A person isn't an extremeist for believing in Creationism or its politically correct cousin.
An extremist is someone who attempts to interject religious beliefs into the secular public school system. The Abrahamic creation myth that Christians espouses isn't the only such myth, and peddling such myths in secular schools only serves to isolate and diminish the religious beliefs of others.
See this Wikipedia article for a sampling of other creation stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_beliefs
How would you like to be an eight year old hindu child and be told in school that you have two choices for creation stories: the big bang or christian mythology.
Or on the flip side, how would you like your child in public school to be taught that that monotheistic stuff that your parents talk about is drivel, and Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva got everything started?
A rational person will consider these things. A devout person will send their child to parochial school. An extremist will launch into some drivel about "moral majorities", "athiestic liberals" or sideline into abortion or a similar divisive topic.
The "evangelical athiests" that dominate the liberal establishment created the well financed evangelical christians of today.
By various policies that essentially smashed the Catholic school system that educated the bulk of the middle class in big cities for years, they created the mass of disconnected catholics with poor public educations that went looking elsewhere for religion.
They fell into the hands of independent churches that have turned into reactionary political fundraising machines. You know have INDIVIDUAL churches with 30,000 to 50,000 members that raise tens of millions of dollars annually, much of it going towards political charity rather than the social causes that the catholics always espoused.
There's a difference between getting piss-drunk and having a beer with some colleagues at a pub. I highly doubt that a UPS driver, whose continued employment is dependent on his CDL is going to go get hammered before driving home in uniform.
I also question the notion that an after work union meeting is a drinking festival. I've been a union member, and most of the meetings were centered around things like retirement seminars and disability insurance.
Unprofessional employees can pose a problem, but the Federal government really has no business deciding what is an appropriate dress code for off-duty private employees.
Why shouldn't I be able to meet with fellow union members after work?
When I leave for the day, my time is my time. Whether I want to go to the zoo or talk to my shop steward at a pub, it none of the NLRB's business and certainly none of my employers.
Do you want your credit information potentially stored on insecure desktops that any yahoo can compromise?
If you need to rotate BIOS passwords every 90 days, buy PCs that allow that capability. IBM/Lenovo PCs allow remote BIOS changes and upgrades, for instance.
I worked as a DBA after I left school. On of the more experienced DBAs that I worked with an experienced DBA who was on-call 24x7 and was one of the only operations people who knew how the massive application that we administered worked inside and out.
Her pay in 2000? $27k after five years.
I was making nearly $50 as a clueless newbie two weeks out of school because I negotiated.
I wish I was. Schenectady is a bad example... its like New York's Detriot.
In the 50's it had a population of about 120,000 the main General Electric plant, GE Corporate HQ and a railroad locomotive factory. GE alone employed 50,000, mostly skilled tradesmen. Today GE Power Systems is barely running with about 2,500 folks.
I live in a suburb of Albany, and my school & property taxes are just under $5,000/yr. I pay for garbage and water too.
Why so high?
States like NY have high taxes because of numerous and large local government. NY state government is huge, and there are over 3,500 towns, villages, cities and counties. Each entity had a paid board, supervisor/mayor/etc and many have overlapping police forces. My home is near the state university, and is within the jurisdiction of five seperate police forces. The average state policeman makes $80k/yr and retires after 20 years at half pay.
Schools are also expensive. The average teacher's salary is around $55k and teachers retire making $75k. Some states, even in the northeast, pay civil servants far less.
Even in a smaller city or suburb, if you own a home property taxes can end up costing you 7-15% of your income.
You can deduct property taxes from your income taxes, of course, but it adds up. A 3bed/1bath in Nassau County, NY often pays around $16,000 in taxes. Outside of the NYC area, a typical 3bed/1.5bath house in a decent neighborhood of a distressed upstate city like Schenectady pays $4,000-$5,000 (on an assessed value of ~$65,000).
I'm not even factoring in sales & excise taxes, which are very significant and nearly impossible to track.
So the Soviets were just in their invasion and butchery in Afghanistan, and the US was in the wrong for supporting the fighters who fought against them?
Saying that the political class in the west that dominates the defense and intelligence establishment is a menace, is a valid political point. I probably agree with you.
But declaring the savages who would merrily rape your wife and butcher your children on television for the sake of a spectacle justified is nothing short of treason. Treason against your nation, culture and civilized humanity.
These people that you defend are against all civilization. They've studied Stalin and Mao and understand the importance of destroying the past. Why do you think the Taliban destroyed Buddist shrines that have stood for a milennia.
Whether we are "good" or not, Bin Laden and his cronies are the enemy, and are the enemy of all civilized men. The sooner their ilk are exterminated from the earth, the better.
Why should a developer capable of re-writing a TCP stack be making a subsistence living?
I could quit my job, move into a crappy apartment in the ghetto, sell my car to drive a '91 Civic and get a job at Starbucks or whatever.
But why? The work I do is worth alot to my employer, we have a 15 year home loan and modest late model cars. I'd like to keep my kids out of public school and live debt free. What's wrong with that?
In most US states, about 50% would go towards various federal state and local taxes. The rest rapidly gets eaten us by food, fuel, housing, etc.
When you start making good money, its harder to live on less. When I was in college, I lived on a total of about $300/mo including rent, food, booze and entertainment. Now... its probably closer to $3000/mo for my wife and I.
You'll find that in the "real world" particularly in big government or corporate projects, your title indicates little more than your paygrade.
Theoretically, a "Systems" engineer focuses on more abstract design and the interaction between various modules of a system. In reality, you're the new kid and you'll get whatever project your boss has that nobody else wants.
Sometimes being in particular titles can help or slow your promotion prospects. At one gov't employer that I was at, a IT Project Manager started making slightly more than the typical Network Analyst or Computer Programmer/Analyst, but getting promoted was alot more difficult for someone in the Project Manager track. YMMV.
When the iMacs first came out, those adapters were in short supply and were more like $150 when you could find them. And who wants to keep two PCs running just so that you can print?
Even having to spend $50 is too much. I recently hooked a 1983-vintage Epson FX-80 dot-matrix printer to a laptop in order to fill out some triplicate forms.
Guess what? It was no problem, as the PC industry didn't see any need to gratuoisly change interfaces for no good reason.
Not really. GPL is another way of interpreting how intellectual property is handled.
If software is a form of expression, than why shouldn't it be treated like language or mathematics?
Did you need to pay somebody to tell your toddler the story of the three bears? Or should someone get a royalty for every person who learns to speak english?
Exactly... Apple produced an excellent computer for scientific users, and appeared to have a serious business offering.
They've proven with the platform swap that they aren't a serious competitor. I know of a few enterprise environments that were considering deploying thousands of iMacs and eMacs to branch office sites for a variety of reasons... but those plans will be shelved for at least 2-3 years until the product line stabilizes again.
The difference is that executives at Microsoft screech about open-source software being "Communist" and "unamerican", while having no problem taking advantage of open-sourced software. (at least in the past)
Most enterprises are likely supporting multiple environments anyway (Windows, UNIX, etc). U of V can probably port their software quite easily (especially if they developed it in Xcode). Not to mention, it was likely developed by students. Porting to the new platform would be a good exercise for current students.
Hah! Keep drinking the kool-aid, buddy! Porting computational software from PowerPC is a non-trivial thing to do. PowerPC has certain advantages for certain computational processes, which is THE REASON WHY THEY USED MAC IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I guess not being an Apple owner, I don't get it. I'm a big fan of OSX, but fortunately my employer shelled out the cash for my instantly-obsolete powerbook.
Apple has never had a problem with holding its customers and developer community in contempt.
For example -
- You have to pay for point releases of the operating systems to stay current. Microsoft still supports six year old operating systems with frequent and free patches. Solaris still provides free updates for Solaris 2.6
- Some schmuck who paid $2,000 for an Apple serial laser printer in 1997 got reamed by Apple in 1998 when it retired all legacy interfaces in new Macs. Either pay $300 for an ethernet adapter or enjoy your $2000 paperweight
- The fools who decided to include Apple systems in an enterprise environment is now stuck with two hardware platforms to support. I'm sure the University of Virginia is really happy that they've wasted thousands of man-hours developing computatinon software on Power.
- The even more foolish souls who try to sell software to Apple users get fucked, since Apple will steer lots of consumers towards Apple software solutions when consumers complain about "slow" programs running in emulation. (End Mac-users don't know shit about processor architectures or emulation)
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A person isn't an extremeist for believing in Creationism or its politically correct cousin.
An extremist is someone who attempts to interject religious beliefs into the secular public school system. The Abrahamic creation myth that Christians espouses isn't the only such myth, and peddling such myths in secular schools only serves to isolate and diminish the religious beliefs of others.
See this Wikipedia article for a sampling of other creation stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_beliefs
How would you like to be an eight year old hindu child and be told in school that you have two choices for creation stories: the big bang or christian mythology.
Or on the flip side, how would you like your child in public school to be taught that that monotheistic stuff that your parents talk about is drivel, and Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva got everything started?
A rational person will consider these things. A devout person will send their child to parochial school. An extremist will launch into some drivel about "moral majorities", "athiestic liberals" or sideline into abortion or a similar divisive topic.
The "evangelical athiests" that dominate the liberal establishment created the well financed evangelical christians of today.
By various policies that essentially smashed the Catholic school system that educated the bulk of the middle class in big cities for years, they created the mass of disconnected catholics with poor public educations that went looking elsewhere for religion.
They fell into the hands of independent churches that have turned into reactionary political fundraising machines. You know have INDIVIDUAL churches with 30,000 to 50,000 members that raise tens of millions of dollars annually, much of it going towards political charity rather than the social causes that the catholics always espoused.
There's a difference between getting piss-drunk and having a beer with some colleagues at a pub. I highly doubt that a UPS driver, whose continued employment is dependent on his CDL is going to go get hammered before driving home in uniform.
I also question the notion that an after work union meeting is a drinking festival. I've been a union member, and most of the meetings were centered around things like retirement seminars and disability insurance.
Unprofessional employees can pose a problem, but the Federal government really has no business deciding what is an appropriate dress code for off-duty private employees.
Why shouldn't I be able to meet with fellow union members after work?
When I leave for the day, my time is my time. Whether I want to go to the zoo or talk to my shop steward at a pub, it none of the NLRB's business and certainly none of my employers.
Do you want your credit information potentially stored on insecure desktops that any yahoo can compromise?
If you need to rotate BIOS passwords every 90 days, buy PCs that allow that capability. IBM/Lenovo PCs allow remote BIOS changes and upgrades, for instance.
Some companies are required by regulation to record who accesses what information where. Think banks, insurance companies and credit bureaus.
Where I work there are similar no removable storage (including floppy) policies for people dealing with sensitive information.
She's also a woman, which doesn't help.
I worked as a DBA after I left school. On of the more experienced DBAs that I worked with an experienced DBA who was on-call 24x7 and was one of the only operations people who knew how the massive application that we administered worked inside and out.
Her pay in 2000? $27k after five years.
I was making nearly $50 as a clueless newbie two weeks out of school because I negotiated.
I wish I was. Schenectady is a bad example... its like New York's Detriot.
In the 50's it had a population of about 120,000 the main General Electric plant, GE Corporate HQ and a railroad locomotive factory. GE alone employed 50,000, mostly skilled tradesmen. Today GE Power Systems is barely running with about 2,500 folks.
I live in a suburb of Albany, and my school & property taxes are just under $5,000/yr. I pay for garbage and water too.
Why so high?
States like NY have high taxes because of numerous and large local government. NY state government is huge, and there are over 3,500 towns, villages, cities and counties. Each entity had a paid board, supervisor/mayor/etc and many have overlapping police forces. My home is near the state university, and is within the jurisdiction of five seperate police forces. The average state policeman makes $80k/yr and retires after 20 years at half pay.
Schools are also expensive. The average teacher's salary is around $55k and teachers retire making $75k. Some states, even in the northeast, pay civil servants far less.
Even in a smaller city or suburb, if you own a home property taxes can end up costing you 7-15% of your income.
You can deduct property taxes from your income taxes, of course, but it adds up. A 3bed/1bath in Nassau County, NY often pays around $16,000 in taxes. Outside of the NYC area, a typical 3bed/1.5bath house in a decent neighborhood of a distressed upstate city like Schenectady pays $4,000-$5,000 (on an assessed value of ~$65,000).
I'm not even factoring in sales & excise taxes, which are very significant and nearly impossible to track.
So the Soviets were just in their invasion and butchery in Afghanistan, and the US was in the wrong for supporting the fighters who fought against them?
Saying that the political class in the west that dominates the defense and intelligence establishment is a menace, is a valid political point. I probably agree with you.
But declaring the savages who would merrily rape your wife and butcher your children on television for the sake of a spectacle justified is nothing short of treason. Treason against your nation, culture and civilized humanity.
These people that you defend are against all civilization. They've studied Stalin and Mao and understand the importance of destroying the past. Why do you think the Taliban destroyed Buddist shrines that have stood for a milennia.
Whether we are "good" or not, Bin Laden and his cronies are the enemy, and are the enemy of all civilized men. The sooner their ilk are exterminated from the earth, the better.
Ok... so when somebody blows you up on the train, that's ok, unless you are a Canadian?
Why should a developer capable of re-writing a TCP stack be making a subsistence living?
I could quit my job, move into a crappy apartment in the ghetto, sell my car to drive a '91 Civic and get a job at Starbucks or whatever.
But why? The work I do is worth alot to my employer, we have a 15 year home loan and modest late model cars. I'd like to keep my kids out of public school and live debt free. What's wrong with that?
Mortgage+PropertyTaxes: $1300/mo
Two car payments (36mo): $600
Food: $450
Gas: $250
Misc: $400
We really don't live a lavish lifestyle... no fancy furniture or plasma TVs. We've paid off the student loans and have no credit card debt.
The house is by far the biggest expense. We have a nice house, but it was owned by old folks and needs alot maintenance.
In most US states, about 50% would go towards various federal state and local taxes. The rest rapidly gets eaten us by food, fuel, housing, etc.
When you start making good money, its harder to live on less. When I was in college, I lived on a total of about $300/mo including rent, food, booze and entertainment. Now... its probably closer to $3000/mo for my wife and I.
You forgot the most important thing:
What about the children?
I heard that even Google ripped it off from the upcoming Apple OSX 10.7! Steve Jobs is god!
You'll find that in the "real world" particularly in big government or corporate projects, your title indicates little more than your paygrade.
Theoretically, a "Systems" engineer focuses on more abstract design and the interaction between various modules of a system. In reality, you're the new kid and you'll get whatever project your boss has that nobody else wants.
Sometimes being in particular titles can help or slow your promotion prospects. At one gov't employer that I was at, a IT Project Manager started making slightly more than the typical Network Analyst or Computer Programmer/Analyst, but getting promoted was alot more difficult for someone in the Project Manager track. YMMV.
No, I'm fast-forwarding a year in the future, where present-day Macintosh applications will need to either run in emulation, or be recompiled.
Emulating a PPC on a Pentium 4 will have a huge performance hit, and you'll be shelling out for the latest and greatest Quark and Illustrator.
Damn, I'm going to be rich.
When the iMacs first came out, those adapters were in short supply and were more like $150 when you could find them. And who wants to keep two PCs running just so that you can print?
Even having to spend $50 is too much. I recently hooked a 1983-vintage Epson FX-80 dot-matrix printer to a laptop in order to fill out some triplicate forms.
Guess what? It was no problem, as the PC industry didn't see any need to gratuoisly change interfaces for no good reason.
Not really. GPL is another way of interpreting how intellectual property is handled.
If software is a form of expression, than why shouldn't it be treated like language or mathematics?
Did you need to pay somebody to tell your toddler the story of the three bears? Or should someone get a royalty for every person who learns to speak english?
Exactly... Apple produced an excellent computer for scientific users, and appeared to have a serious business offering.
They've proven with the platform swap that they aren't a serious competitor. I know of a few enterprise environments that were considering deploying thousands of iMacs and eMacs to branch office sites for a variety of reasons... but those plans will be shelved for at least 2-3 years until the product line stabilizes again.
The difference is that executives at Microsoft screech about open-source software being "Communist" and "unamerican", while having no problem taking advantage of open-sourced software. (at least in the past)
Hah! Keep drinking the kool-aid, buddy! Porting computational software from PowerPC is a non-trivial thing to do. PowerPC has certain advantages for certain computational processes, which is THE REASON WHY THEY USED MAC IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I guess not being an Apple owner, I don't get it. I'm a big fan of OSX, but fortunately my employer shelled out the cash for my instantly-obsolete powerbook.
Apple has never had a problem with holding its customers and developer community in contempt.
For example -
- You have to pay for point releases of the operating systems to stay current. Microsoft still supports six year old operating systems with frequent and free patches. Solaris still provides free updates for Solaris 2.6
- Some schmuck who paid $2,000 for an Apple serial laser printer in 1997 got reamed by Apple in 1998 when it retired all legacy interfaces in new Macs. Either pay $300 for an ethernet adapter or enjoy your $2000 paperweight
- The fools who decided to include Apple systems in an enterprise environment is now stuck with two hardware platforms to support. I'm sure the University of Virginia is really happy that they've wasted thousands of man-hours developing computatinon software on Power.
- The even more foolish souls who try to sell software to Apple users get fucked, since Apple will steer lots of consumers towards Apple software solutions when consumers complain about "slow" programs running in emulation. (End Mac-users don't know shit about processor architectures or emulation)