There's also a difference between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "beyond any doubt." If OJ's defense was that his heretofore unknown evil twin committed the crime, it raises a doubt, but not a reasonable one. The question becomes, is the doubt raised by the allegations of racism reasonable?
Okay, first of all, I'm not a sysadmin, so you don't need to jump down my throat. I find corporate politicking to be a bunch of bullshit, too, but it happens, all the same. CYA is the way of the world. Meetings and committees have a way of diluting responsibility, even if unintentionally. Incompetents keep their jobs by always saying, "Let's have a meeting to discuss this." It creates the illusion of progress while spreading responsibility (and potential blame) to more and more people. Every decision made is prefaced with, "I spoke with so-and-so, and he agrees with me that...." Trust me: The Peter Principle is alive and well.
Next, I love F/OSS; at home, I haven't booted my Windows machine in months. If it were up to me, my employer would use it everywhere. Like I said, though, it's not up to me.
...the kind of blame shifting, no real product, rule by intimidation and bullshit world you think is a normal corporate workplace. It's not normal...
Then how do you explain the wide-spread popularity of Dilbert? I've seen strips that involve near-exact quotes from the managers, directors, VPs, and CIO of my employer. Scott Adams is quite up-front about the fact that these days most of his ideas come from his readers.
...companies like that don't last long without government protection...
I guess I should point out that I work for an RBOC, eh?
Where I work, the CIO makes all of the technology decisions. "We're going to use.NET for all new projects." "Oracle licenses are too expensive; try to use SQL Server wherever you can." "We're going to use Extreme Programming (except for all the parts that make the developers' lives easier)." "All data exchange between systems must be done in XML using the official intra-corporate schema (which changes monthly)."
We have 4000 employees just in IT. Nobody on the implementation level is allowed to make any significant decisions. In a conerference call last month with my VP, someone complained about the fact that even minor conflicts can't get resolved without involving upper management. The VP basically engaged in a bunch of verbal hand-waving that boiled down to, "That's the way it ought to be" (if you read Joel on Software, you'll see him level the same complaint against Juno).
The obvious retort is "if it sucks, leave," but that ignores the fact that this sort of incompetence does exist, which was my original point.
I'm not sure what you mean by "cracking the whip", but it surely does not apply to commercial software. With closed source software, you take what the software company gives and can never expect more.
Not so. We've had closed-source vendors write patches just to handle the fickle nature of some of our setups. They have to if they want us to buy the next version when it comes out (multi-million dollar licensees tend to get the red carpet treatment). I've exchanged emails and had telephone conversations with the original developers of a piece of closed-source software that was giving me problems. He (so far it's always been a man) can offer workarounds, suggest a better way to approach the problem, or write a patch. Again, support contracts guarantee I'll get a substantive response to my queries by the next business day. If the problem affects a production server, the vendor contacts me on a daily basis until the problem is resolved.
Is it as good as having the source for myself? Philosophically, no. Pragmatically, it's even better. I don't have time to learn the internals of every piece of software I touch and do the job I was hired to do.
First, an off-topic question to the moderators: How can self-professed ignorance ("I don't get it.") be insightful?
Next, a response to the parent.
When corporations talk about "official support," they're looking for a couple of things that F/OSS can't give them:
Somewhere else to point the finger of blame.
The ability to "crack the whip."
Number one is standard CYA; if you do your own software support, then it's clearly your fault when things aren't working. The fundamental rule of succeeding in Corporate America is: find someone else to blame. You sort of get this with F/OSS, if your job consists of sending in bug reports and then sitting back and waiting for the maintainers to issue a fix, but how is this any different from closed source?
Number two is something people often overlook. When problems occur, corporations need to know when to expect a solution, so they can plan accordingly. That means they need fairly firm deadlines, and someone to intimidate if those deadlines slip. Just try to do that on IRC and see how far it gets you. Since most companies don't have the resources to have a coder on staff, support contracts are the only alternative.
There's something seriously wrong with WineX. I've been playing Civilization III on it (which is now officially supported) and the sound effects and music get stuck like a scratched CD. I hear the same half-second over and over until I shut off all sounds. Of course, that doesn't actually get rid of all the sound; a few random sound effects still get through (might be a bug in the game, though).
Of course, that's just a minor annoyance I can put up with. The real problem is performance. I know everyone says Wine Is Not an Emulator, but it runs slow enough to fool me every time, regardless of application.
you also have to admit that the idea of a 60 year commitment has been kicked by the wayside.
Oh, sure. Even my parents packed it in after "only" thirty years.
Part of the problem is the average lifespan today as compared to, say, four or five centuries ago. You have a lot more time to get fed up with someone. Back in the day, if you couldn't get along with your spouse, there was no real way to start over (what with travel being so perilous), even if there hadn't been a lot of social/religious pressure to stay together. I wonder if the traditional concept of marriage is losing its relevence.
Like Perfection, it's not strictly the sort of thing the article asks about (although I suppose you need to be good at spatial relationships when blindly going through the maze), but it's an entertaining variant on the timed 1-player game.
Every person I've ever played with relies on a different obscure house rule which they insist is necessary "for balance" (curiously, I have never even come close to winning a game of Risk in which its "imbalance" had been corrected). If I refuse to allow the rule, I'm setting myself up for six to eight hours of pissing and moaning, and attempts by that opponent to use the rule surreptitiously, as if it were a game of Cosmic Encounter or Illuminati.
Maybe I just have bad luck finding people to play Risk with, but that's just the final straw. The larger problem is that I simply can't afford to burn through such a large block of time: Risk, Axis & Allies, Diplomacy,... The games are good, but it takes longer to get these things set up than most of my friends are willing to spend playing.
I played Settlers of Catan for the first time this weekend; that seemed like a lot of fun (we only played to 10 points, though). The hex-map island suddenly reminded me of Survive! They otherwise have nothing in common, but I realized I hadn't even thought of that game in years.
The larger problem is the ridiculously high marriage rate. People need to abandon the notion that six months is long enough exposure to a brand new person to make a sixty year commitment.
The reason being that by '2' we mean not only '2' but the numbers {..., -4, -2, 0, 2, 4, 6,...} (i.e. all multiples of '2').
I'm going to assume that has something to do with the commutative ring theory you mentioned, because I've never heard "2" used interchangeably with "the set of all even integers."
That aside, I don't understand your definition of prime. Something is missing, but I can't even guess at what it was. You didn't define x and y at all. Are they any two integers? If so, {a,x,y} = {4,8,3} shows us that 4 is prime (for that matter, permitting a = x or a = y means all integers are prime). Also, zero doesn't divide anything; so far as I've ever heard, that's just one of the rules. Finally, what about 1 and -1? They divide everything.
The only time I saw a formal definition for primes, it was something like: An integer p > 1 is prime if and only if there exists no integer q such that q divides p and 1 < q < p.
However, what about real numbers [as opposed to rationals]. Again it's infinite. But this time, it's NOT A. It's much more than A (A^2 is it?).
Sadly, the answer is: It depends on which version of set theory you're using.
Cantor tried for years to prove it was 2^A (the cardinality of aleph_x+1 is the power set of aleph_x). This assertion--called the Continuum Hypothesis--turns out to be a lot like the Parallel Axiom. Is it true? Well, you're allowed to assume whichever answer you prefer and there will be no inherent contradiction.
Cantor did manage to show that it was definitely no more than 2^A, and that some other value Z > A (or maybe ">="?) acted as a lower bound for it; he just couldn't do anything to clarify the relationship between Z and A (I'm pretty sure Z is defined as the ordinality of all integers, whereas A is the cardinality, but you might want to double-check; I'm usually quite unconscious by this hour). Obviously, he was hoping to show Z = 2^A to pin down an exact value, but... *shrug*
By the way, I got all of this from Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. It has to be the single best Christmas present I've ever received. I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic (the author is much more eloquent/entertaining than I, so don't judge it on my post).
Personally, I had not heard of this guy, so I followed your link. Trust me when I say: It's a crock of shit. Most of the "predictions" are still off in the future and are thus untestable (setting aside the huge "out" he left for himself by saying how his timeline differs from ours), and/or are the same vague nonsense that lets the reader fill in his or her own meaning. It's like the quatrains of Nostradamus: people always seem to be able to figure out what they mean after it's too late to be rightly called a prediction. Let's take a look at a few gems, shall we?
Computer technology and software get MUCH better.
Yes, we have cameras. More digital.
Yes we have phones but the service is through the web.
Women like to wear their hair longer and men have it much shorter. Both sexes shave it all off when they're in active military service.
Genetic medicine and cloning organs are the obvious new techs in the future.
UNIX has a problem in 2038.
Thus the passing of time is a local phenomenon depending on how close you are to a gravitational source.
This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep.
There are other equally-amazing revelations, but you obviously have the link and can read them for yourself. My favorite from the ones I've listed is number 5, because even Titor admits it's "obvious," although 7 is a close runner up; I have to admire the sheer balls of taking a theory that's nearly a century old and passing it off as a glimpse of Things Yet to Be.
Whoever Titor was, he or she definitely had access to a lot of relatively-obscure scientific knowledge and the understanding to use the terms therefrom in a semi-coherent manner. If I were a betting man, I put my money on Titor being a math or physics graduate student.
There is no justice to be had in the Slashdot moderation system. This person hit the nail squarely on the head.
Wa-a-ay back in '99 or 2000, I read an article somewhere that talked about the perennial notion of "the coming class war," and why it was patent nonsense. The thesis was that instead of a single Lower Class threatening to rise up against the Upper Class, the country was divided into hundreds or perhaps thousands of cliques with one of two main mindsets:
"Things kind of suck for Us, but frankly, it's a heck of a lot better than how Those People Over There have it. Of course, they're just weird, so they kind of deserve it."
"People treat Us like crap, but there's nowhere in particular to point the finger. Everyone Else hates us. They just don't get it, man. Losers."
The consequence is that everyone who's in a position to lay claim to the title of Oppressed Masses actually has a sense of superiority over someone (frequently everyone) who is outside the clique, so they claim the moral high ground and figure that's enough. "Some day, people will come to realize that We're right, and then We'll be vindicated."
Some people might look at how convenient this setup is for the Upper Class and be tempted to suggest that there's something deliberate about it. Those people don't neatly fit into the above mold; they see a single source of oppression aimed at all groups equally instead of everyone slighting whichever other cliques annoy them most. We call these people Conspiracy Nuts and duly ignore everything they say.
People have the god-given write [sic] to have the grille pattern from their dashbord embossed in the forehead. No mortician has the right to remove that embossing without knowing the wishes of the deceased.
[Emphasis added.]
What is the basis for this position? Why should the dead have any rights? What is the libertarian justification for denying you the opportunity to purchase my corpse from my (hypothetically) impoverished next-of-kin to provide raw materials to the next Dr. Frankenstein? Because some guy who doesn't even exist anymore said No? (It probably goes without saying that I haven't managed to summon up the will (heh) to talk to a lawyer about planning for the inevitable.)
Half of your suggestions are useless when the weather refuses to cooperate. As much as I want to avoid the hassle of automobile ownership, I will not ride a bicycle to a job interview.[*] Nothing says, "Don't call us, we'll call you," like being drenched in either sweat or rain.
I will, however, agree with the staircase suggestion. I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone take an elevator up--or worse, down--one floor. I prefer to take stairs on every occasion that it's feasible.
[*]Please don't suggest public transportation. As a poor college student, I rode the bus everywhere. I can still remember the time this guy went off on the bus driver because he was half an hour late for his job interview. The reason? Someone in a wheelchair both boarded and exited the bus before picking up our luckless friend, and that tends to put them a little behind schedule.
The Wendy's burger King, McDonald's, and Arby's in my neighborhood all accept debit and/or credit cards. So, yeah: leaving cash at home doesn't accomplish much.
I agree that F/OSS isn't a panacea, but the article says the vendor for their current application went out of business. Maybe that's made them a little gun-shy. I can easily imagine the customer asking, "Is there any way to make sure this doesn't happen again?" Once they ask, you really ought to start looking to see if anything meets that need.
I live in Columbus, OH... after 6pm here there is no city life.
Preach on, bnet41!
The sad part is, there aren't many places in the U.S. larger than Columbus (last I heard, 15th largest by population). If this place is dead, where else is there to go?
On the other hand, I remember once hearing about a study that showed Ohioans are more of a "homebody" type than the average American. On the whole, we seem to prefer staying at home to watch TV.
After spending eight solid hours playing Need for Speed: High Stakes, I went out to the grocery for whatever, and a police cruiser comes up to pass me on the left. I had to suppress the urge to sideswipe him in an attempt to run him off the road.
A couple days later, I sold the game and my force-feedback steering wheel to a coworker.
Thanks for not attacking me personally. I was expecting you to. Apparently, you're not a child.;-)
Something must be wrong with the way I argue online, because I get a lot of that.
Them: Foo.
Me: Bar.
Them: FOO!
Me: Bar... ish.
Them: Oh, I guess you aren't an asshole after all.
I've been here (on slashdot) for longer than most.
Yeah, I saw the number (583?! Damn!) and suspected you were even more disappointed in the decline than I, probably had more reason to be sentimental about the good old days, too. I didn't learn about The Other Site (is it still called that?) until it was already pretty far downhill, so I never bothered with it. I should probably spend some time at Ars Technica, just as a change of pace.
Thanks for the links. I can probably pick up a copy of Slander from the library this weekend.
It's grand how so many of you simply dismiss things as rubbish when you didn't even read them.
Thank you, but I did read the first two links you sent (and explained that I cannot make out the third). McCarthy may not have been a member of the HUAC (how could he? he was a senator), but he was--and is--an icon of the work they did. The average person needs a nice way to mentally sum up complex things, and Sen. McCarthy waving the list of names is as good as it gets. Hence the "-ism."
This place fucking amazes me.
Me too. Have you considered the possibility you might be happier if you stopped coming here? I was just considering it earlier today. The signal-to-noise ratio is becoming vanishingly small, and I find myself getting into petty bickering matches with assholes who are probably laughing at me for caring about what they post. The only thing keeping me coming back these days is the neat geeky stuff they occasionally post, and the fact that I haven't found anywhere else that isn't just as bad (the devil you know, and all that).
The first post Nazi guy gets modded insightful. I point out a few articles and the source of these articles (the Venona project), and get modded troll.
It's pretty well known that Slashdot's moderation system is broken. I don't even see people threaten to use meta-moderation anymore; there's no point. You can't stem the tide of idiots with mod points and an agenda. I mostly just ignore the moderation anymore. If it's above my threshold, I'll read it.
I guess it only backs up my other comment about no fair political debates on slashdot.
Well, I usually don't bother with political threads on this site, so I've little experience there, but methinks you put too much stock in the moderation system. I can see a point about the moderators being invisible (and mostly unaccountable) partisans steering the conversation, but I think in the long run, we're better off ignoring them (or maybe getting the Hell out of here, once and for all).
As I said (or meant to), I don't doubt the PDF has lots of useful information, but since I can't read it, I can't really justify changing my opinions just yet. I will keep an eye out for more information on the subject, though. This was the first I had heard about this sort of thing, and I have to admit, you've piqued my curiosity.
McCarthyism is a myth perpetuated by a liberal American media.
Read (link to newsmax.com)
This is just an editorial, backed by nothing more than vitriol and a liberal (heh) dose of ad hominem attacks. You weaken your position by including this link.
about (link to inatoday.com)
If M. Stanton Evans' assertions are true, it'd be very interesting, indeed. I should point out, though, that the article doesn't offer anything in the way of support for his claims.
it. (link to illegible PDF at fbi.gov)
I can't make heads or tails of this. Maybe it says something useful, but whoever scanned it in did a piss-poor job of it.
In sum: At present, I see no reason to believe
that the "liberal American media" have had any reason to disbelieve the McCarthyism/HUAC meme up until now, or
that there is reliable, readily-available information online which vindicates Joseph McCarthy (I am not well-to-do, so those are the only sources I can examine just now).
Without IP laws you have no recourse when your competitor takes your product idea and markets it as their own.
Without IP laws, ideas are neither yours nor theirs. Maybe that's a Bad Thing, but you haven't established that. Instead your argument states you need IP laws because without them, people wouldn't obey IP laws. This is tantamount to arguing that we shouldn't legalize marijuana because then more people would smoke it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the twenty-first amendment ended Prohibition.
There's also a difference between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "beyond any doubt." If OJ's defense was that his heretofore unknown evil twin committed the crime, it raises a doubt, but not a reasonable one. The question becomes, is the doubt raised by the allegations of racism reasonable?
Okay, first of all, I'm not a sysadmin, so you don't need to jump down my throat. I find corporate politicking to be a bunch of bullshit, too, but it happens, all the same. CYA is the way of the world. Meetings and committees have a way of diluting responsibility, even if unintentionally. Incompetents keep their jobs by always saying, "Let's have a meeting to discuss this." It creates the illusion of progress while spreading responsibility (and potential blame) to more and more people. Every decision made is prefaced with, "I spoke with so-and-so, and he agrees with me that... ." Trust me: The Peter Principle is alive and well.
Next, I love F/OSS; at home, I haven't booted my Windows machine in months. If it were up to me, my employer would use it everywhere. Like I said, though, it's not up to me.
Then how do you explain the wide-spread popularity of Dilbert? I've seen strips that involve near-exact quotes from the managers, directors, VPs, and CIO of my employer. Scott Adams is quite up-front about the fact that these days most of his ideas come from his readers.
I guess I should point out that I work for an RBOC, eh?
Where I work, the CIO makes all of the technology decisions. "We're going to use .NET for all new projects." "Oracle licenses are too expensive; try to use SQL Server wherever you can." "We're going to use Extreme Programming (except for all the parts that make the developers' lives easier)." "All data exchange between systems must be done in XML using the official intra-corporate schema (which changes monthly)."
We have 4000 employees just in IT. Nobody on the implementation level is allowed to make any significant decisions. In a conerference call last month with my VP, someone complained about the fact that even minor conflicts can't get resolved without involving upper management. The VP basically engaged in a bunch of verbal hand-waving that boiled down to, "That's the way it ought to be" (if you read Joel on Software, you'll see him level the same complaint against Juno).
The obvious retort is "if it sucks, leave," but that ignores the fact that this sort of incompetence does exist, which was my original point.
Not so. We've had closed-source vendors write patches just to handle the fickle nature of some of our setups. They have to if they want us to buy the next version when it comes out (multi-million dollar licensees tend to get the red carpet treatment). I've exchanged emails and had telephone conversations with the original developers of a piece of closed-source software that was giving me problems. He (so far it's always been a man) can offer workarounds, suggest a better way to approach the problem, or write a patch. Again, support contracts guarantee I'll get a substantive response to my queries by the next business day. If the problem affects a production server, the vendor contacts me on a daily basis until the problem is resolved.
Is it as good as having the source for myself? Philosophically, no. Pragmatically, it's even better. I don't have time to learn the internals of every piece of software I touch and do the job I was hired to do.
First, an off-topic question to the moderators: How can self-professed ignorance ("I don't get it.") be insightful?
Next, a response to the parent.
When corporations talk about "official support," they're looking for a couple of things that F/OSS can't give them:
Number one is standard CYA; if you do your own software support, then it's clearly your fault when things aren't working. The fundamental rule of succeeding in Corporate America is: find someone else to blame. You sort of get this with F/OSS, if your job consists of sending in bug reports and then sitting back and waiting for the maintainers to issue a fix, but how is this any different from closed source?
Number two is something people often overlook. When problems occur, corporations need to know when to expect a solution, so they can plan accordingly. That means they need fairly firm deadlines, and someone to intimidate if those deadlines slip. Just try to do that on IRC and see how far it gets you. Since most companies don't have the resources to have a coder on staff, support contracts are the only alternative.
There's something seriously wrong with WineX. I've been playing Civilization III on it (which is now officially supported) and the sound effects and music get stuck like a scratched CD. I hear the same half-second over and over until I shut off all sounds. Of course, that doesn't actually get rid of all the sound; a few random sound effects still get through (might be a bug in the game, though).
Of course, that's just a minor annoyance I can put up with. The real problem is performance. I know everyone says Wine Is Not an Emulator, but it runs slow enough to fool me every time, regardless of application.
Oh, sure. Even my parents packed it in after "only" thirty years.
Part of the problem is the average lifespan today as compared to, say, four or five centuries ago. You have a lot more time to get fed up with someone. Back in the day, if you couldn't get along with your spouse, there was no real way to start over (what with travel being so perilous), even if there hadn't been a lot of social/religious pressure to stay together. I wonder if the traditional concept of marriage is losing its relevence.
Run Yourself Ragged
Like Perfection, it's not strictly the sort of thing the article asks about (although I suppose you need to be good at spatial relationships when blindly going through the maze), but it's an entertaining variant on the timed 1-player game.
I will never play Risk again.
Every person I've ever played with relies on a different obscure house rule which they insist is necessary "for balance" (curiously, I have never even come close to winning a game of Risk in which its "imbalance" had been corrected). If I refuse to allow the rule, I'm setting myself up for six to eight hours of pissing and moaning, and attempts by that opponent to use the rule surreptitiously, as if it were a game of Cosmic Encounter or Illuminati.
Maybe I just have bad luck finding people to play Risk with, but that's just the final straw. The larger problem is that I simply can't afford to burn through such a large block of time: Risk, Axis & Allies, Diplomacy,... The games are good, but it takes longer to get these things set up than most of my friends are willing to spend playing.
I played Settlers of Catan for the first time this weekend; that seemed like a lot of fun (we only played to 10 points, though). The hex-map island suddenly reminded me of Survive! They otherwise have nothing in common, but I realized I hadn't even thought of that game in years.
The larger problem is the ridiculously high marriage rate. People need to abandon the notion that six months is long enough exposure to a brand new person to make a sixty year commitment.
I haven't felt this lost after someone's explanation of a mathematical concept since I first heard about transfinite numbers back in college.
Thanks. I needed a new hobby to pursue this summer, and now I think I know what it'll be.
I'm going to assume that has something to do with the commutative ring theory you mentioned, because I've never heard "2" used interchangeably with "the set of all even integers."
That aside, I don't understand your definition of prime. Something is missing, but I can't even guess at what it was. You didn't define x and y at all. Are they any two integers? If so, {a,x,y} = {4,8,3} shows us that 4 is prime (for that matter, permitting a = x or a = y means all integers are prime). Also, zero doesn't divide anything; so far as I've ever heard, that's just one of the rules. Finally, what about 1 and -1? They divide everything.
The only time I saw a formal definition for primes, it was something like:
An integer p > 1 is prime if and only if there exists no integer q such that q divides p and 1 < q < p.
Sadly, the answer is: It depends on which version of set theory you're using.
Cantor tried for years to prove it was 2^A (the cardinality of aleph_x+1 is the power set of aleph_x). This assertion--called the Continuum Hypothesis--turns out to be a lot like the Parallel Axiom. Is it true? Well, you're allowed to assume whichever answer you prefer and there will be no inherent contradiction.
Cantor did manage to show that it was definitely no more than 2^A, and that some other value Z > A (or maybe ">="?) acted as a lower bound for it; he just couldn't do anything to clarify the relationship between Z and A (I'm pretty sure Z is defined as the ordinality of all integers, whereas A is the cardinality, but you might want to double-check; I'm usually quite unconscious by this hour). Obviously, he was hoping to show Z = 2^A to pin down an exact value, but... *shrug*
By the way, I got all of this from Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. It has to be the single best Christmas present I've ever received. I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic (the author is much more eloquent/entertaining than I, so don't judge it on my post).
Personally, I had not heard of this guy, so I followed your link. Trust me when I say: It's a crock of shit. Most of the "predictions" are still off in the future and are thus untestable (setting aside the huge "out" he left for himself by saying how his timeline differs from ours), and/or are the same vague nonsense that lets the reader fill in his or her own meaning. It's like the quatrains of Nostradamus: people always seem to be able to figure out what they mean after it's too late to be rightly called a prediction. Let's take a look at a few gems, shall we?
There are other equally-amazing revelations, but you obviously have the link and can read them for yourself. My favorite from the ones I've listed is number 5, because even Titor admits it's "obvious," although 7 is a close runner up; I have to admire the sheer balls of taking a theory that's nearly a century old and passing it off as a glimpse of Things Yet to Be.
Whoever Titor was, he or she definitely had access to a lot of relatively-obscure scientific knowledge and the understanding to use the terms therefrom in a semi-coherent manner. If I were a betting man, I put my money on Titor being a math or physics graduate student.
There is no justice to be had in the Slashdot moderation system. This person hit the nail squarely on the head.
Wa-a-ay back in '99 or 2000, I read an article somewhere that talked about the perennial notion of "the coming class war," and why it was patent nonsense. The thesis was that instead of a single Lower Class threatening to rise up against the Upper Class, the country was divided into hundreds or perhaps thousands of cliques with one of two main mindsets:
The consequence is that everyone who's in a position to lay claim to the title of Oppressed Masses actually has a sense of superiority over someone (frequently everyone) who is outside the clique, so they claim the moral high ground and figure that's enough. "Some day, people will come to realize that We're right, and then We'll be vindicated."
Some people might look at how convenient this setup is for the Upper Class and be tempted to suggest that there's something deliberate about it. Those people don't neatly fit into the above mold; they see a single source of oppression aimed at all groups equally instead of everyone slighting whichever other cliques annoy them most. We call these people Conspiracy Nuts and duly ignore everything they say.
What is the basis for this position? Why should the dead have any rights? What is the libertarian justification for denying you the opportunity to purchase my corpse from my (hypothetically) impoverished next-of-kin to provide raw materials to the next Dr. Frankenstein? Because some guy who doesn't even exist anymore said No? (It probably goes without saying that I haven't managed to summon up the will (heh) to talk to a lawyer about planning for the inevitable.)
Half of your suggestions are useless when the weather refuses to cooperate. As much as I want to avoid the hassle of automobile ownership, I will not ride a bicycle to a job interview.[*] Nothing says, "Don't call us, we'll call you," like being drenched in either sweat or rain.
I will, however, agree with the staircase suggestion. I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone take an elevator up--or worse, down--one floor. I prefer to take stairs on every occasion that it's feasible.
[*]Please don't suggest public transportation. As a poor college student, I rode the bus everywhere. I can still remember the time this guy went off on the bus driver because he was half an hour late for his job interview. The reason? Someone in a wheelchair both boarded and exited the bus before picking up our luckless friend, and that tends to put them a little behind schedule.
The Wendy's burger King, McDonald's, and Arby's in my neighborhood all accept debit and/or credit cards. So, yeah: leaving cash at home doesn't accomplish much.
I agree that F/OSS isn't a panacea, but the article says the vendor for their current application went out of business. Maybe that's made them a little gun-shy. I can easily imagine the customer asking, "Is there any way to make sure this doesn't happen again?" Once they ask, you really ought to start looking to see if anything meets that need.
Preach on, bnet41!
The sad part is, there aren't many places in the U.S. larger than Columbus (last I heard, 15th largest by population). If this place is dead, where else is there to go?
On the other hand, I remember once hearing about a study that showed Ohioans are more of a "homebody" type than the average American. On the whole, we seem to prefer staying at home to watch TV.
Bleh.
After spending eight solid hours playing Need for Speed: High Stakes, I went out to the grocery for whatever, and a police cruiser comes up to pass me on the left. I had to suppress the urge to sideswipe him in an attempt to run him off the road.
A couple days later, I sold the game and my force-feedback steering wheel to a coworker.
Something must be wrong with the way I argue online, because I get a lot of that.
Yeah, I saw the number (583?! Damn!) and suspected you were even more disappointed in the decline than I, probably had more reason to be sentimental about the good old days, too. I didn't learn about The Other Site (is it still called that?) until it was already pretty far downhill, so I never bothered with it. I should probably spend some time at Ars Technica, just as a change of pace.
Thanks for the links. I can probably pick up a copy of Slander from the library this weekend.
vi or die!
Thank you, but I did read the first two links you sent (and explained that I cannot make out the third). McCarthy may not have been a member of the HUAC (how could he? he was a senator), but he was--and is--an icon of the work they did. The average person needs a nice way to mentally sum up complex things, and Sen. McCarthy waving the list of names is as good as it gets. Hence the "-ism."
Me too. Have you considered the possibility you might be happier if you stopped coming here? I was just considering it earlier today. The signal-to-noise ratio is becoming vanishingly small, and I find myself getting into petty bickering matches with assholes who are probably laughing at me for caring about what they post. The only thing keeping me coming back these days is the neat geeky stuff they occasionally post, and the fact that I haven't found anywhere else that isn't just as bad (the devil you know, and all that).
It's pretty well known that Slashdot's moderation system is broken. I don't even see people threaten to use meta-moderation anymore; there's no point. You can't stem the tide of idiots with mod points and an agenda. I mostly just ignore the moderation anymore. If it's above my threshold, I'll read it.
Well, I usually don't bother with political threads on this site, so I've little experience there, but methinks you put too much stock in the moderation system. I can see a point about the moderators being invisible (and mostly unaccountable) partisans steering the conversation, but I think in the long run, we're better off ignoring them (or maybe getting the Hell out of here, once and for all).
As I said (or meant to), I don't doubt the PDF has lots of useful information, but since I can't read it, I can't really justify changing my opinions just yet. I will keep an eye out for more information on the subject, though. This was the first I had heard about this sort of thing, and I have to admit, you've piqued my curiosity.
This is just an editorial, backed by nothing more than vitriol and a liberal (heh) dose of ad hominem attacks. You weaken your position by including this link.
If M. Stanton Evans' assertions are true, it'd be very interesting, indeed. I should point out, though, that the article doesn't offer anything in the way of support for his claims.
I can't make heads or tails of this. Maybe it says something useful, but whoever scanned it in did a piss-poor job of it.
In sum: At present, I see no reason to believe
Without IP laws, ideas are neither yours nor theirs. Maybe that's a Bad Thing, but you haven't established that. Instead your argument states you need IP laws because without them, people wouldn't obey IP laws. This is tantamount to arguing that we shouldn't legalize marijuana because then more people would smoke it.