narrow subset of the American Programmer population that what you describe as the behavioral norm is nothing but an old and tire descriptional cliche?
Where do you think the cliche comes from?
Folk tales? Urban legends? Stereotypes perpetuated by media?
Its well rooted in truth.
It's well rooted in the American psyche and popular culture, like the pocket protector cliche, or the cliche that one day (extremely soon as I've heard again and again and again from the masses) computers will learn to write programs, making us programmers obsolete.More concretely, during the 70's oil crisis, it was a well rooted cliche among a large number of the population to believe big oil companies kept their tankers away from ports to up the prices (despite the more sensible explanations of that economic phenomenon.)
Being well rooted has no logical bearing on a cliche being truth or false.
The sad part is, a lot of these guys seem themselves as normal and have no idea how much of a dick they really are.
But that is true of any type of sociopath or introvert... or of any normal being with personal flaws for that matter. It is still an unquantifiable statement, an stereotype. We can argue about personality types and the prevalence of high functioning autism or ADHD among engineers, scientists (and for that matter people in the creative arts.)
But to describe what amounts to borderline sociopath tendencies across a professional disciple and trade, that's just perpetuating a stereotype, one that you can only measure by the strength of your personal convictions in believing it to be true. It is subjective.
Their massive ego frequently prevents them from seeing themselves as others outside their field see them.
That is the typical human condition except for the rarely few gifted in the humane department.
No offense, but perhaps this also describes you?
That is a possibility, but without proof of it, that is just speculation of your part, one that cannot be measured for truth or falsehood, ergo one that cannot be used to logically defend a position or argument. And if you were to take that as a certainty, then you would have created a convenient, self-fulfilling strawman + "petitio principii" with which to counter-argue my original statement.
We frequently refuse to see our own failings in others.
Typical human condition, not one exclusive of a particular trade or profession.
And introspection is something I rarely see in my peers. Its sad.
It is sad only if we seek a reason to be upset or a target to point finger at.
Again, typical human condition. You can find that in any trade. With the exception of some social studies on individuals in business leadership positions, I've never seen any objective measure by which one can say engineers are this or sociologists are that beyond the realm of speculation.
It is sad if you decide to believe it is. Things can be seen as sad, happy or irrelevant, moral, immoral or amoral depending on how we chose to see the world. For me I simply accept the imperfections of the human condition, coupled with the fact that people in general are capable of love and affection and respect, but that simply must cope with their own specific imperfections as they go about their business.
I don't find it sad (most of the time) because I chose to see and appreciate the goodness in people. And that choice is not dependent on the temporal/occasional flaws that people will inevitably exhibit from time to time.
In other words, if I find something sad, it is because I am personally unable find a redeeming attribute on that which I'm observing. Whether that ability or inability is objective or subjective, that is truly a function of the individual.
Contrary to popular belief, most programmers are not socially inept basement dwellers at the mom's house. The sales person does not need to know 100% of the technical aspects, they need to be able to convey what can be done at a coarse level, and then for detail, reference a skilled programmer.
You've clearly worked with a very narrow slice of the American Programmer. A disproportionate number of programmers do so because they are socially innept and/or generally social outcasts. They are drawn to the field as an escape from society. They are all too typically massively egotistical, and tie their ego directly to their work product - regardless of actual merit. So while saying they are not basement dwellers is true, the "socially inept" part, on average, is extremely accurate. And for the record, I've have the misfortune of working with the basement dwellers too. Yes, they actually exist.
The bottom line is, most programmers struggle to have basic chit-chat as well as struggle to relate to the rest of humanity. Worse, because of their massively inappropriate and usually completely unjustified ego, they then look down on those who don't share their exact same outlook at life/work/project/product. And its not just me saying so. I can't tell you how many EE's I've worked with how have told me they generally hate working with the software guys because they are a bunch of counter-culture/anti-social dicks. And honestly, on average, if not a little more, I completely agree.
Obligatory "citations please" here.
Not tooth my own horn, but provide some anecdotal perspective - I've worked in 11 different programming shops (financial/insurance, R&D, commercial engineering and defense), with local and offshore teams, with good and bad programmers with various backgrounds (CS, MIS, CE/EE, Physics/Stats and even Foreign Languages). I've never observed that which you describe.
A mandatory YMMV disclaimer is in order obviously. Crap, everything is possible. However, what are the chances, statistically speaking, that 11 different programming shops in completely unrelated industries will cut through such a narrow subset of the American Programmer population that what you describe as the behavioral norm is nothing but an old and tire descriptional cliche?
C++ - a can of worms which only a language lawyer could love - probably hit the big time because of MS Visual C++ and the MS Foundation Classes. That and the fact that C programmers didn't think they had to learn a whole new language (see earlier comment about cans of worms).
Or maybe C++ became popular because it introduced the object-oriented paradigm while retaining compatibility with C.
Can of worms? You know you don't have to get into template programming and other complex C++ STL guts, right?
You don't have to get into template meta-programming or STL/Boost or RTTI to see it can become a can of worms very quickly. It is true of all languages, but from my experience, C++ can get you there very quickly.
Read my lips. No amount of training is going to bridge the shortage of skilled workers in the USA. Until something is done that actually addresses the problems in your education system this is always going to be an issue.
The education system is far from perfect, but there seems to be a lack of entry level positions that would help aleviate the problem. Basically Corporate America complains there is a "talent shortage" but then does nothing about it.
This is one of the root causes (not the only one mind you, but an important one.) Corporate America used to believe in training and developing talent. Now, they all want already trained senior level people (with mid-level salaries), and junior-level openings filled with either local senior-level people or with offshore foot soldiers.
My first job send me and other colleagues to a 5-day training workshop, $7K per head. And mind you that this wasn't an engineering firm, but a good ol' insurance company. But this wasn't uncommon. Any company with enough size had a budget for training.
That concept is gone because, after all, a company's sole goal nowadays is to maximize profit. Anything else is labeled as socialism (mostly by illiterate angry folks who have no flying clue what the f* that term means.)
With an average unemployment of over 8.2%, and you can't find a single American to do your job?
We are talking about the 20% top percentile, 6-figure salary type of jobs, you know. This is not about filling job slots, but bringing highly trained talent into the country. If we are to survive the inevitability of globalization (and the cheap-o manufacturing flight that comes with it), we must do this.
How about training local citizens for the job, at low or no cost to them.
That requires local citizens willing/inclined to pursue the education necessary for a 6-figure salary. And please don't tell me that cost is what drives locals away from doing that. We have an abundance of Marketing/Creative Writing graduates (and too few STEM graduates) to prove this is not a factor.
You need to change the ethos of our society before you can even have a soapbox from where to ask your question. As it is, it's just jingoistic posturing. Deal with it, and suck on it. We do not have a society that cares much about education, and who cares more about creationism and MBAs than anything remotely associated with STEM. There is a reason the STEM intelligentsia in this country is made up in great part by foreign-born citizens.
U.S. out of state students pay out of state tuition. There are more U.S. out of state students than foreign students.
Nice try troll.
Not really. Many of them become state citizens after the first year, ergo paying in-state tuition. Granted that the OP is exaggerating foreign students' contribution to keeping tuition low. BUT so are you. At the risk of bringing up a cliche, the truth is in the middle.
Public Universities should not be accepting foreign students over U.S. students. They may say they want the "prestige" of having a diverse student body or say that they have some hot shot kid from one of the Stan countries, but no matter. They were created for and their job is to provide a higher education for the American public. Especially since they are largely financed by U.S. Taxpayers.
Private Universities? As long as they are let in under the rules and not given precedence over those who have been in line, fine, go ahead.
It seems that most of the institutions of higher learning have forgotten what their purpose is and instead strive to have the most bling... people or programs or things.
Let me stop you right there with three points.
1. No one is saying that US students are passed over foreign ones. Do you have proof that this is what is happening?
2. The truth of the matter is that US students are not going in droves into STEM fields at the 4-year level, let alone the grad level. This is the truth. Suck on it and deal with it. The US STEM intelligentsia is disproportionally composed of foreign-born nationals. US students do not get passed over. They simply chose to study for Marketing or Creative Writing.
3. Why not use tax payers to get the best and brightest from abroad to study here and become US nationals? That's better use of of taxpayers money (my money, your money) than funding yet another graduate in Creative Writing burdened by a $100K loan.
It was a foreign-born citizen who created USB, and another one who helped create google. And many more created a lot more shit while the rest of us were content studying for useless degrees, while complaining why US students get passed over (which is not true.)
A little bit more perspective and a little less of this stupid faux victim look-at-me syndrome is what you need.
He made a claim and then backed up the claim with logical reasoning. How does that match with "You claiming that it is does not make it so"?
No, he did not. Hyperbolic bending of the is/ought philosophical problem is not logical reasoning.
All nations do things that are tyrannical. To answer your question directly, yes, when it comes to their laws restricting ownership of guns, Japan is a tyrannical nation.
With that example (Japan of all places), do you realize how stupid this reasoning is?
Interesting read, but in this case they couldn't really measure password strength, only password uniqueness which isn't exactly the same.
True, strength and uniqueness are not the same. However, the later (in particular when considering a large population sample) can serve as a proxy to quantify the former. Think of if this way, the more unique a password is, the greater the probability that this password is long enough and with a sufficiently large character set to make it strong. That is, the more random that it will look.
The less unique the password, the greater the probability that it will share more characters (off a smaller character set), substrings, and length in common with others (as per the birthday problem in probability.) Ergo, it is less random.
So yes, uniqueness does not equate strength in absolute terms. But randomness is proportional to uniqueness (off set of elements under consideration.) And apparent randomness in a password is a necessary condition for strength.
Taking guns away from your citizens is itself an act of tyranny. You can't do it without being also being tyrannical. You may argue that despite being tyrannical they did it for some other reason and not "because" they are tyrannical, but that's a fine hair to split.
So, going back to the original question. Is Japan is a tyrannical nation?
As Stephen Colbert said "I can't prove it, but I can claim it."
Your answer (and the position from which you give it) is as arrogant as it is useless. In principle that makes you no different than a Bat-crap crazy fundamentalist that claims he's better than you just because he goes to Church every Sunday.
To quasi-quote Obi-Wan Kenobi - Only an idiot deals in absolutes.
"The measure is intended to curb violent crime in Venezuela, where 78% of homicides are linked to firearms."
That's what Venezuela claims. In reality, the government prefers a citizenry armed with sticks and rocks when the inevitable revolt comes to pass.
I might have a slightly different perspective (given that I come from Nicaragua, a country that used to be plagued by civil wars and tyrannical regimes.) There is a lot of truth that violent crime is up to levels never seen before in Venezuela's history (same in other countries, like Honduras and Mexico.)
Violent crimes are simply too much for the government (tyrannical or not) to handle. A general dissarmament (coupled with other social changes) can curb violent crime in poor countries with poorly developed (or unmaintained) social institutions. And by social changes I mean more pluralistic participation, increased professionalization of the police and armed forces, an opening of markets, however poor the country might be, and an atmosphere devoid of continuous civil strife.
I do not believe the Venezuelan government is simply trying to disarm the civilian population just to remain in power. I'm not a Chavez-sympathizer, au contrair, I loathe everything he stands for. However, this is just too simplistic an explanation, one well suited for playing arm-chair conspiracy theories. It also neglects to acknowledge that a substantial % of the population supports him (populism sells for the simple, destitute masses.)
They Venezuelan authorities have a substantial criminal violence problem in their hands, and this is one necessary (but not sufficient) step to curb it. It will fall short given that all the other necessary ingredients to make it work.
And that is the sad mark of incompetent regimes: to take uneducated, incomplete shortcuts to solve extremelly complex socio-economic problems.
Apparently. I'm pro-gun, but the whole blanket statement that government takes away guns from citizens because they are tyrannical and thus want to prevent resistance, that's just hand waving.
Any government that holds secret wars is extremely corrupt. That taxpayer pays for tinkering that almost always causes more trouble, giving the secret agencies more work and more demands on the taxpayers.
Yeah, damned the government for keeping the actual date and location of D-Day as a state secret </stupid>
Sovereign Immunity. You cannot sue the government without their permission, so it's not as easy as "just file in the appropriate court" when you're suing the government itself. Yes, it is that easy for suing anyone else.
What does that have to do with everything discussed so far? The posts you are replying to is talking about companies (defense contractors and a hypothetical chip manufacturing) suing a 3rd party agent for raising a false alert (which would most likely be dropped trivially). There is no mentioning of the government. Moreover, sovereign immunity, though an existing term, it is not a generic blank statement that the government (be it at the federal, state or local level) can pull out of its ass whenever someone has a grievance - not to mention that it is up to the judge to decide if a sovereign immunity defense (and the suit) has any merits.
Yes, because you know that those books available on Project Gutenberg were never sold, no one tried to buy one and it was only when they were available online for free that people tried to read them.
Non sequitur. Why? Because:
1. What you said doesn't prove that paying for books is bad, and most importantly
2. What you said is not fucking true.
I can prove to you that what you said is not true by contradiction. If what you said was true (that no one tried to read the books in Project Gutenberg), then it has to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", Cervantes's Qixote, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" to name a few.
This is obviously not true since these writings have been the object of substantial reading through the centuries and ages, which predates free e-books. Ergo, your statement is false (in addition to being tangential), and you are an idiot for making it.
Until the government decides to steal that money from you: "Freezing your assets" because they suspect you of some crime, "garnishing" or "levying" your bank account because you didn't "voluntarily" pay their taxes, and so on.
In neither of these cases the government steals. Though there is always the chance that an innocent person can have his wages garnished, the overwhelming majority of cases occur because the suspect has already crossed a threshold of unanswered warnings. This is particularly true when not paying your taxes (yes, you should pay them voluntarily, that's the law.) I really have no clue what the heck you are babbling about here.
And then of course, the government can just decide to print more money at will, stealing wealth from everyone, through inflation.
Bro, you should, I dunno, teach economics or something. Your grasp in the subject is just awesome.
The risk of theft or loss with government-backed banks is the same; the thieves are just more organized. And if you consider inflation, the slow, persistent, and inexorable theft of your banked USDs is all but certain.
Well, switch to bitcoin. There is some truth to what you say, but you started to fail miserably when you decided to inject so much theft hyperbola in your argument.
For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well.
Shouldn't that be handled by the manager or someone?
The actual coders should never have to look up the prices on any of their tools. New hardware should just show up as soon as the manager can complete all the paperwork and the political fights.
This is how is done in good places (both public and private.) There are private shops that act as stupidly as bad public shops when it comes to insulating developers from the day-to-day management/inventory minutia.
That's one of the gayest things I've read in slashdot in a while.
Say what you want, this is the best venue for dating, a zillion times better than clubbing and getting hammered. Plus, on average, people engaged in trained dancing activities tend to have a higher level of education and income than the crowd engaged in clubbing and getting hammered. For me it was Salsa dancing. Dated a lot; have a lot fun; met more engineers that I could socialize with that way than at work; and where I met my wife.
Kids and man-kids will call it ghey. Men see it for what it is, a social activity.
Slashdot Mirror
narrow subset of the American Programmer population that what you describe as the behavioral norm is nothing but an old and tire descriptional cliche?
Where do you think the cliche comes from?
Folk tales? Urban legends? Stereotypes perpetuated by media?
Its well rooted in truth.
It's well rooted in the American psyche and popular culture, like the pocket protector cliche, or the cliche that one day (extremely soon as I've heard again and again and again from the masses) computers will learn to write programs, making us programmers obsolete.More concretely, during the 70's oil crisis, it was a well rooted cliche among a large number of the population to believe big oil companies kept their tankers away from ports to up the prices (despite the more sensible explanations of that economic phenomenon.)
Being well rooted has no logical bearing on a cliche being truth or false.
The sad part is, a lot of these guys seem themselves as normal and have no idea how much of a dick they really are.
But that is true of any type of sociopath or introvert... or of any normal being with personal flaws for that matter. It is still an unquantifiable statement, an stereotype. We can argue about personality types and the prevalence of high functioning autism or ADHD among engineers, scientists (and for that matter people in the creative arts.)
But to describe what amounts to borderline sociopath tendencies across a professional disciple and trade, that's just perpetuating a stereotype, one that you can only measure by the strength of your personal convictions in believing it to be true. It is subjective.
Their massive ego frequently prevents them from seeing themselves as others outside their field see them.
That is the typical human condition except for the rarely few gifted in the humane department.
No offense, but perhaps this also describes you?
That is a possibility, but without proof of it, that is just speculation of your part, one that cannot be measured for truth or falsehood, ergo one that cannot be used to logically defend a position or argument. And if you were to take that as a certainty, then you would have created a convenient, self-fulfilling strawman + "petitio principii" with which to counter-argue my original statement.
We frequently refuse to see our own failings in others.
Typical human condition, not one exclusive of a particular trade or profession.
And introspection is something I rarely see in my peers. Its sad.
It is sad only if we seek a reason to be upset or a target to point finger at.
Again, typical human condition. You can find that in any trade. With the exception of some social studies on individuals in business leadership positions, I've never seen any objective measure by which one can say engineers are this or sociologists are that beyond the realm of speculation.
It is sad if you decide to believe it is. Things can be seen as sad, happy or irrelevant, moral, immoral or amoral depending on how we chose to see the world. For me I simply accept the imperfections of the human condition, coupled with the fact that people in general are capable of love and affection and respect, but that simply must cope with their own specific imperfections as they go about their business.
I don't find it sad (most of the time) because I chose to see and appreciate the goodness in people. And that choice is not dependent on the temporal/occasional flaws that people will inevitably exhibit from time to time.
In other words, if I find something sad, it is because I am personally unable find a redeeming attribute on that which I'm observing. Whether that ability or inability is objective or subjective, that is truly a function of the individual.
Contrary to popular belief, most programmers are not socially inept basement dwellers at the mom's house. The sales person does not need to know 100% of the technical aspects, they need to be able to convey what can be done at a coarse level, and then for detail, reference a skilled programmer.
You've clearly worked with a very narrow slice of the American Programmer. A disproportionate number of programmers do so because they are socially innept and/or generally social outcasts. They are drawn to the field as an escape from society. They are all too typically massively egotistical, and tie their ego directly to their work product - regardless of actual merit. So while saying they are not basement dwellers is true, the "socially inept" part, on average, is extremely accurate. And for the record, I've have the misfortune of working with the basement dwellers too. Yes, they actually exist.
The bottom line is, most programmers struggle to have basic chit-chat as well as struggle to relate to the rest of humanity. Worse, because of their massively inappropriate and usually completely unjustified ego, they then look down on those who don't share their exact same outlook at life/work/project/product. And its not just me saying so. I can't tell you how many EE's I've worked with how have told me they generally hate working with the software guys because they are a bunch of counter-culture/anti-social dicks. And honestly, on average, if not a little more, I completely agree.
Obligatory "citations please" here.
Not tooth my own horn, but provide some anecdotal perspective - I've worked in 11 different programming shops (financial/insurance, R&D, commercial engineering and defense), with local and offshore teams, with good and bad programmers with various backgrounds (CS, MIS, CE/EE, Physics/Stats and even Foreign Languages). I've never observed that which you describe.
A mandatory YMMV disclaimer is in order obviously. Crap, everything is possible. However, what are the chances, statistically speaking, that 11 different programming shops in completely unrelated industries will cut through such a narrow subset of the American Programmer population that what you describe as the behavioral norm is nothing but an old and tire descriptional cliche?
Or maybe C++ became popular because it introduced the object-oriented paradigm while retaining compatibility with C.
Can of worms? You know you don't have to get into template programming and other complex C++ STL guts, right?
You don't have to get into template meta-programming or STL/Boost or RTTI to see it can become a can of worms very quickly. It is true of all languages, but from my experience, C++ can get you there very quickly.
Competition is good
Only if the competition is fair. Are they paying the same taxes? Are they living in the same area with the same cost index?
If they are living among us as US citizens or permanent residents, they do.
Read my lips. No amount of training is going to bridge the shortage of skilled workers in the USA. Until something is done that actually addresses the problems in your education system this is always going to be an issue.
The education system is far from perfect, but there seems to be a lack of entry level positions that would help aleviate the problem. Basically Corporate America complains there is a "talent shortage" but then does nothing about it.
This is one of the root causes (not the only one mind you, but an important one.) Corporate America used to believe in training and developing talent. Now, they all want already trained senior level people (with mid-level salaries), and junior-level openings filled with either local senior-level people or with offshore foot soldiers.
My first job send me and other colleagues to a 5-day training workshop, $7K per head. And mind you that this wasn't an engineering firm, but a good ol' insurance company. But this wasn't uncommon. Any company with enough size had a budget for training.
That concept is gone because, after all, a company's sole goal nowadays is to maximize profit. Anything else is labeled as socialism (mostly by illiterate angry folks who have no flying clue what the f* that term means.)
more apprenticeships are needed college for all is a issue with the system as is.
And grammar classes. We need more of that as well.
With an average unemployment of over 8.2%, and you can't find a single American to do your job?
We are talking about the 20% top percentile, 6-figure salary type of jobs, you know. This is not about filling job slots, but bringing highly trained talent into the country. If we are to survive the inevitability of globalization (and the cheap-o manufacturing flight that comes with it), we must do this.
How about training local citizens for the job, at low or no cost to them.
That requires local citizens willing/inclined to pursue the education necessary for a 6-figure salary. And please don't tell me that cost is what drives locals away from doing that. We have an abundance of Marketing/Creative Writing graduates (and too few STEM graduates) to prove this is not a factor.
You need to change the ethos of our society before you can even have a soapbox from where to ask your question. As it is, it's just jingoistic posturing. Deal with it, and suck on it. We do not have a society that cares much about education, and who cares more about creationism and MBAs than anything remotely associated with STEM. There is a reason the STEM intelligentsia in this country is made up in great part by foreign-born citizens.
As soon as we can accept the reality that we are already competing with them for jobs, all the reasons not to have them here fall away.
The countries that recognize this first will gain the most benefit.
Oh please. Have you looked at our state of education lately? Have you noticed how few of us go into the most important fields of study?
U.S. out of state students pay out of state tuition. There are more U.S. out of state students than foreign students. Nice try troll.
Not really. Many of them become state citizens after the first year, ergo paying in-state tuition. Granted that the OP is exaggerating foreign students' contribution to keeping tuition low. BUT so are you. At the risk of bringing up a cliche, the truth is in the middle.
Public Universities should not be accepting foreign students over U.S. students. They may say they want the "prestige" of having a diverse student body or say that they have some hot shot kid from one of the Stan countries, but no matter. They were created for and their job is to provide a higher education for the American public. Especially since they are largely financed by U.S. Taxpayers.
Private Universities? As long as they are let in under the rules and not given precedence over those who have been in line, fine, go ahead.
It seems that most of the institutions of higher learning have forgotten what their purpose is and instead strive to have the most bling... people or programs or things.
Let me stop you right there with three points.
1. No one is saying that US students are passed over foreign ones. Do you have proof that this is what is happening?
2. The truth of the matter is that US students are not going in droves into STEM fields at the 4-year level, let alone the grad level. This is the truth. Suck on it and deal with it. The US STEM intelligentsia is disproportionally composed of foreign-born nationals. US students do not get passed over. They simply chose to study for Marketing or Creative Writing.
3. Why not use tax payers to get the best and brightest from abroad to study here and become US nationals? That's better use of of taxpayers money (my money, your money) than funding yet another graduate in Creative Writing burdened by a $100K loan.
It was a foreign-born citizen who created USB, and another one who helped create google. And many more created a lot more shit while the rest of us were content studying for useless degrees, while complaining why US students get passed over (which is not true.)
A little bit more perspective and a little less of this stupid faux victim look-at-me syndrome is what you need.
He made a claim and then backed up the claim with logical reasoning. How does that match with "You claiming that it is does not make it so"?
No, he did not. Hyperbolic bending of the is/ought philosophical problem is not logical reasoning.
All nations do things that are tyrannical. To answer your question directly, yes, when it comes to their laws restricting ownership of guns, Japan is a tyrannical nation.
With that example (Japan of all places), do you realize how stupid this reasoning is?
Interesting read, but in this case they couldn't really measure password strength, only password uniqueness which isn't exactly the same.
True, strength and uniqueness are not the same. However, the later (in particular when considering a large population sample) can serve as a proxy to quantify the former. Think of if this way, the more unique a password is, the greater the probability that this password is long enough and with a sufficiently large character set to make it strong. That is, the more random that it will look.
The less unique the password, the greater the probability that it will share more characters (off a smaller character set), substrings, and length in common with others (as per the birthday problem in probability.) Ergo, it is less random.
So yes, uniqueness does not equate strength in absolute terms. But randomness is proportional to uniqueness (off set of elements under consideration.) And apparent randomness in a password is a necessary condition for strength.
It's not hand waving. It's tautological.
You claiming that it is does not make it so.
Taking guns away from your citizens is itself an act of tyranny. You can't do it without being also being tyrannical. You may argue that despite being tyrannical they did it for some other reason and not "because" they are tyrannical, but that's a fine hair to split.
So, going back to the original question. Is Japan is a tyrannical nation?
Yes. Next question?
As Stephen Colbert said "I can't prove it, but I can claim it."
Your answer (and the position from which you give it) is as arrogant as it is useless. In principle that makes you no different than a Bat-crap crazy fundamentalist that claims he's better than you just because he goes to Church every Sunday.
To quasi-quote Obi-Wan Kenobi - Only an idiot deals in absolutes.
"The measure is intended to curb violent crime in Venezuela, where 78% of homicides are linked to firearms."
That's what Venezuela claims. In reality, the government prefers a citizenry armed with sticks and rocks when the inevitable revolt comes to pass.
I might have a slightly different perspective (given that I come from Nicaragua, a country that used to be plagued by civil wars and tyrannical regimes.) There is a lot of truth that violent crime is up to levels never seen before in Venezuela's history (same in other countries, like Honduras and Mexico.)
Violent crimes are simply too much for the government (tyrannical or not) to handle. A general dissarmament (coupled with other social changes) can curb violent crime in poor countries with poorly developed (or unmaintained) social institutions. And by social changes I mean more pluralistic participation, increased professionalization of the police and armed forces, an opening of markets, however poor the country might be, and an atmosphere devoid of continuous civil strife.
I do not believe the Venezuelan government is simply trying to disarm the civilian population just to remain in power. I'm not a Chavez-sympathizer, au contrair, I loathe everything he stands for. However, this is just too simplistic an explanation, one well suited for playing arm-chair conspiracy theories. It also neglects to acknowledge that a substantial % of the population supports him (populism sells for the simple, destitute masses.)
They Venezuelan authorities have a substantial criminal violence problem in their hands, and this is one necessary (but not sufficient) step to curb it. It will fall short given that all the other necessary ingredients to make it work.
And that is the sad mark of incompetent regimes: to take uneducated, incomplete shortcuts to solve extremelly complex socio-economic problems.
So Japan is a tyrannical regime?
Apparently. I'm pro-gun, but the whole blanket statement that government takes away guns from citizens because they are tyrannical and thus want to prevent resistance, that's just hand waving.
Any government that holds secret wars is extremely corrupt. That taxpayer pays for tinkering that almost always causes more trouble, giving the secret agencies more work and more demands on the taxpayers.
Yeah, damned the government for keeping the actual date and location of D-Day as a state secret </stupid>
Ask Slashdot: What Type of Asset Would You Not Virtualize?
^^^ That, I wouldn't virtualize (or at least I would think over it very seriously.)
Sovereign Immunity. You cannot sue the government without their permission, so it's not as easy as "just file in the appropriate court" when you're suing the government itself. Yes, it is that easy for suing anyone else.
What does that have to do with everything discussed so far? The posts you are replying to is talking about companies (defense contractors and a hypothetical chip manufacturing) suing a 3rd party agent for raising a false alert (which would most likely be dropped trivially). There is no mentioning of the government. Moreover, sovereign immunity, though an existing term, it is not a generic blank statement that the government (be it at the federal, state or local level) can pull out of its ass whenever someone has a grievance - not to mention that it is up to the judge to decide if a sovereign immunity defense (and the suit) has any merits.
If so, then my bad. My online sarcasm-o-meter is broken.
Yes, because you know that those books available on Project Gutenberg were never sold, no one tried to buy one and it was only when they were available online for free that people tried to read them.
Non sequitur. Why? Because:
1. What you said doesn't prove that paying for books is bad, and most importantly
2. What you said is not fucking true.
I can prove to you that what you said is not true by contradiction. If what you said was true (that no one tried to read the books in Project Gutenberg), then it has to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", Cervantes's Qixote, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" to name a few.
This is obviously not true since these writings have been the object of substantial reading through the centuries and ages, which predates free e-books. Ergo, your statement is false (in addition to being tangential), and you are an idiot for making it.
Until the government decides to steal that money from you: "Freezing your assets" because they suspect you of some crime, "garnishing" or "levying" your bank account because you didn't "voluntarily" pay their taxes, and so on.
In neither of these cases the government steals. Though there is always the chance that an innocent person can have his wages garnished, the overwhelming majority of cases occur because the suspect has already crossed a threshold of unanswered warnings. This is particularly true when not paying your taxes (yes, you should pay them voluntarily, that's the law.) I really have no clue what the heck you are babbling about here.
And then of course, the government can just decide to print more money at will, stealing wealth from everyone, through inflation.
Bro, you should, I dunno, teach economics or something. Your grasp in the subject is just awesome.
The risk of theft or loss with government-backed banks is the same; the thieves are just more organized. And if you consider inflation, the slow, persistent, and inexorable theft of your banked USDs is all but certain.
Well, switch to bitcoin. There is some truth to what you say, but you started to fail miserably when you decided to inject so much theft hyperbola in your argument.
Shouldn't that be handled by the manager or someone?
The actual coders should never have to look up the prices on any of their tools. New hardware should just show up as soon as the manager can complete all the paperwork and the political fights.
This is how is done in good places (both public and private.) There are private shops that act as stupidly as bad public shops when it comes to insulating developers from the day-to-day management/inventory minutia.
4.5 years ago I discovered Tango dancing.
Wow.
That's one of the gayest things I've read in slashdot in a while.
Say what you want, this is the best venue for dating, a zillion times better than clubbing and getting hammered. Plus, on average, people engaged in trained dancing activities tend to have a higher level of education and income than the crowd engaged in clubbing and getting hammered. For me it was Salsa dancing. Dated a lot; have a lot fun; met more engineers that I could socialize with that way than at work; and where I met my wife.
Kids and man-kids will call it ghey. Men see it for what it is, a social activity.