things we can tell about reality master by reading his posts in this thread...
Pretty close, although not that impressive when you consider that 90-95% of Slashdotters probably fall into those categories.
However, I do take issue with this...
He's got no political perspective as, in his eyes, the Republican vs. Democrat debate is an Us vs. Them thing.
Not at all. I'm an engineer. To me, everything comes down to "what works" or "what doesn't work". Not everything the Democratic Party advocates is bad, and not everything the Republicans advocate is good. But on balance, Democrats advocate more central government control, and that has been proven time after time that it doesn't work. But government control sounds like such a simple solution that unfortunately people fall into the trap of wanting the simple solution. People very rarely apply any historical perspective.
Take Vouchers -- I advocate vouchers because public schools don't work compared to private schools. I also think that poor people should have the same ability to put their kids in the school of their choice as rich people. Yet Democrats usually oppose vouchers. Why, when the people it would help the most are poor people in bad schools?
I'll tell you why: Control. Schools are one of the most powerful institutions of social architecture. Democrats believe passionately that the government has a role in shaping and molding people into having the beliefs they think they should have. If parents could make their own decisions about how to educate their children, they would be giving up a great deal of their power.
But social architecture has failed over and over and over, and in fact, almost always does more harm than good. Welfare has destroyed the character of generations of poor people, because many people refuse to believe that you can't simply give away money in order to raise people out of poverty. But it sure sounds good on paper.
You think you have me pegged in some nice little slot in your mind, but quite frankly you haven't proved you have any "political perspective". You only seem capable of throwing out little cynicisms to prove that "Hey, I'm not fooled by any of the candidates, I know what's really going on". It must be nice to have a neat little view of the world, full of "rich people that don't care" and "poor people screwed by The Man". Guess what -- the world is more complex than your narrow little view.
when you start giving up your own beliefs for any group, you become a simple minded fool.
No one is "giving up any beliefs". I have serious differences with the Republican party platform, but they most closely represent my beliefs (note "my beliefs"). However, I also am a realist. Democracy works on votes. Guess what? We don't elect a dictator. The President has to work with Congress.
...voting republican because they believe that baby's shouldn't be slaughtered in the woom
What was that you were saying about "simple minded"? Reducing a complex subject to flamebait does not help your point.
i'll be either voting Nader or writing in McCain.
Thus proving you have absolutely no idea what either man stands for. It's not as bad as the fools who says "I'm voting for either Nader or the Libertarians", but close. While I severely dislike McCain, he's definitely not as bad as Nader.
Oh, there is no question the Republic party is far from perfect. The religious right is definitely a pain in the butt. "Prayer in schools" is particularly irritating to me. But all freedom begins with economic freedom, and the religious right makes a lot of noise, but fortunately doesn't have that much power in the party.
One issue I will defend them on is mandatory filters in schools and libraries. I realize reasonable people can disagree on this, but I think the key point is "public places". People in public have a right to a reasonably non-threatening invironment, and I don't think it's unreasonable to attempt to block severely offensive material. For example, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that my little girl should be able to go to the library without teenage boys bringing up women having sex with animals as a joke. For some reason, people think that if the filters can't be perfect, then they're useless. As long as they stop most of the behavior, or make it difficult enough that it's not worth messing with, then that's good enough.
As for the Libertarian party, I like a lot of what they believe in, but unfortunately the party is full of extremists who believe that one set of principles is always applicable in all circumstances. The most telling debate I ever had with a Libertarian is one guy who advocated that people should be able to shoot guns at other people, and in fact had the perfect right to do so -- until he actually hit someone. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and his infringement didn't begin until he hit someone.
I've had Libertarians tell me that weapons should be absolutely unrestricted. Howitzer on your house? No problem. Personal nuke? Yup -- it's your right, as long as you don't set it off (thus infringing on other's rights).
That's the problem with Libertarianism in a nutshell. It's all based on negative feedback. If you crack down hard enough on crime, then crime ceases. The flaw in that reasoning is that it assumes people are perfectly rational, and people simply aren't.
Now, I will grant you those examples are extreme cases, and I believe (hope) that the rank-and-file libertarian believes that some preventative limits on personal freedom is necessary to prevent total anarchy. But if you look at other, more minor, things, you find the same thread of problems in the philosophy. All negative feedback, no willingness to do some preventative measures.
Not to mention that they advocate going back to the Gold Standard, which is just insane, 19th century thinking.:)
Somehow, I find this statement rather ironic. I'm sure it's unintentional:)
Heh! It does sound funny when you put it that way. It's all in the context, though. When it comes to individual freedom, you want as much power as possible in the hands of the individual. When it comes to the government, you want as little power as possible concentrated in one person.
Wow, talk about your unprovable, flamebait blanket statements.
First of all, it's not "blanket". I made a point to say "more often than not". Second of all, maybe you missed when Democrats were trying to ramrod socialized medicine through a few years ago? That's called "the government consolidating power, and taking away freedom". Yes, it was Republicans that saved us from the horror of a bill.
You'll also note which party consistently votes to give more power to the state and local levels, and which party consistently votes to take away power from the state and local levels. Yes, more local power == more local freedom.
Don't you think it's a little strange that he couldn't get at least one other Democrat to support it? Don't you think he would rather have a 2/2 balance?
I'll give him credit for sponsoring it; not all Democrats are anti-freedom. But more often than not, Republicans vote to give more freedom and take away government power, and Democrats vote to consolidate power and take away freedom.
Wow, it's nice to see that someone else realizes this.
I know, and we're in the minority. Unfortunately, it's very counter-intuitive to a lot of people, who primarily look at personalities. Not to say that the man doesn't matter at all (Clinton has made the Presidency a laughingstock), but most people don't realize that Congress has far, far more power than the President. Even if you got some 3rd party fool in the White House, all that means is that nothing would happen for four years.
It's not a coincidence that there are three Republicans and only one Democrat on this bill. Don't get all your information from the media (including Slashdot), look at reality. And this not rare, it's typical. Please vote accordingly.
I guess my primary complaint is that he doesn't acknowledge the huge size and complexity is a problem. Yes, every feature has a justification, but the sum total of the justifications doesn't outweigh the massive weight and learning curve of the language (if that makes sense). I guess that's the acknowledgement I'm waiting to hear.
His solution to most problems of the past has been adding more features. I, like a lot of people, am looking for a language with 80% of the functionality but 20% of the complexity. Java is a good example of that type of language, but Java has its own problems. I just can't imagine him endorsing a language with fewer features than C++.
Xerces is what I'm playing with, using Sun's Forte under Linux. Parsing an 4K XML file (with empty SAX callbacks) took 117ms on my P/II 266 machine. Does anyone here think they couldn't write an XML parser that would parse a 4K file in under 5ms in C++? Or perhaps even 1ms?
I don't even think I could write a C++ program that took 117ms.
Incidently, that 117ms was after executing the parser once to make sure everything was loaded (the first time took about 1.5sec!!!)
I think you're underplaying the performance problems of Java. I've been using some XML libraries, and was absolutely shocked by the bad performance. In this application at least, Java is at least 10-100 times slower than C++ code.
I agree with you about the Java-the-language, but the JVM is a millstone around the neck of the language that has got to go. If Java could be natively compiled, it would still be slower than C++, but at least not orders of magnitude.
There is a lot of talk about PARC's historical accomplishments, and they are significant. But what have they produced recently? I don't mean to malign anyone still working there (it's not always the people, it's often the organization), but is the PARC of today the same as the PARC of yesterday?
One requirement to vote was that you were required to own Real Property. Since they uneducated seldomly owne property, they were not a large factor in election results.
Public speaking ability != intelligence. How about if we get you up on a debate platform in front of the whole world and see you smooth the words flow?
Read his policy statements. You do know how to read, right? Or does only smooth talking impress you?
Does anyone know anything about solid state gyroscopes? I read about a gyro once that worked using a length of fiber optic cable wound into a loop. You passed a laser through a splitter, one beam down the cable, and then both beams hitting a light sensor. When you spun the loop, it would cause the interference pattern to change, thus measuring rotation. The dynamic range of its operation was astounding, like from 1000RPM down to.0001 RPM or something crazy.
From a project like this to succeed, I would imagine you would need something like this that could withstand the G forces while giving you extremely accurate results.
It seemed so simple that I figured they would have taken over the world by now with a million uses, but I haven't heard anything since. Anyone know anything?
Try teaching 35 children with four or five unruly ones, probably couldn't.
I agree that teaching requires certain management skills. Where I take issue is that students need "specially trained" people over people that simply have an interest in their education. The original poster downplayed the importance of parental interest over teacher qualifications. In other words, that it was more important to leave the question of where a student should get educated to the government, rather than to the parent.
Diamond is very hard, but I don't think it's particularly strong, is it? I mean, it's incredibly easy to shatter a diamond. A diamond tower would probably have great tensile strength, but crummy rigidity. If an airplane hit it, it would rain diamond shards. That would really suck for the people below.:)
I've heard no good reasons for it, and however bad public schools may be, I will not stand for harming them further.
This is your problem in a nutshell. Which is more important -- harming the public school institution or the harm to the public school students? Isn't the point that we want students to be educated as well as possible?
Educators, by profession and by societal expecation, are qualified to educate (thus the term!).
The "educators" are the problem, not the solution. Yes, some teachers are good teachers, who have the best interests of the children in mind. But others are typical government beauracrats whose only function is generate more money, students be damned. Explain to me how we got "social promotion". Explain to me how we got "whole language" (that destroyed a generation of reading skills). Explain to me how a student can make it all the way through school without being able to read!
As far as "qualifications" to teach, there has been study after study showing home schooled students do far better than the average because of the personal attention. Let's face it... teaching is important, but it's not rocket science.
That's wrong, and leads directly into the
old "rich get richer..." game,
The rich already send their kids to private school. Hell, I forget the statistic, but an absurd number of public school teachers send their kids to private school. I think it's the ultimate in classism to insist the poor can only go to the school that the Government dictates (no matter how bad), and the rich can send their kids to any school they want.
How does diverting money away from these [public] schools -- gutting both -- any kind of sane solution here?
Because the schools are controlled by interests that do not care about how students are educated, namely, the teacher unions. I have a friend who worked for LA Unified. Her school had a early-grade teacher who would only hand out coloring assignments. Every day. The prinicipal couldn't because of the union contracts.
The power must be given to the parents, because they are the best qualified to care about their child's education. Yes, there are some parents who have wacky, creationist ideas. But that's a small area compared to the utter disaster the public schools have become.
But one thing I simply don't understand is this whole thing of "taking money away from public schools". The government's job is to make sure students get an education. Where the money goes is irrelevent, as long as children are getting educated. If we have fewer public schools, and more private schools spring up, I simply don't understand why this is a problem. The amount of money per student stays the same. It just means some schools would be consolidated.
While I don't support evolution being pulled from school curriculums, better one science course be messed up than students being graduated unable to read.
But hey, if they can't spell Darwin at least they've heard of him!
...choose less offensive Supreme Court nominees...
Yeah, God forbid we get justices who actually interpret the constitution rather than making up laws as they go. In any case, what type of justices do you think the Libertarians are going to pick? Activist ones? Please. I do find it highly amusing that you are voting Libertarian, rather than your first choice, the pseudo-socialists. Do you actually look at what people believe before voting?
Not to mention you are a slave of the media. You have no evidence that Bush is dumb, except what you hear in the media. Or perhaps because he's not a perfect public speaker. Either way, you're making an uninformed judgement.
Slashdot Mirror
things we can tell about reality master by reading his posts in this thread...
Pretty close, although not that impressive when you consider that 90-95% of Slashdotters probably fall into those categories.
However, I do take issue with this...
He's got no political perspective as, in his eyes, the Republican vs. Democrat debate is an Us vs. Them thing.
Not at all. I'm an engineer. To me, everything comes down to "what works" or "what doesn't work". Not everything the Democratic Party advocates is bad, and not everything the Republicans advocate is good. But on balance, Democrats advocate more central government control, and that has been proven time after time that it doesn't work. But government control sounds like such a simple solution that unfortunately people fall into the trap of wanting the simple solution. People very rarely apply any historical perspective.
Take Vouchers -- I advocate vouchers because public schools don't work compared to private schools. I also think that poor people should have the same ability to put their kids in the school of their choice as rich people. Yet Democrats usually oppose vouchers. Why, when the people it would help the most are poor people in bad schools?
I'll tell you why: Control. Schools are one of the most powerful institutions of social architecture. Democrats believe passionately that the government has a role in shaping and molding people into having the beliefs they think they should have. If parents could make their own decisions about how to educate their children, they would be giving up a great deal of their power.
But social architecture has failed over and over and over, and in fact, almost always does more harm than good. Welfare has destroyed the character of generations of poor people, because many people refuse to believe that you can't simply give away money in order to raise people out of poverty. But it sure sounds good on paper.
You think you have me pegged in some nice little slot in your mind, but quite frankly you haven't proved you have any "political perspective". You only seem capable of throwing out little cynicisms to prove that "Hey, I'm not fooled by any of the candidates, I know what's really going on". It must be nice to have a neat little view of the world, full of "rich people that don't care" and "poor people screwed by The Man". Guess what -- the world is more complex than your narrow little view.
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when you start giving up your own beliefs for any group, you become a simple minded fool.
No one is "giving up any beliefs". I have serious differences with the Republican party platform, but they most closely represent my beliefs (note "my beliefs"). However, I also am a realist. Democracy works on votes. Guess what? We don't elect a dictator. The President has to work with Congress.
What was that you were saying about "simple minded"? Reducing a complex subject to flamebait does not help your point.
i'll be either voting Nader or writing in McCain.
Thus proving you have absolutely no idea what either man stands for. It's not as bad as the fools who says "I'm voting for either Nader or the Libertarians", but close. While I severely dislike McCain, he's definitely not as bad as Nader.
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Don't give the Republicans a halo just yet. ...
Oh, there is no question the Republic party is far from perfect. The religious right is definitely a pain in the butt. "Prayer in schools" is particularly irritating to me. But all freedom begins with economic freedom, and the religious right makes a lot of noise, but fortunately doesn't have that much power in the party.
One issue I will defend them on is mandatory filters in schools and libraries. I realize reasonable people can disagree on this, but I think the key point is "public places". People in public have a right to a reasonably non-threatening invironment, and I don't think it's unreasonable to attempt to block severely offensive material. For example, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that my little girl should be able to go to the library without teenage boys bringing up women having sex with animals as a joke. For some reason, people think that if the filters can't be perfect, then they're useless. As long as they stop most of the behavior, or make it difficult enough that it's not worth messing with, then that's good enough.
As for the Libertarian party, I like a lot of what they believe in, but unfortunately the party is full of extremists who believe that one set of principles is always applicable in all circumstances. The most telling debate I ever had with a Libertarian is one guy who advocated that people should be able to shoot guns at other people, and in fact had the perfect right to do so -- until he actually hit someone. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and his infringement didn't begin until he hit someone.
I've had Libertarians tell me that weapons should be absolutely unrestricted. Howitzer on your house? No problem. Personal nuke? Yup -- it's your right, as long as you don't set it off (thus infringing on other's rights).
That's the problem with Libertarianism in a nutshell. It's all based on negative feedback. If you crack down hard enough on crime, then crime ceases. The flaw in that reasoning is that it assumes people are perfectly rational, and people simply aren't.
Now, I will grant you those examples are extreme cases, and I believe (hope) that the rank-and-file libertarian believes that some preventative limits on personal freedom is necessary to prevent total anarchy. But if you look at other, more minor, things, you find the same thread of problems in the philosophy. All negative feedback, no willingness to do some preventative measures.
Not to mention that they advocate going back to the Gold Standard, which is just insane, 19th century thinking. :)
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I don't know -- better head than dead.
(sorry)
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Somehow, I find this statement rather ironic. I'm sure it's unintentional:)
Heh! It does sound funny when you put it that way. It's all in the context, though. When it comes to individual freedom, you want as much power as possible in the hands of the individual. When it comes to the government, you want as little power as possible concentrated in one person.
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Wow, talk about your unprovable, flamebait blanket statements.
First of all, it's not "blanket". I made a point to say "more often than not". Second of all, maybe you missed when Democrats were trying to ramrod socialized medicine through a few years ago? That's called "the government consolidating power, and taking away freedom". Yes, it was Republicans that saved us from the horror of a bill.
You'll also note which party consistently votes to give more power to the state and local levels, and which party consistently votes to take away power from the state and local levels. Yes, more local power == more local freedom.
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Don't you think it's a little strange that he couldn't get at least one other Democrat to support it? Don't you think he would rather have a 2/2 balance?
I'll give him credit for sponsoring it; not all Democrats are anti-freedom. But more often than not, Republicans vote to give more freedom and take away government power, and Democrats vote to consolidate power and take away freedom.
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Wow, it's nice to see that someone else realizes this.
I know, and we're in the minority. Unfortunately, it's very counter-intuitive to a lot of people, who primarily look at personalities. Not to say that the man doesn't matter at all (Clinton has made the Presidency a laughingstock), but most people don't realize that Congress has far, far more power than the President. Even if you got some 3rd party fool in the White House, all that means is that nothing would happen for four years.
--
It's not a coincidence that there are three Republicans and only one Democrat on this bill. Don't get all your information from the media (including Slashdot), look at reality. And this not rare, it's typical. Please vote accordingly.
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I guess my primary complaint is that he doesn't acknowledge the huge size and complexity is a problem. Yes, every feature has a justification, but the sum total of the justifications doesn't outweigh the massive weight and learning curve of the language (if that makes sense). I guess that's the acknowledgement I'm waiting to hear.
His solution to most problems of the past has been adding more features. I, like a lot of people, am looking for a language with 80% of the functionality but 20% of the complexity. Java is a good example of that type of language, but Java has its own problems. I just can't imagine him endorsing a language with fewer features than C++.
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Xerces is what I'm playing with, using Sun's Forte under Linux. Parsing an 4K XML file (with empty SAX callbacks) took 117ms on my P/II 266 machine. Does anyone here think they couldn't write an XML parser that would parse a 4K file in under 5ms in C++? Or perhaps even 1ms?
I don't even think I could write a C++ program that took 117ms.
Incidently, that 117ms was after executing the parser once to make sure everything was loaded (the first time took about 1.5sec!!!)
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Maybe the authors should have Bjarne Stroustrup take a gander...
Bjarne has already gone on record as thinking he doesn't think C++ has any (significant) problems. I don't think he's looking for a "better" language.
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I think you're underplaying the performance problems of Java. I've been using some XML libraries, and was absolutely shocked by the bad performance. In this application at least, Java is at least 10-100 times slower than C++ code.
I agree with you about the Java-the-language, but the JVM is a millstone around the neck of the language that has got to go. If Java could be natively compiled, it would still be slower than C++, but at least not orders of magnitude.
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There is a lot of talk about PARC's historical accomplishments, and they are significant. But what have they produced recently? I don't mean to malign anyone still working there (it's not always the people, it's often the organization), but is the PARC of today the same as the PARC of yesterday?
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One requirement to vote was that you were required to own Real Property. Since they uneducated seldomly owne property, they were not a large factor in election results.
Sometimes I think that wasn't a bad idea... :)
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Er, yeah, that was "smooth". Gotta use that preview button. How about "see how smooth the words flow".
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Public speaking ability != intelligence. How about if we get you up on a debate platform in front of the whole world and see you smooth the words flow?
Read his policy statements. You do know how to read, right? Or does only smooth talking impress you?
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On a semi-related subject...
Does anyone know anything about solid state gyroscopes? I read about a gyro once that worked using a length of fiber optic cable wound into a loop. You passed a laser through a splitter, one beam down the cable, and then both beams hitting a light sensor. When you spun the loop, it would cause the interference pattern to change, thus measuring rotation. The dynamic range of its operation was astounding, like from 1000RPM down to .0001 RPM or something crazy.
From a project like this to succeed, I would imagine you would need something like this that could withstand the G forces while giving you extremely accurate results.
It seemed so simple that I figured they would have taken over the world by now with a million uses, but I haven't heard anything since. Anyone know anything?
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Try teaching 35 children with four or five unruly ones, probably couldn't.
I agree that teaching requires certain management skills. Where I take issue is that students need "specially trained" people over people that simply have an interest in their education. The original poster downplayed the importance of parental interest over teacher qualifications. In other words, that it was more important to leave the question of where a student should get educated to the government, rather than to the parent.
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Right, ad hominems are where I get off the debate train.
You're misinterpreting what I said. How about, "here is the flaw in your reasoning in a nutshell"...
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Diamond is very hard, but I don't think it's particularly strong, is it? I mean, it's incredibly easy to shatter a diamond. A diamond tower would probably have great tensile strength, but crummy rigidity. If an airplane hit it, it would rain diamond shards. That would really suck for the people below. :)
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I've heard no good reasons for it, and however bad public schools may be, I will not stand for harming them further.
This is your problem in a nutshell. Which is more important -- harming the public school institution or the harm to the public school students? Isn't the point that we want students to be educated as well as possible?
Educators, by profession and by societal expecation, are qualified to educate (thus the term!).
The "educators" are the problem, not the solution. Yes, some teachers are good teachers, who have the best interests of the children in mind. But others are typical government beauracrats whose only function is generate more money, students be damned. Explain to me how we got "social promotion". Explain to me how we got "whole language" (that destroyed a generation of reading skills). Explain to me how a student can make it all the way through school without being able to read!
As far as "qualifications" to teach, there has been study after study showing home schooled students do far better than the average because of the personal attention. Let's face it... teaching is important, but it's not rocket science.
That's wrong, and leads directly into the old "rich get richer..." game,
The rich already send their kids to private school. Hell, I forget the statistic, but an absurd number of public school teachers send their kids to private school. I think it's the ultimate in classism to insist the poor can only go to the school that the Government dictates (no matter how bad), and the rich can send their kids to any school they want.
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How does diverting money away from these [public] schools -- gutting both -- any kind of sane solution here?
Because the schools are controlled by interests that do not care about how students are educated, namely, the teacher unions. I have a friend who worked for LA Unified. Her school had a early-grade teacher who would only hand out coloring assignments. Every day. The prinicipal couldn't because of the union contracts.
The power must be given to the parents, because they are the best qualified to care about their child's education. Yes, there are some parents who have wacky, creationist ideas. But that's a small area compared to the utter disaster the public schools have become.
But one thing I simply don't understand is this whole thing of "taking money away from public schools". The government's job is to make sure students get an education. Where the money goes is irrelevent, as long as children are getting educated. If we have fewer public schools, and more private schools spring up, I simply don't understand why this is a problem. The amount of money per student stays the same. It just means some schools would be consolidated.
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While I don't support evolution being pulled from school curriculums, better one science course be messed up than students being graduated unable to read.
But hey, if they can't spell Darwin at least they've heard of him!
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Yeah, God forbid we get justices who actually interpret the constitution rather than making up laws as they go. In any case, what type of justices do you think the Libertarians are going to pick? Activist ones? Please. I do find it highly amusing that you are voting Libertarian, rather than your first choice, the pseudo-socialists. Do you actually look at what people believe before voting?
Not to mention you are a slave of the media. You have no evidence that Bush is dumb, except what you hear in the media. Or perhaps because he's not a perfect public speaker. Either way, you're making an uninformed judgement.
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