"Ignorance" implies a lack of understanding, "stupidity" implies a lack of skill. I don't consider myself ignorant about how cars work, but when it comes to fixing them, I consider myself a total idiot, and call in a professional.
Neither of those answers counts as a complete definition. Both might form part of one. But since there are many character encodings, a basic definition would have to say something about how ASCII differs from other encodings. A key detail would be the number of bits you need to represent an ASCII character, something most people get wrong.
Sigh. In addition to your poor reading skills, understanding of logical principles sucks. I argued that your post was clueless, therefore you're an idiot. That's exactly the opposite of an ad homminen argument, which would go "you're an idiot, therefore your post is clueless".
Re:Wow! Who ever would have guessed that!?
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
That doesn't make them stupid.
I didn't say that it did. In fact, I was arguing that nobody is completely "smart" or "stupid". Though you might be an exception.
Re:Wow! Who ever would have guessed that!?
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I basically agree with you, but I think your description of the problem is oversimplified and misleading. People are not monolithically "smart" or "stupid". Everybody's smart and stupid about different things. Like those wizards in the Harry Potter books that can master complicated magic spells, but can't mail a letter. What turns smart people into assholes is when they assume their smartness in one field automatically transfers to another.
I think computer techies are particularly bad this way because they tend to be self-taught. Often the most effective strategy for learning a technology is to just sit down and fiddle with it. Or they read a book that was probably written by another self-taught techie that often gets details wrong (how many of you can correctly define "ASCII"?) but gets enough essentials right to get the job done.
What techies don't get is that this style of learning just doesn't work with the law. Even if you understand a legal principle (and when techies try to understand something as abstract as a legal principle they often get it wrong) you don't have a practical understanding of its proper application in every context. Lawyers spend years studying and arguing about this stuff, and even so they have to specialize in order to develop any real expertise.
My favorite WSJ journal editorial was the one against eliminating the penny. They argued that this was conceding defeat to inflation. By that logic, we should bring back the half penny, so we can roll back prices to 1857!
The problem of micropayments (payments of less than US$ 0.05 or even fractions of a cent) is that you ask a user all the time when they want to see certain content, whether they want to pay for it.
"Viewing this page will cost you $0.001. To avoid this charge, navigate away in 5 seconds"
Congratulations! Your email to my registrar forced me to correct my registration info. Now that you've forced me to Do Things Right, you only have 1,532,438,221 bogus registrations to go before you've totally cleaned up the registration system!
Then again, all I did was click a button that set all my contact info to the "anonymous" values they provide. (They didn't provide this service when I first registered.) So I've just replaced one set of useless data with another.
But while I was doing this I noticed that the feature that was supposed to remind me to renew was disabled. So I guess I should thank you!
This is one of many things wrong with our current banking transaction system. It's not even the worst (though it is pretty bad). But the established financial institutions find the status quo extremely profitable, and aren't anxious to see it changed. So they write off the losses from the occasional fraud that they can't stick on somebody else.
I've often wondered if this institutional inertia is why online micropayments have never gained traction. The usual argument is that people prefer the alternatives (advertising supported media, flat rate subscriptions, etc.) But I don't see where these arguments have ever been tested by giving users a real choice.
They'd probably give it to you for free. Safety razor economics.
I used to read ebooks on my PDA. But I've found that I need a certain amount of text on a single screen before I can get absorbed in a book. The bigger screens on newer phones are big enough reading the news on mobile-adapted web sites, but I still wouldn't want to read a long novel on one of them.
The convenience factor of the Kindle is obviously worth different amounts to different people. You may consider $300 too much, as would I, but a half million people think otherwise. Can we all make an effort to avoid the usual egocentric geek logic of "not useful to me, therefore not useful"?
I've opted not to buy this gadget, because ultimately, it's just not as satisfying or lasting as having a book. I have books given to me by my grandparents that they had as teenagers...
And you also have (or most people have) cheap paperbacks you'll read once and discard. (A major hassle for me, since I'm totally unable to simply throw books out; I've got a full box sitting in the back of my car right now, waiting for me to think of a place to donate them.) And you have bulky dictionaries and other reference books that would be a lot easier to refer to if you had them in electronic form.
I'm really tired of hearing this lame "ebooks will never replace real books" argument. No one's saying they will. But that argument is like saying that regular books will never replace stone tablets. There will often be things that old technologies do better.
There are still places where a horse is a more practical form of transportation than a car. But of the dozens of carriages house in the old neighborhood where I live, not one is used for its original purpose.
Cost is still an issue. (As it was for the first cars and books.) I'm certainly not going to pay $300 for something like this. But if it were cheaper, or the convenience factor of ebooks were worth more to me, I'd buy one in a flash.
In point of fact, I already read ebooks on my table PC, a device I spent way too much money on. (Maybe 3 times the cost of a comparable laptop.) Possibly if I didn't already have the tablet, an ebook reader would be a lot more tempting.
Using unnecessarily pretentious language (such as calling the German army "The Bundeswehr" instead of just saying "German army") is always a bad idea. On Slashdot it's positively dangerous!
OK, let's hear an example of something more clueless than somebody who doesn't get the humor of using Russell and Whitehead as a high school text, despite the use of smileys.
Being about "how not to use math" and about math as such are pretty different things. It's like you were teaching a class on car repair and assigning a book on consumer fraud.
Not everybody pays $100 extra for Windows. Most often you have to buy a Windows license just to get the hardware you want. Even if the manufacturer offers a Windows-free price, it's not usually that much less than the regular price. (Note that OEM licenses are a lot cheaper than retails licenses.) In effect, everybody pays for Windows, whether they run it or not, or even own a license.
Oops, somebody screwed up. This is an Ask Slashdot that asks an interesting question that some of us are actually qualified to answer, and that can't be answered by trivial means such as googling. I don't think that's allowed!
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I'd love to quibble with you about the definition of "definition", but I don't want to.
"Ignorance" implies a lack of understanding, "stupidity" implies a lack of skill. I don't consider myself ignorant about how cars work, but when it comes to fixing them, I consider myself a total idiot, and call in a professional.
Your example just lacks social awareness. ("How hard can it be to get by on $14K a year?") Mine defies logic.
Neither of those answers counts as a complete definition. Both might form part of one. But since there are many character encodings, a basic definition would have to say something about how ASCII differs from other encodings. A key detail would be the number of bits you need to represent an ASCII character, something most people get wrong.
Sigh. In addition to your poor reading skills, understanding of logical principles sucks. I argued that your post was clueless, therefore you're an idiot. That's exactly the opposite of an ad homminen argument, which would go "you're an idiot, therefore your post is clueless".
That doesn't make them stupid.
I didn't say that it did. In fact, I was arguing that nobody is completely "smart" or "stupid". Though you might be an exception.
I basically agree with you, but I think your description of the problem is oversimplified and misleading. People are not monolithically "smart" or "stupid". Everybody's smart and stupid about different things. Like those wizards in the Harry Potter books that can master complicated magic spells, but can't mail a letter. What turns smart people into assholes is when they assume their smartness in one field automatically transfers to another.
I think computer techies are particularly bad this way because they tend to be self-taught. Often the most effective strategy for learning a technology is to just sit down and fiddle with it. Or they read a book that was probably written by another self-taught techie that often gets details wrong (how many of you can correctly define "ASCII"?) but gets enough essentials right to get the job done.
What techies don't get is that this style of learning just doesn't work with the law. Even if you understand a legal principle (and when techies try to understand something as abstract as a legal principle they often get it wrong) you don't have a practical understanding of its proper application in every context. Lawyers spend years studying and arguing about this stuff, and even so they have to specialize in order to develop any real expertise.
My favorite WSJ journal editorial was the one against eliminating the penny. They argued that this was conceding defeat to inflation. By that logic, we should bring back the half penny, so we can roll back prices to 1857!
The problem of micropayments (payments of less than US$ 0.05 or even fractions of a cent) is that you ask a user all the time when they want to see certain content, whether they want to pay for it.
"Viewing this page will cost you $0.001. To avoid this charge, navigate away in 5 seconds"
Congratulations! Your email to my registrar forced me to correct my registration info. Now that you've forced me to Do Things Right, you only have 1,532,438,221 bogus registrations to go before you've totally cleaned up the registration system!
Then again, all I did was click a button that set all my contact info to the "anonymous" values they provide. (They didn't provide this service when I first registered.) So I've just replaced one set of useless data with another.
But while I was doing this I noticed that the feature that was supposed to remind me to renew was disabled. So I guess I should thank you!
This is one of many things wrong with our current banking transaction system. It's not even the worst (though it is pretty bad). But the established financial institutions find the status quo extremely profitable, and aren't anxious to see it changed. So they write off the losses from the occasional fraud that they can't stick on somebody else.
I've often wondered if this institutional inertia is why online micropayments have never gained traction. The usual argument is that people prefer the alternatives (advertising supported media, flat rate subscriptions, etc.) But I don't see where these arguments have ever been tested by giving users a real choice.
I live for public acclaim, not for mod points!
If you don't care about the quality of your online discussion, then no, I guess it's not.
Wrong principia. Sorry.
They'd probably give it to you for free. Safety razor economics.
I used to read ebooks on my PDA. But I've found that I need a certain amount of text on a single screen before I can get absorbed in a book. The bigger screens on newer phones are big enough reading the news on mobile-adapted web sites, but I still wouldn't want to read a long novel on one of them.
The convenience factor of the Kindle is obviously worth different amounts to different people. You may consider $300 too much, as would I, but a half million people think otherwise. Can we all make an effort to avoid the usual egocentric geek logic of "not useful to me, therefore not useful"?
I've opted not to buy this gadget, because ultimately, it's just not as satisfying or lasting as having a book. I have books given to me by my grandparents that they had as teenagers...
And you also have (or most people have) cheap paperbacks you'll read once and discard. (A major hassle for me, since I'm totally unable to simply throw books out; I've got a full box sitting in the back of my car right now, waiting for me to think of a place to donate them.) And you have bulky dictionaries and other reference books that would be a lot easier to refer to if you had them in electronic form.
I'm really tired of hearing this lame "ebooks will never replace real books" argument. No one's saying they will. But that argument is like saying that regular books will never replace stone tablets. There will often be things that old technologies do better.
There are still places where a horse is a more practical form of transportation than a car. But of the dozens of carriages house in the old neighborhood where I live, not one is used for its original purpose.
Cost is still an issue. (As it was for the first cars and books.) I'm certainly not going to pay $300 for something like this. But if it were cheaper, or the convenience factor of ebooks were worth more to me, I'd buy one in a flash.
In point of fact, I already read ebooks on my table PC, a device I spent way too much money on. (Maybe 3 times the cost of a comparable laptop.) Possibly if I didn't already have the tablet, an ebook reader would be a lot more tempting.
Using unnecessarily pretentious language (such as calling the German army "The Bundeswehr" instead of just saying "German army") is always a bad idea. On Slashdot it's positively dangerous!
OK, interesting reading list. But you seem to have missed the joke.
Actually, Abe Lincoln taught himself geometry from that book. Though probably not a good text for our less motivated high school kids.
Lincoln was impressively literate despite almost no formal schooling. If he'd more educational opportunities, he might have amounted to something...
OK, let's hear an example of something more clueless than somebody who doesn't get the humor of using Russell and Whitehead as a high school text, despite the use of smileys.
That has to be the most thoroughly clueless post of all time!
Being about "how not to use math" and about math as such are pretty different things. It's like you were teaching a class on car repair and assigning a book on consumer fraud.
Not everybody pays $100 extra for Windows. Most often you have to buy a Windows license just to get the hardware you want. Even if the manufacturer offers a Windows-free price, it's not usually that much less than the regular price. (Note that OEM licenses are a lot cheaper than retails licenses.) In effect, everybody pays for Windows, whether they run it or not, or even own a license.
periodically I reboot into Windows to play Fallout 3.
I'm curious: do you not use WINE because it's more hassle than rebooting, or because it doesn't work with this game?
Oops, somebody screwed up. This is an Ask Slashdot that asks an interesting question that some of us are actually qualified to answer, and that can't be answered by trivial means such as googling. I don't think that's allowed!