You can't count on having everything in common with anyone, really.
Or, you can just move to the Silicon Valley. That way, pretty much anyone you meet will be able to have a conversaion about Linux vs. BSD (or Emacs vs. VI or Mac vs. PC).
But, if you do come, please bring at least 3 single women in the 18-35 age range.
A change in an artist's philosophy, religion, world-view, or whatever can also alienate their existing fan base. Not just because they make public remarks that offend people, but it also changes the style and content of their work - often to a point where former fans get offended, insulted, or just plain fed up. Card, Lucas, etc, etc...
If some statements are part of a loop, then we gratuitously indent them.
It's only gratuitous if you use something extreme like 8 spaces per indentation level.
I think his point was that any indentation is gratuitous to the compiler - it is used for human readability, and thus could be considered a "comment."
But, I think a comment is a certain class of readability measures applied to code. Formatting is another. Naming is another. I personally subscribe to the self-documenting code philosophy - I'd generally rather pull some code out to a seperate method and give it a terse, yet descriptive name than break the flow of the code with some inline comments. Refactoring and all that.
Of course, sometimes I get stuck because I can't think of an acceptable name for my new class or function.
So, who is tearing down society? The people for the bill, against the bill? Were you being sarcastic? I can't tell!
Perhaps it's just nationalistic pride, but I am really proud the the job our Founding Fathers did constructing our nation. They might have been composed primarily of wealthy landowners, but they decided not to maximize their quality of life, but the maximize the collective quality of life for all the people of the country. Specifically, they hated the idea of nobility and dictatorship and thus built a system that would withstand individual extremists and tyrants. The benevolent dictator works well until the dictator stops being benevolent or dies. Our system works less well, but is MUCH more stable. And it really was NOT in the absolute best interests of those that developed our government to make it such.
On the other hand, some things have to change. Social norms change independently of legislation, and so the system needs to adapt. It's important we make changes as they become necessary, like the obvious example of ensuring women and black people have the same rights as everyone else.
Basically, we still depend on having our wealthy and powerful be intelligent, rational, and benevolent like our founding fathers. But it's harder for just one malevolent (or just selfish) wealthy powerful guy to make too many waves - it takes a whole conspiracy!
This will seem like an OT troll at first, but it comes together in the end.
I was frustrated recently with Linux - I got a new Asus P5GDC-V "Deluxe" motherboard with GigE and RAID etc... and I wanted to put Linux on it to use as a general media/http/cvs/dns/wins box. Even though the kernel included a driver for my GigE, it was too old to work with the chipset. Oh, they include a driver on the CD that came with the MB! Great! It has a fancy script that builds+installs a module without any messy kernel patching or anything. Cool. Except... it doesn't compile. (Let's just ignore how the script assumed/sbin was in your path even though that is not the default that I've ever seen, even for root.) Between the latest version of the kernel when this driver was released and FC3's chosen version of the kernel, 2.6 had changed enough to not just break the driver but prevent it from compiling.
Here's where it all comes together: Not only can I not use a 10 year old app, I can't use a 6-month old driver. Eventually I found a version of the driver that would compile with the latest version of the kernel, but I don't understand how the driver interface is that unstable in the supposedly stable version of the kernel. As far as I can tell, a field was removed from a structure that the driver referenced. Not only are vendors not inclined to make Linux drivers to begin with, if it's that much of a moving target they are likely not to put any effort into it at all. And, damn, ethernet is the first thing I need working. Well, after storage and video, I guess. The third thing I need working.
Ok, I'm done now. I won't mention the fact that Linux won't work with my RAID IDE channels even in non-RAID mode or the audio out of the box.
I still like Linux - once it is all set up, it works for me. But it was fairly painful to get there, even though they've had 10 years to improve things since I had my first miserable experience installing Linux. I was trying to use a large (800MB) hard drive with a BIOS that didn't support LBA. Wow, I was 17. Now I am old and bitter.
In the 5th grade we had a class project to write a letter to our "hero," and see what the response was. Most people write to Michael J. Fox or Joe Montana and they mostly got form responses or a poster and such. I wrote to Steve Meretzky, and I was the first to get a response in my class, like a week later. Not only that, be he had handwritten the whole letter - I had only typed mine.
Anyway, when I met him at GDC in 1999 or so, he didn't remember my letter. Bastard. I wish he was doing something more interesting these days than http://worldwinner.com/
Yeah, ideally congress would be a thick molasses that makes it difficult for extremists and tyrants to make sweeping changes that would be bad for the vast moderate majority.
Re:Please place your nerd membership in the garbag
on
Ask mc chris
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· Score: 1
The whole idea of being "geek" is that you don't fit in.
Actually, I think that's more Punk. Geek isn't really an anti-establishment movement. Of course, if you look a bit deeper, an "anti-establishment movement" is rather paradoxical.
The problem with providing a web application service is that your clients are not going to want to do anything just because you say. Your application has to work with their machines as they are, with whatever software and policies they have decided on.
Basically you have to assume this guy has no access to the client machines, his software just has to work anyway.
I think, to be fair, you would have to weight the platforms by ubiquity. You are still correct in that C99 can be compiled on more deployed machines than Java, but the margin is orders of magnitude smaller.
Personally, I love Java for many reasons - it is by far my favorite language to develop in - but I think the binary portability aspect is over-rated and not as successful as promised/hyped. Much of this is due to implementation issues and not theory.
For example, I've worked on Java in the Enterprise (J2EE) and in embedded environments on mobile devices (J2ME). Though the binary format and virtual machine language is the same, the core API is different enough to be incompatible, and there are even some extra language restrictions on J2ME that could prevent straight porting at the source level.
That's not exactly the promise of Java, so let's just look at taking code between two J2ME devices. J2ME does not provide for run-time querying of extention API access (Palm actually has a decent facility for this in their OS API), so to use hardware-dependent (generally manufacturer-dependent) APIs, you have to link in external jars from the manufacturer, and provide different binaries for different phones. Also, the space and speed constraints on many popular, deployed phones are such that you may not have the option of having conditional code for all your different platforms. Also, there are potential issues with class-file overhead, so many of our object-oriented designs went out the window when it was time to "ninja" down to the phone constraints. For example, you could concieve of a system where important platform differences were distilled into an interface, and there would be different implementations of that interface for each platform, and the correct implementation would be loaded dynamically at application start. This is just in so many ways impractical for J2ME that it makes me upset.
Oddly enough, Java was originally designed as an embedded language (At least in the Oak days), and I feel it fails on many levels. Much of the misery of J2ME is weak and incomplete specifications. Even if devices of the time didn't support things like sound playback, framebuffer access, 2D/3D graphics transforms, they should have planned the API ahead. As it is, you have version 1 and version 2 devices with quirky compatibility issues, and device-specific APIs for sound, graphics, and often terrible thread scheduling as well - all because of a lack of specification requirements.
Also, Sun, last I checked, has an extremely poor VM for PalmOS, such that you would never use it in any production capacity. And that just pisses me off.
I can't believe I'm writing this in response to a "Bzzzzzzt. 0 Points." post.
I had to take way more math than I could stomach as prerequisites for CS. Bleah. I responded by not attending those classes and failing them the first couple times. Proofs suck.
Ok, sometimes IT includes programming/development, sometimes IT is maintainance, support, and administration. Which is it? When they say IT salaries are increasing, what do they mean by IT? Can we come up with some more accurate terminology? As a software engineer, I usually am categorized into Engineering, as opposed to IT - but there seems to be no consistancy.
Regarding the US job market for programmers - there seems to be jobs here in the Silicon Valley/SF area, but they just put you through a ringer during the interview process (3-4 interview sessions of 2-3 hours each), and then give you a lowball offer. If you have a specific domain knowledge that is valuable to someone, the situation becomes a lot better. I wouldn't really be interested in relocating, so I have no idea what is going on outside the Bay Area, but I keep getting people asking if I'm interested in BREW/J2ME positions, since very few people actually have experience with that technology. Not that it's a particularly difficult domain to understand/learn.
A lot of companies seem to think that the bad economy means that hiring top notch developers should be cheap and easy. But, in reality, these are not the people that stay unemployed forever. Most of your top talent doesn't stay on the market very long, leaving you to sift through thousands of resumes and hundreds of interviews. At my last company, we got some smart people coming in and not getting the job because they felt they could do better, or that they didn't want to pay much. It was a tiny company, which has less leeway for supporting people who can't do their job well, but I remember a couple people who I thought were really good and my boss decided against them for, I felt, trivial reasons. I think those decisions were justified either consciously or subconsciously by the economy.
You are, again, pushing a position to the extreme to show how it breaks down. It is a strategy that works fairly well for convincing people of things, but generally does not contribute to the discourse. The reality is that most theories that are valid within certain paramters fail when pushed outside those parameters.
Yes, some situations require dramatic solutions, but they are relatively rare, and it doesn't really apply to this particular argument.
Here is an example of using your debate tactics against your own tactics: If a doctor tells you to drink lots of fluids to get over a cold, do you lift of a full container of kerosene and say, "Well should I drink this, huh? It's a fluid, right?"
OBVIOUSLY you are not going to do that, is it ridiculous - so it does not say anything. But the difference here is that it is a fairly TYPICAL use of the Reductio ad Absurdum strategy, so I would argue that typically that type of argument doesn't present any meaningful information. The problem is that the counterexample generally misrepresents the opponent's argument in a subtle way that observers, and even the opponent, cannot immediately ascertain - leaving them without a counterargument. Reductio ad Absurdum is a valid way of defeating a theory, but only if it accurately represents the theory. The misrepresentation in my example is that the doctor was implying comestibles, not anything classified as liquid.
To restate my orginal point: Rational Americans do not want an oppressive, authoritarian government, nor do they want total anarchy. Government, then, clearly has a role in society. What is valuable is determining the parameters for that role that satisfy as many people as possible (i.e. how much to tax, how much to regulate, how much to provide). In fact your "counterexample" actually supports my argument: The British Empire was too oppressive for the founding fathers (though there were many loyalists as well that were opposed to secession), and it was determined by those activists that there were no parameters that would allow for a moderate government while still under British rule. It is not my position that this is the case with Social Security or taxes in general in contemporary America.
Either direction taken to an extreme is absurd. A government that has no revenue cannot provide for things that rational people from both sides of the political spectrum believes it should provide, such as education and the common defence - and one that does no regulation of commerce ends up with monopolistic consolidation and the death of capitalism. A government that takes all of everyone's money is oppressive, reduces freedom, and is ripe for corruption - and has no competition or innovation at all in the commercial sector.
So, what's the answer? Moderation, of course. If you want to argue, argue over where the balance is healthiest, not which extreme is most moronic.
Why the heck would you want to run an LCD or an OLED at lower than the highest res?
Well, if you like to play any games, then it could be because the highest resolution your display can support is too demanding for your video hardware (or CPU or memory or whatever). If you are playing some of these latest games like Doom3, you might even be able to get a (subjectively) better-looking picture at a higher frame rate by lowering the resolution.
-If
Re:i interviewed
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Really? Not even a letter that stated you would not be hired?
In my country that would be considered bad taste, and I'm sure it is in the US too.
Personally, I consider it bad taste as well, but it is the Standard Practice here in the US.
It is my understanding that a lot of residences here in California do not have gas stoves or heat because we have earthquakes, which can rupture gas mains. I've lived in a bunch of places, and all the stoves/heating were all electric. Cooking on an electric range is pretty terrible, as well - restaurants and such have the industrial gas stoves, but they seem to be more rare in residences.
When Adams put together the Internet version of the guide, he put it up at: http://h2g2.com/ It's still there, in fact...
If anything needed an abbreviation, it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... Even just typing "Hitchhiker's" is somewhat cumbersome. I wouldn't blame this one on elitism.
"That's just the reality of the marketplace today. Even if our economy was doing really well, this would still be the case. It's capitalism."
Therefore, pure Capitalism is unethical. I am all for a tempered Capitalism, but this ruthless demand-says-we-can-work-you-to-death culture only helps a small number individuals and is ultimately damaging to our society as a whole.
I live in Sunnyvale, CA, in what some people call the Silicon Valley. Comcast DOES NOT OFFER CABLE INTERNET to my area. It's like I'm in Bizarro zip-code where companies don't want to accept my money. The best I could do was 1.5m/384k DSL from Speakeasy with their "special" service that doesn't require a phone line for $55/mo (ends up being about $60 with "taxes" that for some reason they are not required to include in their price advertising). And that's with a friggin 1 year contract.
One reason the DSL rates are so high is that I have to go through TWO MONOPOLIES to get internet. SBC owns all the copper in the area, and Covad went and bought up all the DSL providers in the area. I don't really know where Covad is in the value chain, actually, except fuck the consumer (i.e. me). My ISP is Speakeasy, they have to convince Covad to do any work, who then has to convince SBC to do any work, and SBC really doesn't want to get off their morbidly bloated ass to do any work for them. Because of this, the prices are stupidly high, and it takes an incredible *15 days* from ordering the service to actually getting it installed. At least Comcast will generally hook it up within 5 working days.
Damn. So what do we do about it? This is the sort of thing Post-Regan Republicanism promotes... Trickle down my ass!
I think Java IS a great platform for object-oriented developement. I've recently had to go back and forth between Java and C++, and I always forget how nasty C++ is until I go back and try to use it.
In general, Java can provide a consistent and sane development environment through the VM abstraction, and the new generics and autoboxing now give the developer template-like constructs but without the bloat. The Java collections classes are much cleaner and more reusable than STL.
I think it comes down to if you are an OO-minded developer, than Java is a really great language. If you are procedural-minded, then C or any of these scripting languages are probably more your speed. Nothing worse than writing procedural Java. Except killing babies. That is worse.
If that's the case with software development, let's outsource it already, rather than dragging out the inevitable with shitty work conditions.
It's not that the industry can't produce sufficient wealth to pay, it's that there are thousands of talented young people FIGHTING for the opportunity to let EA abuse them compared to OTHER SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN THE USA. Because there's so much demand for those positions, EA naturally rapes the people in those positions. The problem is not that they can't pay, but that they don't have to.
The other thing is that a lot of the problem comes from mismanagement. They CAN pay people poorly and make them work incredibly long hours, so that's their solution to their production problems. Most companies, even with outsourcing, don't really have that option. They have to manage a project so that it's developed intelligently. But the games industry uses a short-term brute-force solution to overcome a complete lack of management ability. There are smaller game dev. houses, I am told, that actually do try to manage projects such that both the employees and employer are happy. It's possible. It's not a zero-sum game, everyone can benefit. But it involves having a long-term view of what is good for the company, and utilizing ethical and effective software project management techniques.
I propose a theory: Companies and Individuals do not always act in their own self-interest. Can everyone agree on that? There's plenty of companies and people that have self-destructed because of their actions. It is not in the best interest of people to work for a company that burns them out after one or two projects - inducing physical ailments and emotional distress. That is clear, but people do it anyway.
What is less clear is that it is not in the best interests of EA or the game industry to burn their software engineers out, to fully utilize the fact that people will act against their own self interest to work for them. I think it hurts everyone in the long run. One small peek at why is this massive PR fallout for the company. They didn't think it would ever come bite them in the ass - now it's starting to, and I just hope that it gets worse and worse for them until they realize that their problems are actually with them.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't count on having everything in common with anyone, really.
Or, you can just move to the Silicon Valley. That way, pretty much anyone you meet will be able to have a conversaion about Linux vs. BSD (or Emacs vs. VI or Mac vs. PC).
But, if you do come, please bring at least 3 single women in the 18-35 age range.
-If
A change in an artist's philosophy, religion, world-view, or whatever can also alienate their existing fan base. Not just because they make public remarks that offend people, but it also changes the style and content of their work - often to a point where former fans get offended, insulted, or just plain fed up. Card, Lucas, etc, etc...
-If
He looked at me as if I was a retard, and said something along the lines of "Soldiers are trained to do as they're told".
I felt retarded afterwards, when I thought about our discussion.
I don't understand why you would feel retarded for hoping that people would be decent.
-If
If some statements are part of a loop, then we gratuitously indent them.
It's only gratuitous if you use something extreme like 8 spaces per indentation level.
I think his point was that any indentation is gratuitous to the compiler - it is used for human readability, and thus could be considered a "comment."
But, I think a comment is a certain class of readability measures applied to code. Formatting is another. Naming is another. I personally subscribe to the self-documenting code philosophy - I'd generally rather pull some code out to a seperate method and give it a terse, yet descriptive name than break the flow of the code with some inline comments. Refactoring and all that.
Of course, sometimes I get stuck because I can't think of an acceptable name for my new class or function.
-If
So, who is tearing down society? The people for the bill, against the bill? Were you being sarcastic? I can't tell!
Perhaps it's just nationalistic pride, but I am really proud the the job our Founding Fathers did constructing our nation. They might have been composed primarily of wealthy landowners, but they decided not to maximize their quality of life, but the maximize the collective quality of life for all the people of the country. Specifically, they hated the idea of nobility and dictatorship and thus built a system that would withstand individual extremists and tyrants. The benevolent dictator works well until the dictator stops being benevolent or dies. Our system works less well, but is MUCH more stable. And it really was NOT in the absolute best interests of those that developed our government to make it such.
On the other hand, some things have to change. Social norms change independently of legislation, and so the system needs to adapt. It's important we make changes as they become necessary, like the obvious example of ensuring women and black people have the same rights as everyone else.
Basically, we still depend on having our wealthy and powerful be intelligent, rational, and benevolent like our founding fathers. But it's harder for just one malevolent (or just selfish) wealthy powerful guy to make too many waves - it takes a whole conspiracy!
-If
This will seem like an OT troll at first, but it comes together in the end.
/sbin was in your path even though that is not the default that I've ever seen, even for root.) Between the latest version of the kernel when this driver was released and FC3's chosen version of the kernel, 2.6 had changed enough to not just break the driver but prevent it from compiling.
I was frustrated recently with Linux - I got a new Asus P5GDC-V "Deluxe" motherboard with GigE and RAID etc... and I wanted to put Linux on it to use as a general media/http/cvs/dns/wins box. Even though the kernel included a driver for my GigE, it was too old to work with the chipset. Oh, they include a driver on the CD that came with the MB! Great! It has a fancy script that builds+installs a module without any messy kernel patching or anything. Cool. Except... it doesn't compile. (Let's just ignore how the script assumed
Here's where it all comes together: Not only can I not use a 10 year old app, I can't use a 6-month old driver. Eventually I found a version of the driver that would compile with the latest version of the kernel, but I don't understand how the driver interface is that unstable in the supposedly stable version of the kernel. As far as I can tell, a field was removed from a structure that the driver referenced. Not only are vendors not inclined to make Linux drivers to begin with, if it's that much of a moving target they are likely not to put any effort into it at all. And, damn, ethernet is the first thing I need working. Well, after storage and video, I guess. The third thing I need working.
Ok, I'm done now. I won't mention the fact that Linux won't work with my RAID IDE channels even in non-RAID mode or the audio out of the box.
I still like Linux - once it is all set up, it works for me. But it was fairly painful to get there, even though they've had 10 years to improve things since I had my first miserable experience installing Linux. I was trying to use a large (800MB) hard drive with a BIOS that didn't support LBA. Wow, I was 17. Now I am old and bitter.
-If
In the 5th grade we had a class project to write a letter to our "hero," and see what the response was. Most people write to Michael J. Fox or Joe Montana and they mostly got form responses or a poster and such. I wrote to Steve Meretzky, and I was the first to get a response in my class, like a week later. Not only that, be he had handwritten the whole letter - I had only typed mine.
Anyway, when I met him at GDC in 1999 or so, he didn't remember my letter. Bastard. I wish he was doing something more interesting these days than http://worldwinner.com/
-If
That's what I thought that the headline meant at first, too. Some kind of outsourcing issue...
-If
Yeah, ideally congress would be a thick molasses that makes it difficult for extremists and tyrants to make sweeping changes that would be bad for the vast moderate majority.
Oh, well.
-If
Here's the website:
t orrent
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
And a torrent for the download:
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/torrents/metainfo.
-If
The whole idea of being "geek" is that you don't fit in.
Actually, I think that's more Punk. Geek isn't really an anti-establishment movement. Of course, if you look a bit deeper, an "anti-establishment movement" is rather paradoxical.
-If
The problem with providing a web application service is that your clients are not going to want to do anything just because you say. Your application has to work with their machines as they are, with whatever software and policies they have decided on.
Basically you have to assume this guy has no access to the client machines, his software just has to work anyway.
-If
I think, to be fair, you would have to weight the platforms by ubiquity. You are still correct in that C99 can be compiled on more deployed machines than Java, but the margin is orders of magnitude smaller.
Personally, I love Java for many reasons - it is by far my favorite language to develop in - but I think the binary portability aspect is over-rated and not as successful as promised/hyped. Much of this is due to implementation issues and not theory.
For example, I've worked on Java in the Enterprise (J2EE) and in embedded environments on mobile devices (J2ME). Though the binary format and virtual machine language is the same, the core API is different enough to be incompatible, and there are even some extra language restrictions on J2ME that could prevent straight porting at the source level.
That's not exactly the promise of Java, so let's just look at taking code between two J2ME devices. J2ME does not provide for run-time querying of extention API access (Palm actually has a decent facility for this in their OS API), so to use hardware-dependent (generally manufacturer-dependent) APIs, you have to link in external jars from the manufacturer, and provide different binaries for different phones. Also, the space and speed constraints on many popular, deployed phones are such that you may not have the option of having conditional code for all your different platforms. Also, there are potential issues with class-file overhead, so many of our object-oriented designs went out the window when it was time to "ninja" down to the phone constraints. For example, you could concieve of a system where important platform differences were distilled into an interface, and there would be different implementations of that interface for each platform, and the correct implementation would be loaded dynamically at application start. This is just in so many ways impractical for J2ME that it makes me upset.
Oddly enough, Java was originally designed as an embedded language (At least in the Oak days), and I feel it fails on many levels. Much of the misery of J2ME is weak and incomplete specifications. Even if devices of the time didn't support things like sound playback, framebuffer access, 2D/3D graphics transforms, they should have planned the API ahead. As it is, you have version 1 and version 2 devices with quirky compatibility issues, and device-specific APIs for sound, graphics, and often terrible thread scheduling as well - all because of a lack of specification requirements.
Also, Sun, last I checked, has an extremely poor VM for PalmOS, such that you would never use it in any production capacity. And that just pisses me off.
I can't believe I'm writing this in response to a "Bzzzzzzt. 0 Points." post.
-If
I had to take way more math than I could stomach as prerequisites for CS. Bleah. I responded by not attending those classes and failing them the first couple times. Proofs suck.
-If
Ok, sometimes IT includes programming/development, sometimes IT is maintainance, support, and administration. Which is it? When they say IT salaries are increasing, what do they mean by IT? Can we come up with some more accurate terminology? As a software engineer, I usually am categorized into Engineering, as opposed to IT - but there seems to be no consistancy.
Regarding the US job market for programmers - there seems to be jobs here in the Silicon Valley/SF area, but they just put you through a ringer during the interview process (3-4 interview sessions of 2-3 hours each), and then give you a lowball offer. If you have a specific domain knowledge that is valuable to someone, the situation becomes a lot better. I wouldn't really be interested in relocating, so I have no idea what is going on outside the Bay Area, but I keep getting people asking if I'm interested in BREW/J2ME positions, since very few people actually have experience with that technology. Not that it's a particularly difficult domain to understand/learn.
A lot of companies seem to think that the bad economy means that hiring top notch developers should be cheap and easy. But, in reality, these are not the people that stay unemployed forever. Most of your top talent doesn't stay on the market very long, leaving you to sift through thousands of resumes and hundreds of interviews. At my last company, we got some smart people coming in and not getting the job because they felt they could do better, or that they didn't want to pay much. It was a tiny company, which has less leeway for supporting people who can't do their job well, but I remember a couple people who I thought were really good and my boss decided against them for, I felt, trivial reasons. I think those decisions were justified either consciously or subconsciously by the economy.
-If
You are, again, pushing a position to the extreme to show how it breaks down. It is a strategy that works fairly well for convincing people of things, but generally does not contribute to the discourse. The reality is that most theories that are valid within certain paramters fail when pushed outside those parameters.
Yes, some situations require dramatic solutions, but they are relatively rare, and it doesn't really apply to this particular argument.
Here is an example of using your debate tactics against your own tactics: If a doctor tells you to drink lots of fluids to get over a cold, do you lift of a full container of kerosene and say, "Well should I drink this, huh? It's a fluid, right?"
OBVIOUSLY you are not going to do that, is it ridiculous - so it does not say anything. But the difference here is that it is a fairly TYPICAL use of the Reductio ad Absurdum strategy, so I would argue that typically that type of argument doesn't present any meaningful information. The problem is that the counterexample generally misrepresents the opponent's argument in a subtle way that observers, and even the opponent, cannot immediately ascertain - leaving them without a counterargument. Reductio ad Absurdum is a valid way of defeating a theory, but only if it accurately represents the theory. The misrepresentation in my example is that the doctor was implying comestibles, not anything classified as liquid.
To restate my orginal point: Rational Americans do not want an oppressive, authoritarian government, nor do they want total anarchy. Government, then, clearly has a role in society. What is valuable is determining the parameters for that role that satisfy as many people as possible (i.e. how much to tax, how much to regulate, how much to provide). In fact your "counterexample" actually supports my argument: The British Empire was too oppressive for the founding fathers (though there were many loyalists as well that were opposed to secession), and it was determined by those activists that there were no parameters that would allow for a moderate government while still under British rule. It is not my position that this is the case with Social Security or taxes in general in contemporary America.
-If
Either direction taken to an extreme is absurd. A government that has no revenue cannot provide for things that rational people from both sides of the political spectrum believes it should provide, such as education and the common defence - and one that does no regulation of commerce ends up with monopolistic consolidation and the death of capitalism. A government that takes all of everyone's money is oppressive, reduces freedom, and is ripe for corruption - and has no competition or innovation at all in the commercial sector.
So, what's the answer? Moderation, of course. If you want to argue, argue over where the balance is healthiest, not which extreme is most moronic.
-If
Why the heck would you want to run an LCD or an OLED at lower than the highest res?
Well, if you like to play any games, then it could be because the highest resolution your display can support is too demanding for your video hardware (or CPU or memory or whatever). If you are playing some of these latest games like Doom3, you might even be able to get a (subjectively) better-looking picture at a higher frame rate by lowering the resolution.
-If
Really? Not even a letter that stated you would not be hired?
In my country that would be considered bad taste, and I'm sure it is in the US too.
Personally, I consider it bad taste as well, but it is the Standard Practice here in the US.
-If
It is my understanding that a lot of residences here in California do not have gas stoves or heat because we have earthquakes, which can rupture gas mains. I've lived in a bunch of places, and all the stoves/heating were all electric. Cooking on an electric range is pretty terrible, as well - restaurants and such have the industrial gas stoves, but they seem to be more rare in residences.
-If
H2G2 is:
H2 = Hitch Hiker's (2 H's)
G2 = Guide (to the) Galaxy (2 G's)
When Adams put together the Internet version of the guide, he put it up at: http://h2g2.com/ It's still there, in fact...
If anything needed an abbreviation, it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... Even just typing "Hitchhiker's" is somewhat cumbersome. I wouldn't blame this one on elitism.
-If
"That's just the reality of the marketplace today. Even if our economy was doing really well, this would still be the case. It's capitalism."
Therefore, pure Capitalism is unethical. I am all for a tempered Capitalism, but this ruthless demand-says-we-can-work-you-to-death culture only helps a small number individuals and is ultimately damaging to our society as a whole.
-If
I live in Sunnyvale, CA, in what some people call the Silicon Valley. Comcast DOES NOT OFFER CABLE INTERNET to my area. It's like I'm in Bizarro zip-code where companies don't want to accept my money. The best I could do was 1.5m/384k DSL from Speakeasy with their "special" service that doesn't require a phone line for $55/mo (ends up being about $60 with "taxes" that for some reason they are not required to include in their price advertising). And that's with a friggin 1 year contract.
One reason the DSL rates are so high is that I have to go through TWO MONOPOLIES to get internet. SBC owns all the copper in the area, and Covad went and bought up all the DSL providers in the area. I don't really know where Covad is in the value chain, actually, except fuck the consumer (i.e. me). My ISP is Speakeasy, they have to convince Covad to do any work, who then has to convince SBC to do any work, and SBC really doesn't want to get off their morbidly bloated ass to do any work for them. Because of this, the prices are stupidly high, and it takes an incredible *15 days* from ordering the service to actually getting it installed. At least Comcast will generally hook it up within 5 working days.
Damn. So what do we do about it? This is the sort of thing Post-Regan Republicanism promotes... Trickle down my ass!
Hooray for mediocrity.
-DG
I think Java IS a great platform for object-oriented developement. I've recently had to go back and forth between Java and C++, and I always forget how nasty C++ is until I go back and try to use it.
In general, Java can provide a consistent and sane development environment through the VM abstraction, and the new generics and autoboxing now give the developer template-like constructs but without the bloat. The Java collections classes are much cleaner and more reusable than STL.
I think it comes down to if you are an OO-minded developer, than Java is a really great language. If you are procedural-minded, then C or any of these scripting languages are probably more your speed. Nothing worse than writing procedural Java. Except killing babies. That is worse.
-If
If that's the case with software development, let's outsource it already, rather than dragging out the inevitable with shitty work conditions.
It's not that the industry can't produce sufficient wealth to pay, it's that there are thousands of talented young people FIGHTING for the opportunity to let EA abuse them compared to OTHER SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN THE USA. Because there's so much demand for those positions, EA naturally rapes the people in those positions. The problem is not that they can't pay, but that they don't have to.
The other thing is that a lot of the problem comes from mismanagement. They CAN pay people poorly and make them work incredibly long hours, so that's their solution to their production problems. Most companies, even with outsourcing, don't really have that option. They have to manage a project so that it's developed intelligently. But the games industry uses a short-term brute-force solution to overcome a complete lack of management ability. There are smaller game dev. houses, I am told, that actually do try to manage projects such that both the employees and employer are happy. It's possible. It's not a zero-sum game, everyone can benefit. But it involves having a long-term view of what is good for the company, and utilizing ethical and effective software project management techniques.
I propose a theory: Companies and Individuals do not always act in their own self-interest. Can everyone agree on that? There's plenty of companies and people that have self-destructed because of their actions. It is not in the best interest of people to work for a company that burns them out after one or two projects - inducing physical ailments and emotional distress. That is clear, but people do it anyway.
What is less clear is that it is not in the best interests of EA or the game industry to burn their software engineers out, to fully utilize the fact that people will act against their own self interest to work for them. I think it hurts everyone in the long run. One small peek at why is this massive PR fallout for the company. They didn't think it would ever come bite them in the ass - now it's starting to, and I just hope that it gets worse and worse for them until they realize that their problems are actually with them.
-If