Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1
The conclusion of The Bell Curve was that you can find IQ trends amongst races, and if you recall correctly, Asians had the highest rate of geniuses
This illustrates the flow in Murray's assertions. Genius & achievement are completely unrelated concepts. And if genius were related to achievement, you would probaly find that IQ is not the way to determine genius, since you can cram for many IQ tests.
Many would argue that a genius is more likely to be mentally ill than a man of distinction.
The Bell Curve (the book not the concept) has pretty much been completely discredited.
I imagine that this book will be as well. Measuring "achievement" is easy to skew since it is a moving target that you can define to suit your opinion.
If you asked a Chinese scholar a couple of hundred years ago about the meaning of achievement, he would probaly stress cultural and social stability.
If you asked a Sioux in 1750, he'd probaly describe a great buffalo hunt.
Mr. Murray has undoubtably done a great job describing how citizens of Western societies have done a great job of advancing western civilization.
What a revelation! Maybe in his next book he'll statistically analyze swimming and discover that fish are the best swimmers!
I would never describe a jet plane passing over my house as a "hum".
I used to camp in an area where Air Force F-16's and A-10s would fly very low to approach a target range about 10 miles away. An F-16 sounds more like screeching, earth-shattering death at 100 feet than a "hum".
And if the afterburners are on, forget it. YUO = Temporarily deaf!
Make sure to include Japan, Korea, Southern Europe and China, who soruce nearly 100% of their oil from the mideast.
You also seem to miss the overall point... the Saudis massively increased their production capacity to put the competition out of business. Saudi oil is cheap to the point that US, Mexican and Canadian wells are not economically viable to operate.
It's easy and rather childish to point fingers and declare the one group or another "is evil". The fact is, oil is cheap and land in outlying areas of the US is cheap. These factors lead to longer commutes to work, which lead many americans to buy bigger and more comfortable cars.
When and if oil gets more expensive, people will seek out alternate means of transport or move back to the cities.
The descent of Iraq since the 70's are more a factor of oil economics that the evilness of the US.
The Iraqis were getting rich in the seventies (particularly the early 70's) because oil prices were sky high. (Remember the embargos)
While Saudi Arabia invested billions in developing oil fields, Iraq built statues of Saddam, grand public works projects and palaces. Factor in the huge impact of corruption and nepotism in government & commerce and you have a recipie for trouble.
As oil prices have fallen due to increased supply from the Saudis and Russians, Iraq suffered because it failed to expand it's oil infrastructure.
You can continue to mischaracterize the facts surrounding the 1991 war and the Iran-Iraq war, but I'd strongly recommend that you do some reading first.
Open letters are both extremely obnoxious and grossly ineffective.
If you feel the need to write an open letter, please seek professional medical help. If your initials are "ESR", or if you are a party to the SCO lawsuit, please unplug your computer and hang yourself with the cord.
Auto firms build engine components to open, published standards. Because of this, there are many aftermarket parts companies making parts for most cars.
Car components that are developed to open specs are not licensed to a particular car, so you are free to salvage parts from wrecked or otherwise inoperable vehicles.
I've seen cases where attempting to explain to users that they need to use a special character (ie !,@,#,$) in their passwords is a completely impossible task.
Also remember that schools suck now and many end-users are functionally illiterate.
A bug found in the requirements phase is not the same as someone's misplaced semi-colon.
Say you were told to develop an inventory management style. You deliver a curses-based terminal app and the customer says "wait, I was expecting a web interface!"
That is a requirements-gathering bug that will require substantial work to correct after release!
If you are in an environment that requires information security standards be ahered to (ie medical office, police, software development, etc). Whomever owns the information you work with needs the control.
If you are an insurance examiner working with my medical records, I don't want YOU to to control the information on "YOUR" computer. Your employer, who is legally responsible for that information, doesn't either.
And if a court ordered you to produce a private key and you deleted it, you would be held in contempt and charged with hindering an investigation -- and probaly go to prision for a few years.
Every time a PGP article is posted, everyone here starts panting about how everyone should send signed & encrypted email and how wonderful the world would be, yatta yatta.
Well, Microsoft did it -- you'll see the amount of encrypted email increase substantially as companies adopt this new version of Office and implement their own identity management servers.
So what's the big hub-ubb? If you are being investigated, a court order will result in the police getting your GPG/PGP private key anyway, so that argument is out...
My parents have DirecWay.... It is difficult to configure multiple computers and unreliable in the extreme. You also have lots of obnoxious restrictions and speed caps, which is outrageous considering the costs involved.
You'd be better off with ISDN, although it is also extremely expensive.
Amen... Yahoo likes to take you on the scenic route.
I got Yahoo directions from a motel in Syracuse, NY to the Hilton in Harrisburg, PA. Yahoo had me get off on the opposite edge of Harrisburg and drive for 45 minutes down side streets.
When I got to my room, I could see the fricking highway exit I should have taken... about 1500 yards away.
I've seen all sorts of "datacenters"... from a boy's room of a convereted elementary school to two-story behemoths in high-rises.
There are plenty of problems to be had, even when there is a professional staff of electricians, carpenters and plumbers. (Yes, plumbers... one place had a water-cooled mainframe)
There is also the issue of floor load... at one building they discovered that placing three IBM Shark's in the middle of the floor caused the cantilevered floor to "jump"... we actually had to borrow 1/4" steel plates from the local DOT to roll the sharks to the edge of the building.
There is a glut of computer rooms in this country... take advantage of the glut and pay someone to handle this.
In case you missed the musings of the "Zen master" regarding the SCO suit:
from http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/unix-natu re.html
Master Foo Discourses on the Unix-Nature
A student said to Master Foo: "We are told that the firm called SCO holds true dominion over Unix".
Master Foo nodded.
The student continued, "Yet we are also told that the firm called OpenGroup also holds true dominion over Unix".
Master Foo nodded.
"How can this be?" asked the student.
Master Foo replied:
"SCO indeed has dominion over the code of Unix, but the code of Unix is not Unix. OpenGroup indeed has dominion over the name of Unix, but the name of Unix is not Unix".
"What, then, is the Unix-nature?" asked the student.
Master Foo replied:
"Not code. Not name. Not mind. Not things. Always changing, yet never changing".
"The Unix-nature is simple and empty. Because it is simple and empty, it is more powerful than a typhoon".
"Moving in accordance with the law of nature, it unfolds inexorably in the minds of programmers, assimilating designs to its own nature. All software that would compete with it must become like to it; empty, empty, profoundly empty, perfectly void, hail!"
Slashdot Mirror
www.openafs.org
The conclusion of The Bell Curve was that you can find IQ trends amongst races, and if you recall correctly, Asians had the highest rate of geniuses
This illustrates the flow in Murray's assertions. Genius & achievement are completely unrelated concepts. And if genius were related to achievement, you would probaly find that IQ is not the way to determine genius, since you can cram for many IQ tests.
Many would argue that a genius is more likely to be mentally ill than a man of distinction.
The Bell Curve (the book not the concept) has pretty much been completely discredited.
I imagine that this book will be as well. Measuring "achievement" is easy to skew since it is a moving target that you can define to suit your opinion.
If you asked a Chinese scholar a couple of hundred years ago about the meaning of achievement, he would probaly stress cultural and social stability.
If you asked a Sioux in 1750, he'd probaly describe a great buffalo hunt.
Mr. Murray has undoubtably done a great job describing how citizens of Western societies have done a great job of advancing western civilization.
What a revelation! Maybe in his next book he'll statistically analyze swimming and discover that fish are the best swimmers!
It is easy to be popular when you are the only choice.
I would never describe a jet plane passing over my house as a "hum".
I used to camp in an area where Air Force F-16's and A-10s would fly very low to approach a target range about 10 miles away. An F-16 sounds more like screeching, earth-shattering death at 100 feet than a "hum".
And if the afterburners are on, forget it. YUO = Temporarily deaf!
A giant statue of Mr. Eric Raymond out of Mt. Hood or something. It seems like this man has an insatiable ego that cannot be fulfilled.
Make sure to include Japan, Korea, Southern Europe and China, who soruce nearly 100% of their oil from the mideast.
You also seem to miss the overall point... the Saudis massively increased their production capacity to put the competition out of business. Saudi oil is cheap to the point that US, Mexican and Canadian wells are not economically viable to operate.
It's easy and rather childish to point fingers and declare the one group or another "is evil". The fact is, oil is cheap and land in outlying areas of the US is cheap. These factors lead to longer commutes to work, which lead many americans to buy bigger and more comfortable cars.
When and if oil gets more expensive, people will seek out alternate means of transport or move back to the cities.
Tone down the FUD, man.
The descent of Iraq since the 70's are more a factor of oil economics that the evilness of the US.
The Iraqis were getting rich in the seventies (particularly the early 70's) because oil prices were sky high. (Remember the embargos)
While Saudi Arabia invested billions in developing oil fields, Iraq built statues of Saddam, grand public works projects and palaces. Factor in the huge impact of corruption and nepotism in government & commerce and you have a recipie for trouble.
As oil prices have fallen due to increased supply from the Saudis and Russians, Iraq suffered because it failed to expand it's oil infrastructure.
You can continue to mischaracterize the facts surrounding the 1991 war and the Iran-Iraq war, but I'd strongly recommend that you do some reading first.
Security by obscurity! AAAH!@
To whom it may concern:
Open letters are both extremely obnoxious and grossly ineffective.
If you feel the need to write an open letter, please seek professional medical help. If your initials are "ESR", or if you are a party to the SCO lawsuit, please unplug your computer and hang yourself with the cord.
Thank you,
Got a point there...
linux-2.0.39.tar.bz2 - 5958KB
linux-2.2.25.tar.bz2 - 15421KB
linux-2.6.0-test0.tar.bz2 - 32448BK
Auto firms build engine components to open, published standards. Because of this, there are many aftermarket parts companies making parts for most cars.
Car components that are developed to open specs are not licensed to a particular car, so you are free to salvage parts from wrecked or otherwise inoperable vehicles.
Are you trying to saw that Slashdot is run by a bunch of hypocrites?
I once saw a man with a hat that held soda cans and spliced two straws together.
This guy was able to enjoy 24oz of carbonated refreshment instead of 12, but looked like a total ass.
I've seen cases where attempting to explain to users that they need to use a special character (ie !,@,#,$) in their passwords is a completely impossible task.
Also remember that schools suck now and many end-users are functionally illiterate.
Too bad a Xeon with extra L3 cache beat the crap out of the 64 bit athlon chips!
You are comparing apples and oranges.
A bug found in the requirements phase is not the same as someone's misplaced semi-colon.
Say you were told to develop an inventory management style. You deliver a curses-based terminal app and the customer says "wait, I was expecting a web interface!"
That is a requirements-gathering bug that will require substantial work to correct after release!
If you are in an environment that requires information security standards be ahered to (ie medical office, police, software development, etc). Whomever owns the information you work with needs the control.
If you are an insurance examiner working with my medical records, I don't want YOU to to control the information on "YOUR" computer. Your employer, who is legally responsible for that information, doesn't either.
And if a court ordered you to produce a private key and you deleted it, you would be held in contempt and charged with hindering an investigation -- and probaly go to prision for a few years.
Every time a PGP article is posted, everyone here starts panting about how everyone should send signed & encrypted email and how wonderful the world would be, yatta yatta.
Well, Microsoft did it -- you'll see the amount of encrypted email increase substantially as companies adopt this new version of Office and implement their own identity management servers.
So what's the big hub-ubb? If you are being investigated, a court order will result in the police getting your GPG/PGP private key anyway, so that argument is out...
I guess since it is Microsoft, it has to be bad!
Answer - it sucks...
My parents have DirecWay.... It is difficult to configure multiple computers and unreliable in the extreme. You also have lots of obnoxious restrictions and speed caps, which is outrageous considering the costs involved.
You'd be better off with ISDN, although it is also extremely expensive.
It's disturbing that you would say such a thing in the wake of September 11.
Amen... Yahoo likes to take you on the scenic route.
I got Yahoo directions from a motel in Syracuse, NY to the Hilton in Harrisburg, PA. Yahoo had me get off on the opposite edge of Harrisburg and drive for 45 minutes down side streets.
When I got to my room, I could see the fricking highway exit I should have taken... about 1500 yards away.
I've seen all sorts of "datacenters"... from a boy's room of a convereted elementary school to two-story behemoths in high-rises.
There are plenty of problems to be had, even when there is a professional staff of electricians, carpenters and plumbers. (Yes, plumbers... one place had a water-cooled mainframe)
There is also the issue of floor load... at one building they discovered that placing three IBM Shark's in the middle of the floor caused the cantilevered floor to "jump"... we actually had to borrow 1/4" steel plates from the local DOT to roll the sharks to the edge of the building.
There is a glut of computer rooms in this country... take advantage of the glut and pay someone to handle this.
I smoke cigars, and feel just fine.
My coworker eats life-savers, and has been diagnosed with skin cancer.
I conclude from this experiment that life savers cause cancer, but cigars are ok.
from http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/unix-nat