuntu CD in a drive - the Ubuntu people do the rest.
(3) My direct and personal experience would suggest that there's very little 'value for money' in the Pioneer proposition.
(4) No manufacturer (or box opener, in this case) benefits from the MS tax.
My problem is with the poor quality of Pioneer's rebadged machines, and their terrible service.
I don't care if their owners are locals (which is questionable,) I don't care if they employ low-skill local drones to unpack and assemble. The offering is sub-standard, and wrapping themselves in the flag doesn't help make their low quality more palatable.
If you read the link I provided, you will see the Eee is their front runner, and I'm happy enough with that. (PS: although they don't employ local drones to follow the Ubuntu prompts, they do install Ubuntu.)
I'm kind of tired responding to what I presume is a pioneer employee trying to astroturf as an Anonymous Coward. To compare Dell and Pioneer is risible. Suggest you check your customer service records (assuming you keep them) if you have any more questions about my complaints about Pioneer.
> Sigh! A certain percentage of machines break, no matter who makes them or sells them.
Yes, and a competent vendor maintains a stock of spares and sufficient expertise to deal with those 'breakages.' Pioneer does not. I think it's fairly poor form to hijack the discussion as an A/C to push your(?) company's product as an A/C.
I assure you, Pioneer shill, if the DET in NSW buys a single Pioneer computer to supply to my kids' HS, or anybody else's kids' HS, I will scream blue and bloody murder all the way from the Minister to the local teachers' aides.
I don't expect they're that stupid, though.
> Gee. Harsh.
Not as harsh as being told by pioneer's "Business Development Manager" (of which they have a plethora) that their upstream supplier's business model relied upon heavily discounted new units and extreme profit on replacement parts *after* your expensive laptop died a week after warranty expired.
>>I wouldn't buy a toaster from those clowns.
> Apparently the Australian Government, however, does buy their stuff.
Who knows. They claim to be accredited, they probably are (since that'd be hard to fake and get away with.) Based on my personal experience, I would take any of their less verifiable claims with a grain of salt.
> You wouldn't be a competing supplier or importer by any chance, would you?
Absolutely not. No affiliation or commercial relationship with any vendors (except as a customer.)
> Or worse yet, a Windows-only supplier?
Shyeah, right, that's why I'm called 'Minix.'
> Just asking.
Just reporting my misfortune in ever dealing with Pioneer, that's the extent of my interest. I wouldn't ever buy from them again, and am dismayed that someone would recommend them as 'local suppliers.' In my experience, they just don't bring the goods.
(I love the smell of astroturf in the mornings)
You're missing one critical difference between open source software and Windows: The open source software tends to improve with each release. That can't really be said for Windows.
I just spoke with the bloke who's behind this, and he pointed to the following source material which forms a background to their proposal:
Reading it, seems like they really have a solid grasp of the issues, and have made a cogent and excellent proposal.
Here's hoping it doesn't get subverted or ignored.
You speak as if school kids don't own school MS networks now. You clearly don't speak to kids about it.
To hear them brag, this FUD scenario occurs frequently right now under Windows. Not surprising really, I mean how hard could it be?
I'd rather the best and brightest were bragging about the new program they wrote, or the latest bug they fixed, than the new Windows 'sploit they used to 0wnz0rz the admin network (as they currently do.)
It's not hypothetical.
My daughters' school was recently infested by viruses - infected no doubt by some kid with a USB stick. It came home on their USB sticks, where we avoided it (as far as I know, because one never really knows how up-to-date the virus checker is.)
None of that could happen on a properly configured Linux machine.
You can't police kids' use of computers, and nobody can afford to completely protect or completely repair a Windows machine exposed to malware. Not even Steve Ballmer.
> The government could even be very smart here, and source the "Linux netbooks for education" from an Australian supplier:
> All of the Pioneer DreamBook Light computers can be purchased with Ubuntu pre-installed as an option. No Windows tax with Australian taxpayers money being paid un-necessarily to an American company. Local product, from a local company.
I was with you up to this point, but you're very mistaken about Pioneer.
Pioneer do no more than assemble and re-badge some fairly shoddy Taiwanese gear. They have no capacity to diagnose (let alone repair) the laptops they sell, any repairs go straight back to Taiwan. The cost of repair/replacement of a mobo exceeds 90% the cost of a replacement system.
This is in no sense a local product, and in no sense a quality product. I bought one high end laptop from them, it failed due to poor design, and they absolutely failed to deal properly with it - they have no stock of replacement mobos, they have no wholesale arrangements for replacement of failed mobos, they have no means of repairing them.
I wouldn't buy a toaster from those clowns.
Eval isn't as necessary since the new {*} syntactic element was added.
Unfamiliar syntax - every syntax is unfamiliar until you're familiar with it.
I don't find []-as-command-substitution-operator too vexing. If you have a syntax-aware editor. It's almost as expressive as lisp, but with less of the nesting hell.
Upvar/Uplevel are <b>fantastic</b> when you understand what they're used for. Uplevel enables tcl to be completely extensible - you can write new tcl language elements within tcl. For example, one can write a brand new <i>transaction</i> command which wraps its contents in a db transaction open/close pair, and catches errors to abort transactions. I really miss that when I have to code in other languages.
Tcl isn't for everyone. You need to be able to remember the difference between a function application, a quoted and an unquoted string. There are precisely 13 syntactic rules. It's surprising how many peoples' brains just don't work that way.
There's heaps of active community: mailing list comp.lang.tcl http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/topics, a wiki http://wiki.tcl.tk/, a 24x7 chat #tcl (with a jabber chat too.) You're welcome to join in.
Here are some detailed, relevant links:
Cross platform: http://wiki.tcl.tk/1110
Events: http://wiki.tcl.tk/3448
Internationalization: http://wiki.tcl.tk/6789
Easy C interface: http://wiki.tcl.tk/2523
Oh, did I mention a thriving wiki? http://wiki.tcl.tk/