I program since the age of eight (LOGO, of course, then BASIC, then Pascal, then everything), and I think that what makes me a good programmer is not anything I already had, but what I learned.
Of course, intelligence and creativity go a long way in programming, but they do in most disciplines, too.
I didn't mean that programming skills don't vary among programmers, but I wanted to emphasize that it doesn't take any special ability different than what is useful for most other tasks. Of course you can't be taught a higher IQ, but the specific skills needed for programming, can be learned.
I don't care about people being jews, catholics, muslims, white, brown, green or anything. In fact, I am an atheist, and I don't care about people religion, or color of their skin, where they live, or anything.
I understand that the jewish people had awful things happen to them. I have a problem with the superlativism they try to impose to stuff that happened to them. The problem is that talking about the "Holocaust", with a capital "H", has the secondary effect of negating everything bad that is happening right now with people. Some times, I see jewish people arguing about the size and importance of that, and they actually talk like it was the only genocide that happened.
Of course, it was awful, and there's no denying it, but many times you can hear _some_ jews actually talking like somehow what happened to them is superlative, and above everything else, even taking into account the issue of the quantity of people involved. Some of that times they come up as feeling like their disgrace is somehow more important than what happens to others, and should be regarded as more important by others. That view seems to me, insensitive to the rest of the humanity.
I don't agree with that, I can see right now countries going against specific religions, and specific ethnicities, and I feel it's really bad, and no group that suffers that kind of thing is somehow more important than the other.
About "the jews control the media", I don't think the jews control the media, but it can't be denied that they have a lot more presence and influence in western media, than arab people, or any asian group, for instance. That is because, jews are a part of the US community, and the US is important in forming opinion in other countries.
I don't think it's part of a jew conspiracy, though. It's just how it should be, you are part of a community, your views are more important to them than the views of people outside your community.
But it is kind of poor to say that it's "antisemitic" to say that jews have no media influence.
You should learn that it is ok to think bad things against some jewish people, and it's ok to be against mostly everything that Israel does, and that doesn't have anything to do with people hating jews for being jews. People don't do everything out of hatred, some times they have their own opinions aside from what the other person is.
I really think that Israel is wrong in most of the things they do with Palestinian people, and them invading Lebanon. But I came up with that, just seeing what happens, and not out of hatred for the jews. It would be very arrogant to say that you can't disagree with Israel if not out of hatred.
Those views did not create open source, they created GNU and the FSF. I was freely exchanging sourcecode with friends and fellow developers long before I had ever heard of either of those two organisations.
Of course you were sharing, just like RMS. You are right, they didn't create "open source", but they are key to its continued existance. The problem is that there was a point in time where corporations decided that it was a bad thing, and they started imposing restrictions on that, like NDAs and tough licenses on code. The FSF was created to protect what you did with your friends, and has the consequence of being useful globally.
Programming is very easy, and most people can learn it, like any kind of language.
Of course, it's much easier if you learn as a kid, because your language skills are starting to form, but it can be taught the same way that difficult languages can.
I would compare learning programming to learning a foreign language that is fundamentally different from yours, like a western person learning chinese. You need new structures in your head, and obviously there are people that do that kind of thing more easily, but it's not just a gift.
Aside from that, enjoying programming can go a long way, and probably has much more influence in the development of a programmer.
Here in Uruguay, after lots of years ( more than ten, at least ) McDonalds has a consistent quality. Of course, it's not the best fast food available, but its the most widespread foreign franchise, and you get a reasonable meal for a reasonable total price (3 - 4 dollars).
It's not all that great, but compared to the fast food restaurants (MD and others) I saw in Miami, Fort Lauderlale(?), and Orlando when on vacation, I can see it's much cleaner here, the food tastes much better, and the people are nicer.
Of course, it loses big time in the quality department to most local restaurants in their league, but they have the best locations, lots of advertising (esp. for kids to drag their families in), and end up being actually cheaper.
Here you come, and talk about socialism, and US infrastructure, and why you deserve whatever you have.
I told the original poster that were the US to just dissapear, there would be a beneficial effect on most parts of the world, if only because debt is generally in dollars, and dollars would become nothing. Period.
I don't really care that much about your country, I don't want you to condone any debt. I was making an statement about an hypothetical situation that another poster was talking about. All the other stuff you talked about was uncalled for.
The issue was: would the US be missed if they dissapeared? The guy said: yes! you would need our consumers. I said: We wouldn't, because we wouldn't have as much debt, so we could sell cheaper.
About me, I would miss lots of stuff if the US actually dissapeared, there would be no slashdot, and the stali^Wmao^fidel castr^W^Whugo chavez would turn my country into a communist dictatorship, and they would force me to work in the oil plants of Venezuela. Or the terrorists will have already won, and they would make me wear a towel on my head (because we all know that terrorist=muslim). You see? I can produce off topic rants, too.
I wouldn't want the US or any other country to dissapear, but in the hypothesis where a storm were to wipe the US from the globe, most other parts of the world would probably end up winning.
Latin America, for example, that is the reality I know the most, has as a main problem its foreign debt, and most of it is owned by the US, or at least valued in dollars.
If you have a big region that produces more than it can consume, and doesn't have much foreign debt to worry about, then you wouldn't need to care about finding good markets for your products, you could care about the inside, and sell to Asia the remains, for less money than now and still have a good balance.
Right now, all the LA countries that try to focus on Latin America, have problems with the fact that they arer trading in local money, but they need dollars to pay debt.
I live in Montevideo, Uruguay, and we have plenty of MacDonalds, just one Burger King, and no more foreign fast food franchises (well, one Subway, but does it count?). Given those choices, Burger Kings double whopper is the only franchised stuff I actually enjoy. We are used to eating more beef around here.
Aside from that, I would much rather have a "chivito", that is the same kind of sandwich as a whopper, but made with "lomo", that is the highest quality beef you can take from a cow, instead of the mistery meat that inhabits burgers.
That doesn't make sense to me. You are saying that in order to hack the linux kernel, you would need to make a patch to the mainstream kernel, and get it accepted. Someone will review your code, and you need to disguise it as a fix for something. For this step alone, that involves deceiving kernel hackers, you need the knowledge of a top level kernel hacker, and there are few of them, and _some_ of them can't be easily bought for any reasonable amount of money, because they are well known people, and have a reputation to protect. Then you need to make sure that the makers of the machines use a recent enough version of Linux. So you need to send the patch at least one year, and more realistically, a couple of years in advance. After that, you need to pray that, in the meantime, your code doesn't break anything for any of its millions of users. And some of those millions are actually watching the changelog, and could find some flaw in your patch by chance.
With any closed kernel, there is not known worldwide development process, so it _could_ be much easier to instill a bad patch, you maybe just need to buy one developer for a ridiculous amount of money, and that would be it. Of course, they could have better safeguards, but we don't know anything about that, so we can safely assume the worst.
Aside from that, I think these ways of skeweing the elections are overkill. You can always buy your votes on-site, and find a way to change the software of the voting machines on delivery, or maybe changing the whole voting machine before it goes to its place. You can buy some auditors, or people at Diebold. That would be much easier, safer and cheaper than changing the OS kernel.
It's a skanky woman feeding a guy with a moustache with droppings from her rear end. In that times, you could watch images download, or just while they were slowly loading to memory, and the gross part was in the last lines of the picture. Tell me about surprises.
Stop it. Tubgirl is nothing of a mind scar compared to goatse. Goatse can only be compared, in the harm it inflicts, to an old coconut.jpg skat file that roamed the BBSs twelve years ago. My friends and I only had to say the word "coconut!" to gross out the other guy.
Tubgirl is gross, but it doesn't burn in your brain. I think I don't even remember the picture right now.
I think you don't understand the meaning of "objective". To be objective, you need to start being skeptic, and then evaluate all the alternatives, choosing the one that seems more likely to be true/better.
There is no middle ground between "skeptic" and "believer". For any new piece of knowledge the sensible form of analysis is start as an skeptic, and follow from there.
What you say doesn't negate what I said. You said that the US wouldn't be sensible to do that kind of thing, but right now the US are much more aggressive with other countries, and the current administration can get away with pretty much anything. The UN finally showed their absolute lack of influence in any military decision of anybody.
And nobody said that the US takes sensible decisions.
Right now the US are just more aggressive, and have even less control than they used to have. Right now Bush has the capability of launching nuclear bombs to defend democracy and fight isla^Wterrorism in Iran, and get away with it. And maybe the one that comes after him could go farther ahead and actually choose to do it. It could be easy for an iranian to think of the US as a nuclear threat right now, and to justify a "defense".
Of course, it is a far fetched scenario, but it could happen. Obvioulsy, a world where iran and north korea have nukes would be a worse world for everybody involved, but I think they could justify to their people the need for them.
Because that part of the research can be done. And there will come a time when the elevator can be done. Technology does advance, and better material become possible. The space elevator is a great idea, and should get some funding, and then, when the materials are there, it can be built right away.
Free software gets to 1.0 when it mostly works, not when it's a bag of bugs. Firefox 1.0 did work. Mozilla 1.0 did work better than IE 4 or 5. OpenOffice 1.0 didn't work _that_ great, but 2.0 is way more stable than comparable proprietary software at versions 4 or 5 (office97, I believe)
Usually, free software developers are more humble when numbering their versions.
A synaptic search for "sensor", or probably "temperature" will show you the monitor apps, and their installation will install the needed daemons, too.
Of course, there could be the problem of not having support for your motherboard. And lacking that, the problem of not having a.deb package in the manufacturers site or CD for your plaform is a real problem, of course. But that is a problem with manufacturers, right now. My crappy VIA motherboard Just Works(TM). Of course, the next one I will buy will be a VIA too.
Aside from that, I was talking about ease of software installation, and you are talking about something that sounds a bit esoteric in my view. I wouldn't take "ease of installation" into account when selecting software for a guy who likes to tweak his hardware. Let him have XP, because probably he wants it for gaming anyway.
Obviously, there is a way to use everything to kill people. The issue is that slashdot posts are not the output of the brightest minds in the world, just the average knowledge of an engineer. And most people who want to kill others in big quantities, can hire an engineer, or have on of them in their organization. I think we should safely think that/. is not the place where someone would go for advice when trying to kill other people. It's too easily traceable, and might warn the victims, without providing anything special that couldn't be aquired through a more traditional channel.
Slashdot Mirror
I program since the age of eight (LOGO, of course, then BASIC, then Pascal, then everything), and I think that what makes me a good programmer is not anything I already had, but what I learned.
Of course, intelligence and creativity go a long way in programming, but they do in most disciplines, too.
I didn't mean that programming skills don't vary among programmers, but I wanted to emphasize that it doesn't take any special ability different than what is useful for most other tasks.
Of course you can't be taught a higher IQ, but the specific skills needed for programming, can be learned.
I don't care about people being jews, catholics, muslims, white, brown, green or anything.
In fact, I am an atheist, and I don't care about people religion, or color of their skin, where they live, or anything.
I understand that the jewish people had awful things happen to them.
I have a problem with the superlativism they try to impose to stuff that happened to them. The problem is that talking about the "Holocaust", with a capital "H", has the secondary effect of negating everything bad that is happening right now with people. Some times, I see jewish people arguing about the size and importance of that, and they actually talk like it was the only genocide that happened.
Of course, it was awful, and there's no denying it, but many times you can hear _some_ jews actually talking like somehow what happened to them is superlative, and above everything else, even taking into account the issue of the quantity of people involved.
Some of that times they come up as feeling like their disgrace is somehow more important than what happens to others, and should be regarded as more important by others. That view seems to me, insensitive to the rest of the humanity.
I don't agree with that, I can see right now countries going against specific religions, and specific ethnicities, and I feel it's really bad, and no group that suffers that kind of thing is somehow more important than the other.
About "the jews control the media", I don't think the jews control the media, but it can't be denied that they have a lot more presence and influence in western media, than arab people, or any asian group, for instance. That is because, jews are a part of the US community, and the US is important in forming opinion in other countries.
I don't think it's part of a jew conspiracy, though. It's just how it should be, you are part of a community, your views are more important to them than the views of people outside your community.
But it is kind of poor to say that it's "antisemitic" to say that jews have no media influence.
You should learn that it is ok to think bad things against some jewish people, and it's ok to be against mostly everything that Israel does, and that doesn't have anything to do with people hating jews for being jews. People don't do everything out of hatred, some times they have their own opinions aside from what the other person is.
I really think that Israel is wrong in most of the things they do with Palestinian people, and them invading Lebanon. But I came up with that, just seeing what happens, and not out of hatred for the jews. It would be very arrogant to say that you can't disagree with Israel if not out of hatred.
Those views did not create open source, they created GNU and the FSF. I was freely exchanging sourcecode with friends and fellow developers long before I had ever heard of either of those two organisations.
Of course you were sharing, just like RMS.
You are right, they didn't create "open source", but they are key to its continued existance.
The problem is that there was a point in time where corporations decided that it was a bad thing, and they started imposing restrictions on that, like NDAs and tough licenses on code.
The FSF was created to protect what you did with your friends, and has the consequence of being useful globally.
Programming is very easy, and most people can learn it, like any kind of language.
Of course, it's much easier if you learn as a kid, because your language skills are starting to form, but it can be taught the same way that difficult languages can.
I would compare learning programming to learning a foreign language that is fundamentally different from yours, like a western person learning chinese. You need new structures in your head, and obviously there are people that do that kind of thing more easily, but it's not just a gift.
Aside from that, enjoying programming can go a long way, and probably has much more influence in the development of a programmer.
And what about the credit card that charges the money for the download?
or the guy buying the stuff having an account with that kind of information?
Dilbert is a friend of the BSA. For all that I care, he is dead to me.
Here in Uruguay, after lots of years ( more than ten, at least ) McDonalds has a consistent quality.
Of course, it's not the best fast food available, but its the most widespread foreign franchise, and you get a reasonable meal for a reasonable total price (3 - 4 dollars).
It's not all that great, but compared to the fast food restaurants (MD and others) I saw in Miami, Fort Lauderlale(?), and Orlando when on vacation, I can see it's much cleaner here, the food tastes much better, and the people are nicer.
Of course, it loses big time in the quality department to most local restaurants in their league, but they have the best locations, lots of advertising (esp. for kids to drag their families in), and end up being actually cheaper.
For that amount of money, you could buy a PS3, and you get to play yourself!
Sony RoX0R
Is that you, Michael?
Wrong thread.
Here you come, and talk about socialism, and US infrastructure, and why you deserve whatever you have.
I told the original poster that were the US to just dissapear, there would be a beneficial effect on most parts of the world, if only because debt is generally in dollars, and dollars would become nothing. Period.
I don't really care that much about your country, I don't want you to condone any debt. I was making an statement about an hypothetical situation that another poster was talking about. All the other stuff you talked about was uncalled for.
The issue was: would the US be missed if they dissapeared?
The guy said: yes! you would need our consumers.
I said: We wouldn't, because we wouldn't have as much debt, so we could sell cheaper.
About me, I would miss lots of stuff if the US actually dissapeared, there would be no slashdot, and the stali^Wmao^fidel castr^W^Whugo chavez would turn my country into a communist dictatorship, and they would force me to work in the oil plants of Venezuela. Or the terrorists will have already won, and they would make me wear a towel on my head (because we all know that terrorist=muslim). You see? I can produce off topic rants, too.
I wouldn't want the US or any other country to dissapear, but in the hypothesis where a storm were to wipe the US from the globe, most other parts of the world would probably end up winning.
Latin America, for example, that is the reality I know the most, has as a main problem its foreign debt, and most of it is owned by the US, or at least valued in dollars.
If you have a big region that produces more than it can consume, and doesn't have much foreign debt to worry about, then you wouldn't need to care about finding good markets for your products, you could care about the inside, and sell to Asia the remains, for less money than now and still have a good balance.
Right now, all the LA countries that try to focus on Latin America, have problems with the fact that they arer trading in local money, but they need dollars to pay debt.
I live in Montevideo, Uruguay, and we have plenty of MacDonalds, just one Burger King, and no more foreign fast food franchises (well, one Subway, but does it count?).
Given those choices, Burger Kings double whopper is the only franchised stuff I actually enjoy. We are used to eating more beef around here.
Aside from that, I would much rather have a "chivito", that is the same kind of sandwich as a whopper, but made with "lomo", that is the highest quality beef you can take from a cow, instead of the mistery meat that inhabits burgers.
That doesn't make sense to me.
You are saying that in order to hack the linux kernel, you would need to make a patch to the mainstream kernel, and get it accepted. Someone will review your code, and you need to disguise it as a fix for something. For this step alone, that involves deceiving kernel hackers, you need the knowledge of a top level kernel hacker, and there are few of them, and _some_ of them can't be easily bought for any reasonable amount of money, because they are well known people, and have a reputation to protect.
Then you need to make sure that the makers of the machines use a recent enough version of Linux. So you need to send the patch at least one year, and more realistically, a couple of years in advance.
After that, you need to pray that, in the meantime, your code doesn't break anything for any of its millions of users. And some of those millions are actually watching the changelog, and could find some flaw in your patch by chance.
With any closed kernel, there is not known worldwide development process, so it _could_ be much easier to instill a bad patch, you maybe just need to buy one developer for a ridiculous amount of money, and that would be it. Of course, they could have better safeguards, but we don't know anything about that, so we can safely assume the worst.
Aside from that, I think these ways of skeweing the elections are overkill. You can always buy your votes on-site, and find a way to change the software of the voting machines on delivery, or maybe changing the whole voting machine before it goes to its place. You can buy some auditors, or people at Diebold. That would be much easier, safer and cheaper than changing the OS kernel.
It's a skanky woman feeding a guy with a moustache with droppings from her rear end.
In that times, you could watch images download, or just while they were slowly loading to memory, and the gross part was in the last lines of the picture. Tell me about surprises.
Stop it.
Tubgirl is nothing of a mind scar compared to goatse.
Goatse can only be compared, in the harm it inflicts, to an old coconut.jpg skat file that roamed the BBSs twelve years ago.
My friends and I only had to say the word "coconut!" to gross out the other guy.
Tubgirl is gross, but it doesn't burn in your brain. I think I don't even remember the picture right now.
When you eat candy, you make your dentist wealthier. He is happier, then.
I think you are doing something wrong.
I think you don't understand the meaning of "objective".
To be objective, you need to start being skeptic, and then evaluate all the alternatives, choosing the one that seems more likely to be true/better.
There is no middle ground between "skeptic" and "believer". For any new piece of knowledge the sensible form of analysis is start as an skeptic, and follow from there.
What you say doesn't negate what I said.
You said that the US wouldn't be sensible to do that kind of thing, but right now the US are much more aggressive with other countries, and the current administration can get away with pretty much anything. The UN finally showed their absolute lack of influence in any military decision of anybody.
And nobody said that the US takes sensible decisions.
Right now the US are just more aggressive, and have even less control than they used to have. Right now Bush has the capability of launching nuclear bombs to defend democracy and fight isla^Wterrorism in Iran, and get away with it. And maybe the one that comes after him could go farther ahead and actually choose to do it. It could be easy for an iranian to think of the US as a nuclear threat right now, and to justify a "defense".
Of course, it is a far fetched scenario, but it could happen.
Obvioulsy, a world where iran and north korea have nukes would be a worse world for everybody involved, but I think they could justify to their people the need for them.
Iraq was a friend of the US. They became an enemy later on. It is hard for your allies to keep track.
Here's a simple test. Who is legitimately afraid the US will be launching nukes anytime soon?
Iran and North Korea come to mind.
Because that part of the research can be done.
And there will come a time when the elevator can be done.
Technology does advance, and better material become possible.
The space elevator is a great idea, and should get some funding, and then, when the materials are there, it can be built right away.
Free software gets to 1.0 when it mostly works, not when it's a bag of bugs.
Firefox 1.0 did work.
Mozilla 1.0 did work better than IE 4 or 5.
OpenOffice 1.0 didn't work _that_ great, but 2.0 is way more stable than comparable proprietary software at versions 4 or 5 (office97, I believe)
Usually, free software developers are more humble when numbering their versions.
A synaptic search for "sensor", or probably "temperature" will show you the monitor apps, and their installation will install the needed daemons, too.
.deb package in the manufacturers site or CD for your plaform is a real problem, of course.
Of course, there could be the problem of not having support for your motherboard.
And lacking that, the problem of not having a
But that is a problem with manufacturers, right now. My crappy VIA motherboard Just Works(TM). Of course, the next one I will buy will be a VIA too.
Aside from that, I was talking about ease of software installation, and you are talking about something that sounds a bit esoteric in my view. I wouldn't take "ease of installation" into account when selecting software for a guy who likes to tweak his hardware. Let him have XP, because probably he wants it for gaming anyway.
Obviously, there is a way to use everything to kill people. /. is not the place where someone would go for advice when trying to kill other people. It's too easily traceable, and might warn the victims, without providing anything special that couldn't be aquired through a more traditional channel.
The issue is that slashdot posts are not the output of the brightest minds in the world, just the average knowledge of an engineer. And most people who want to kill others in big quantities, can hire an engineer, or have on of them in their organization.
I think we should safely think that