You began your statement with a parenthetical. You use nothing but sentence fragments. Your essay has no thesis statement and no topic sentences, althogh the latter doesn't matter because there are no paragraphs. You capitalized a word in the middle of a sentence. You quoted someone else but did not use quotation marks.
It took me longer to nitpick your post than it took for you to contradict the post you replied to. Astoundingly, you proved that poster's point.
CONTENT matters. STYLE matters less. To " completely and unambigously" in the passage you quote, I would add "effortlessly." I should not have to exert myself to understand what you're saying. A difficult concept may require effort, but parsing your words shouldn't. If it does, then you are an idiot. If you make what I perceive to be stupid mistakes, then you appear to be an idiot. There is an unsubtle distinction between the two.
the illusion goes away when you stand on your head
And the perception of depth goes away if you close one eye. And the appearance of continuous motion vanishes if you blink your eyes rapidly. In other words, if you literally change the way you are looking at the world, you will change the way your nervous system processes the light that enters your eye. Your example is intriguing, but not all that revealing.
I won't hypothesize why what you said works (since I haven't tested it), but I will point out that there's more to perception than thinking "That is a tree. That is a bird. The bird is in the tree. Therefore the bird is smaller than the tree. There is the moon..." Vision processing occurs in the retina and the optic nerve and on who knkows how many levels in the brain before conscious thought ever gets involved. Inverting an image completely alters its appearance; is it to much to suppose that the processing of rarely inverted images would be different from the processing of normally upright images?
Completely off-topic I once read that intelligence was nothing more than an overgrown hack on the optic nerve. I partly believe it. The optic centers of the brain imporant bits of the visual signals - there's some lines, there's some blue, there's some motion. Intelligence is little more than astract abstractions - feeding the abstractions back into the engine that produced the abstractions, mixing the levels of abstraction, and seeing what useful behaviors the whole process produces.
True, dat. There's a local community college where, a few years ago, I taught a single course for a single semester. I had the understanding that I was to be paid at the end of the semester for my short-term contract work. (A bit strange, but OK, since it wasn't my primary job).
Turns out the guy who hired me was retiring at the end of the semester. I went to the payroll department after posting my grades and foud out that I should have been paid monthly all along...turns out that the old guy didn't want to fill out all the paperwork, and so arranged it that he didn't have to! I got my money lump sum, as I had expected, the old guy was retired and didn't have to deal with it, and the payroll people just rolled their eyes and acted like it was par for the course with this guy.
Everyone was happy, no one was hurt, but I will second the notion that YOU must make sure that YOUR paperwork is taken care of.
(This is actually true in every job I've ever worked...Though there was the law firm that paid me for eight hours of work on my first day, because I started on payday. I was impressed.)
Wow. A comment by a grownup. I encourage all you youngsters to pay attention to this guy. I'll chip in my two cents...The HARDEST part of ANY job is working with idiots. (Hint: WE'RE ALL IDIOTS! GET OVER YOURSELF!)
The LUG I was a member of for a few years included a professor who could only run the software he needed to do his research on a Linux box. Actually, I suppose it could have been compiled for other unices, but Linux was free and he needed to hurdle no bureaucracy to use it.
things move along at a slow pace
HA. Sounds a lot like the environment at the federal factory I work at. I suspect you'd find a simliar laid-backness in ANY public sector job...there's not a driving need to produce or communicate.
Imagine, as a Linux adminstrator with over 7 years professional experience, you are put under the technical guidance of an office manager, an attorney, an engineer, a shop foreman, etc.with 0 years professional experience as a system admin.
What you point out has nothing to do with the university scene; it has to do with the fact that non-techies hire techies. If this bugs you, I would advise you to commit sepuku, as you encounter analogous circumstances should you become a pharmacist, a tool designer, a landscaper, a remodeler, an architect...
Don't like working for people who don't know what you know? Then limit your job search to large companies that employ herds of people who do what you do. You will be a cog, utterly replaceable, with no special knowledge or experience. Don't like that idea? Then limit your job search to small and medium companies where you will be THE tech guy, and your boss will not have the smallest clue about how to do your job.
But 'fully automated installers' are in their infancy and many people simply don't trust them. Consequently system integrators have to 'bang rocks together' to get systems built.
What is there to automate?
you puts files on the computer you alters configuration files on the computer
WHAT IS THERE TO AUTOMATE?!?!?
What really gets my goat (at least in the Windows world) is the fact that, despite 15 years' effort, you CAN NOT uninstall most applications. Oh, you can TRY, but 90% of the time, your system DOES NOT revert to its pre-installation state after an uninstall. You can take a clean install of Windows, install an app, uninstall the app, and there are remnants left on your hard drive. And it's been like this FOR FIFTEEN YEARS.
For the same reasons, the world hasn't broken the secret code I've had since I was a kid (going on 25 years ago, now.) There's got to be motivation to break the encryption. You need a DVD that is broken in some way, and you need something to copy the DVD to. There may be other motivating factors.
If the studios used DRM that didn't work against consumers, no one would be likely to break it.
I believe that machine translation will be the 'killer application' for 64-bit home PCs...along with DRM busting..
Doubt it. There is nothing above the bit level that 64-bit machines can do that 32-bit machines can't. I challenge you to name one such task - again, above the bit level, so "performing a bitwise AND on two 64-bit values with a single instruction" doesn't count...
"Give me a one sentence definition of 'irony'" "Like silvery, only harder."
If you have no use for them, why did you hire them?
Speaking as a citizen who votes and pays taxes, exactly what compels me to permit my government to grant you a corporate charter or a business license?
Yup. Not unsolvable, merely unsolved. Anyone with a grasp of the English language would realize that. Snopes seems to delight in sneering at the obvious.
Which is easier top do? Enforcing arbitrary rules on everyone, regardless of the circumstances, or deciding what's the best judgement in any particular circumstancs?
Which is easer to do when you screw up? Explaining to the angry mob "Rules are rules. They're the same for everyone," or explaining to the angry mob "We used our best judgement in making this arbitrary, one-time exception to the rules; it's not favoritism, really it's not!"
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." A glance at the bell curve will tell you that, from the perspective of those with the greatest minds, 90% of us have little minds.
The crowd. Pretend you're a scab. On Monday, you cross the picket lines and get rocks thrown at you. You get in your truck and drive away; an hour or two later the crowd is dispersed.
On Tuesday, you cross the picket lines and get rocks thrown at you. You get in your truck and drive away; an hour or two later the crowd is dispersed.
On Wednesday, you cross the picket lines and get rocks thrown at you. You quit.
You have a deeper trust in the unionized police forces than I do. I think the crowd would be dispersed, a "leader" or two would be jailed for a couple of weeks before charges were dropped, and the trash wouldn't get collected. I can't see one group of unionized city employees working to weaken the position of unions; it's simply not rational. Granted, people do not always behave rationally, but in this "might makes right" world, I think the cops might be a bit slow to respond...
How many times have you used Iridium this year? Approximately as many times as I've used each of the bridges over the Mississipi River, the Ohio River, the Colorado River, the Rio Grande, etc. My point, of course, is that simply because I do not personally use a piece of our society's infrastructure doesn't mean it's valueless.
Were they worth it at the time THAT is a key question. Don't know about you, but at one time I knew an awful lot about Windows 3.x I now have millions (billions?) of brain cells storing useless information. Totally worthless. But was it worth it at the time? Totally.
The people making millions off of all of it certainly aren't going to publicize the true ways they get paid. Good point. That's the key point. We poor schmucks down in the trenches doing the actual work of the economy can't know how much the oligarchs are exploiting us. (On the other hand, I'm getting paid to post on slashdot. HAH!)
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I think Iridium has been useful. I'll grant that it made a lot of people a lot of money; I'll grant that the US taxpayer ended up footing the bill. A recent interest in the study of history has led me to accept that the lower classes of society will ALWAYS be giving money to the upper classes of society, and the upper classes will control the government. If you think (a) 1776 changed that, or (b) it can ever change, then you're ignoring (a) 225 years of history and (b) 7,000 years of history.
ON THE PLUS SIDE...the wealthy currently have far more than any ancient emperor could have DREAMED of having, even if he were to conquer the whole of the earth. We poor schmucks may only be permitted to nibble on crumbs that fall from the table, but we are getting better quality crumbs than anyone else in history. Reagan's "trickle-down" economics work; they make the rich FAR richer, and the rest of us SLIGHTLY richer. Exponential growth means that I am now living better than any medieval king ever did. It's poor comfort, but it's some comfort.
I stand by my assertion that a Texas Democrat would be a moderat Republican in Massachusetts, and vice versa. If you disagree, I encourage you to produce evidence to support your position; I've got common sense on my side, and you give no evidence of having science on yours. I'll bow to science but not to ad hominem attacks, appeals to irrelevant authorities, false analogies, or proofs by repeated assertion.
Rounding up or rounding to the nearest whole number means the percentages would be 84% and 86%. Rounding down would make the percentages 83% and 85%.
The people who wrote the study have demonstrated mastery of:
- arithmetic I was taught when I was 11
- Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets
- a calculator
Can you trust ANY of their quantitative conclusions? I think not.
The point is not that individuals are powerful, but that groups performing essential services are powerful. Your garbage man would get fired post haste, but if ALL the garbage men got "sick" and then threw rocks at scabs, your city could have a serious public health problem within a month.
This is a REALLY stupid place for you to make that argument. Were it not for the "bankruptcy carwash" we would have several dozen out-of-control multi-ton chunks of steel deorbiting randomly over the next decade or so. "Not so!" you declaim. "Iridium would have deorbited them all!"
Ah. Right.
So, we either have no global satellite phone system, or we have FLAMING DEATH. Great choice. In this case, I think option # 3 (the "Bankruptcy Carwash") is a much better choice. Global satellite phones AND no flaming death.
I agree with your assertion; I just think you've picked a really stupid example, because in this one case, BECAUSE of the vagaries of bankruptcy law, we have a useful piece of technological infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
You began your statement with a parenthetical. You use nothing but sentence fragments. Your essay has no thesis statement and no topic sentences, althogh the latter doesn't matter because there are no paragraphs. You capitalized a word in the middle of a sentence. You quoted someone else but did not use quotation marks.
It took me longer to nitpick your post than it took for you to contradict the post you replied to. Astoundingly, you proved that poster's point.
CONTENT matters. STYLE matters less. To " completely and unambigously" in the passage you quote, I would add "effortlessly." I should not have to exert myself to understand what you're saying. A difficult concept may require effort, but parsing your words shouldn't. If it does, then you are an idiot. If you make what I perceive to be stupid mistakes, then you appear to be an idiot. There is an unsubtle distinction between the two.
I believe that at most universities, if you enter the examination hall with a personal army, you will get a pass.
HE is my hero...because he IS the Anti-Pedant!
the illusion goes away when you stand on your head
And the perception of depth goes away if you close one eye. And the appearance of continuous motion vanishes if you blink your eyes rapidly. In other words, if you literally change the way you are looking at the world, you will change the way your nervous system processes the light that enters your eye. Your example is intriguing, but not all that revealing.
I won't hypothesize why what you said works (since I haven't tested it), but I will point out that there's more to perception than thinking "That is a tree. That is a bird. The bird is in the tree. Therefore the bird is smaller than the tree. There is the moon..." Vision processing occurs in the retina and the optic nerve and on who knkows how many levels in the brain before conscious thought ever gets involved. Inverting an image completely alters its appearance; is it to much to suppose that the processing of rarely inverted images would be different from the processing of normally upright images?
Completely off-topic I once read that intelligence was nothing more than an overgrown hack on the optic nerve. I partly believe it. The optic centers of the brain imporant bits of the visual signals - there's some lines, there's some blue, there's some motion. Intelligence is little more than astract abstractions - feeding the abstractions back into the engine that produced the abstractions, mixing the levels of abstraction, and seeing what useful behaviors the whole process produces.
True, dat. There's a local community college where, a few years ago, I taught a single course for a single semester. I had the understanding that I was to be paid at the end of the semester for my short-term contract work. (A bit strange, but OK, since it wasn't my primary job).
Turns out the guy who hired me was retiring at the end of the semester. I went to the payroll department after posting my grades and foud out that I should have been paid monthly all along...turns out that the old guy didn't want to fill out all the paperwork, and so arranged it that he didn't have to! I got my money lump sum, as I had expected, the old guy was retired and didn't have to deal with it, and the payroll people just rolled their eyes and acted like it was par for the course with this guy.
Everyone was happy, no one was hurt, but I will second the notion that YOU must make sure that YOUR paperwork is taken care of.
(This is actually true in every job I've ever worked...Though there was the law firm that paid me for eight hours of work on my first day, because I started on payday. I was impressed.)
Wow. A comment by a grownup. I encourage all you youngsters to pay attention to this guy. I'll chip in my two cents...The HARDEST part of ANY job is working with idiots. (Hint: WE'RE ALL IDIOTS! GET OVER YOURSELF!)
The LUG I was a member of for a few years included a professor who could only run the software he needed to do his research on a Linux box. Actually, I suppose it could have been compiled for other unices, but Linux was free and he needed to hurdle no bureaucracy to use it.
things move along at a slow pace
HA. Sounds a lot like the environment at the federal factory I work at. I suspect you'd find a simliar laid-backness in ANY public sector job...there's not a driving need to produce or communicate.
Imagine, as a Linux adminstrator with over 7 years professional experience, you are put under the technical guidance of an office manager, an attorney, an engineer, a shop foreman, etc.with 0 years professional experience as a system admin.
What you point out has nothing to do with the university scene; it has to do with the fact that non-techies hire techies. If this bugs you, I would advise you to commit sepuku, as you encounter analogous circumstances should you become a pharmacist, a tool designer, a landscaper, a remodeler, an architect...
Don't like working for people who don't know what you know? Then limit your job search to large companies that employ herds of people who do what you do. You will be a cog, utterly replaceable, with no special knowledge or experience. Don't like that idea? Then limit your job search to small and medium companies where you will be THE tech guy, and your boss will not have the smallest clue about how to do your job.
Welcome to the world of grownups.
But 'fully automated installers' are in their infancy and many people simply don't trust them. Consequently system integrators have to 'bang rocks together' to get systems built.
What is there to automate?
you puts files on the computer
you alters configuration files on the computer
WHAT IS THERE TO AUTOMATE?!?!?
What really gets my goat (at least in the Windows world) is the fact that, despite 15 years' effort, you CAN NOT uninstall most applications. Oh, you can TRY, but 90% of the time, your system DOES NOT revert to its pre-installation state after an uninstall. You can take a clean install of Windows, install an app, uninstall the app, and there are remnants left on your hard drive. And it's been like this FOR FIFTEEN YEARS.
Interesting that you respond to a scientific study by mentioning your probabilities rather than facts.
How would YOU suppose that the Ashkenazi Jews came to have a higher average IQ than the general population?
I am reminded of the fact that ALL of Einstein's children are a very insignificant proportion of ANY population.
For the same reasons, the world hasn't broken the secret code I've had since I was a kid (going on 25 years ago, now.) There's got to be motivation to break the encryption. You need a DVD that is broken in some way, and you need something to copy the DVD to. There may be other motivating factors.
If the studios used DRM that didn't work against consumers, no one would be likely to break it.
I believe that machine translation will be the 'killer application' for 64-bit home PCs. ..along with DRM busting..
Doubt it. There is nothing above the bit level that 64-bit machines can do that 32-bit machines can't. I challenge you to name one such task - again, above the bit level, so "performing a bitwise AND on two 64-bit values with a single instruction" doesn't count...
"Give me a one sentence definition of 'irony'"
"Like silvery, only harder."
No, no, no. You're thinking of:
"Per, haps, but...Ialwaysfind gratuitious. Punctu, ation, tobeannoying?"
If you have no use for them, why did you hire them?
Speaking as a citizen who votes and pays taxes, exactly what compels me to permit my government to grant you a corporate charter or a business license?
Yup. Not unsolvable, merely unsolved. Anyone with a grasp of the English language would realize that. Snopes seems to delight in sneering at the obvious.
It's just not as funny without the hand movements...
Which is easier top do? Enforcing arbitrary rules on everyone, regardless of the circumstances, or deciding what's the best judgement in any particular circumstancs?
Which is easer to do when you screw up? Explaining to the angry mob "Rules are rules. They're the same for everyone," or explaining to the angry mob "We used our best judgement in making this arbitrary, one-time exception to the rules; it's not favoritism, really it's not!"
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." A glance at the bell curve will tell you that, from the perspective of those with the greatest minds, 90% of us have little minds.
So who's stopping the replacement workers?
The crowd. Pretend you're a scab. On Monday, you cross the picket lines and get rocks thrown at you. You get in your truck and drive away; an hour or two later the crowd is dispersed.
On Tuesday, you cross the picket lines and get rocks thrown at you. You get in your truck and drive away; an hour or two later the crowd is dispersed.
On Wednesday, you cross the picket lines and get rocks thrown at you. You quit.
You have a deeper trust in the unionized police forces than I do. I think the crowd would be dispersed, a "leader" or two would be jailed for a couple of weeks before charges were dropped, and the trash wouldn't get collected. I can't see one group of unionized city employees working to weaken the position of unions; it's simply not rational. Granted, people do not always behave rationally, but in this "might makes right" world, I think the cops might be a bit slow to respond...
How many times have you used Iridium this year?
Approximately as many times as I've used each of the bridges over the Mississipi River, the Ohio River, the Colorado River, the Rio Grande, etc. My point, of course, is that simply because I do not personally use a piece of our society's infrastructure doesn't mean it's valueless.
Were they worth it at the time
THAT is a key question. Don't know about you, but at one time I knew an awful lot about Windows 3.x I now have millions (billions?) of brain cells storing useless information. Totally worthless. But was it worth it at the time? Totally.
The people making millions off of all of it certainly aren't going to publicize the true ways they get paid.
Good point. That's the key point. We poor schmucks down in the trenches doing the actual work of the economy can't know how much the oligarchs are exploiting us. (On the other hand, I'm getting paid to post on slashdot. HAH!)
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I think Iridium has been useful. I'll grant that it made a lot of people a lot of money; I'll grant that the US taxpayer ended up footing the bill. A recent interest in the study of history has led me to accept that the lower classes of society will ALWAYS be giving money to the upper classes of society, and the upper classes will control the government. If you think (a) 1776 changed that, or (b) it can ever change, then you're ignoring (a) 225 years of history and (b) 7,000 years of history.
ON THE PLUS SIDE...the wealthy currently have far more than any ancient emperor could have DREAMED of having, even if he were to conquer the whole of the earth. We poor schmucks may only be permitted to nibble on crumbs that fall from the table, but we are getting better quality crumbs than anyone else in history. Reagan's "trickle-down" economics work; they make the rich FAR richer, and the rest of us SLIGHTLY richer. Exponential growth means that I am now living better than any medieval king ever did. It's poor comfort, but it's some comfort.
I stand by my assertion that a Texas Democrat would be a moderat Republican in Massachusetts, and vice versa. If you disagree, I encourage you to produce evidence to support your position; I've got common sense on my side, and you give no evidence of having science on yours. I'll bow to science but not to ad hominem attacks, appeals to irrelevant authorities, false analogies, or proofs by repeated assertion.
Interesting. For those who don't get it:
41/49 = 83.67%
42/49 = 85.71%
Rounding up or rounding to the nearest whole number means the percentages would be 84% and 86%. Rounding down would make the percentages 83% and 85%.
The people who wrote the study have demonstrated mastery of:
- arithmetic I was taught when I was 11
- Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets
- a calculator
Can you trust ANY of their quantitative conclusions? I think not.
The point is not that individuals are powerful, but that groups performing essential services are powerful. Your garbage man would get fired post haste, but if ALL the garbage men got "sick" and then threw rocks at scabs, your city could have a serious public health problem within a month.
The sea is mostly empty water: true
The Earth is mostly empty water: true
The earth is mostly empty land: true
The Earth is mostly empty land: false
THIS, children, is why we MUST pay attention to capitalization.
This is a REALLY stupid place for you to make that argument. Were it not for the "bankruptcy carwash" we would have several dozen out-of-control multi-ton chunks of steel deorbiting randomly over the next decade or so. "Not so!" you declaim. "Iridium would have deorbited them all!"
Ah. Right.
So, we either have no global satellite phone system, or we have FLAMING DEATH. Great choice. In this case, I think option # 3 (the "Bankruptcy Carwash") is a much better choice. Global satellite phones AND no flaming death.
I agree with your assertion; I just think you've picked a really stupid example, because in this one case, BECAUSE of the vagaries of bankruptcy law, we have a useful piece of technological infrastructure.