"We treat our servants well, of course they can't vote or hold office". No matter how well you dress the servant class, they are still sub-citizens and often paid under the legal minimum for various jobs. It may be wonderful from their perspective -- I'm sure they are, as you say, happy little workers -- but it's still a sub-class of workers who are not afforded equal rights. Again, I am not saying that this point supports *either* side of the debate (there are multiple ways to rectify the situation), but you can make your non-voting, non-legally represented (de facto, not de jure) working group as happy and shiny as you want: it is immoral to say "we need to keep them in their place to have a cheap supply of labor". The argument is wrong no matter what side you choose to bolster with it.
All other countries that manage to feed and house themselves do so with underpaid illicit labor? I highly doubt that large percentages of people would starve and be homeless. There may well be major impacts across the economy (when you have to pay fair prices for food, a new plasma television might not be an option), but large masses of people starving is unlikely. Societies have been able to feed themselves since... well, that's a primary function of the concept of "society", so since the beginning. He's right that using people with inherent unequal rights to do labor is a popular solution. I just don't think it is the right solution nor the only solution.
Actually, I agree with you as well. I am merely stating that given minimum wage as a socially endorsed mechanism, to turn around and establish a unofficially endorsed exception class is highly questionable. The law doesn't matter; it is the variable application of the law that gives me pause. And you are of course correct: the other side of the issue is that if minimum wage prevents society from being able to feed itself without a de facto special class to which it does not apply, either the special class or minimum wage should be abolished (or adjusted). The third alternative, starving, tends to be an unpopular choice historically.
No, it actually makes our food and housing industries possible.
I am intensely uncomfortable with the morality in that statement: that it is acceptable to have a separate group of people being paid less than minimum wage in order to make living easier for the rest of the country. I am making no statement regarding immigration, legal or not. I just think that the concept of "well, we have to keep a lesser class of people around because they accept wages below the norm in order to make products cheaper" is not a valid argument.
Again, the fact that the single argument is invalid is not in any way support for any other side of the debate. It just strikes me that this particular line of argument is morally repugnant.
Sure, the points can't be redeemed for anything - but since when have high scores in games, or unlocking all the secrets, or beating Mike Tyson, ever been redeemable for anything?
IIRC, wasn't there a contest when the original Punch Out (with Mike Tyson) was first released where you could win actual physical prizes? (Of course, there were other physical prizes offered in the past, including some damn expensive jeweled swords and such in the Atari days, but it's Mike Tyson that triggered the memory of something having to do with beating Punch Out).
I've had it running on my Libretto 110CT. That's a 233Mhz machine which has a maximum of 64megs. It's slow, but it works fine, chugging along and getting work done. Normally that's primarily a "carry everywhere" emacs terminal (it's the same size as a Moleskine notebook, for comparison). I can launch Konqueror "by itself" (which loads a chunk of KDE) with little problem.
Plenty of us still remember our bang path to uunet. My first comment on a pre-1.0 web browser was "nice, but it won't ever replace gopher... too many people use it and there's just too much information already formatted to gopher". Whups.
Isn't conio utterly tied to the PC architecture? It was early on, I know. It just manipulated the video memory directly, making it utterly useless for this guy's needs (serial terminals).
The first steps it goes through are a preprocessor and an indenter. Things like "#define i void" are pretty much old hat and not seen as creative nowadays. Most of the obvious things (that syntax scramblers tend to do) are poor scoring manipulations. See the guidelines for exactly how they score. Highest scores are given to novel approaches, and that in turn is somewhat dictated by what has been done in the past.
I've long since switched over. I thought everybody had. Ah well, I suppose you all still use toilet paper, too...
Anyway, some of the bulbs I have have the delay, some don't. I also buy "brighter" bulbs than I'd normally use, as they tend to be a bit more dim than the "equivalent to a n watt" rating they have. As I buy them, I move the bulbs with a delay to some locations, the instant on ones to other locations.
I still use incandescents in three locations, only one of which might eventually go fluorescent: I have vanity mirrors in the bathrooms with four bare sockets that use the large frosted bulbs. The other two uses are my clamp lights in the basement I use for photography, and the bigass incandescents in my stage lighting (the follow spot and various other lighting instruments). I also have fluorescent grow lights for my bonsai (which I don't want to expose to winter).
Physics as a *distinct* branch of science. Einstein had done his tango in the field, but the mainstream world didn't really know about physics as a its own field or think it had any relevance to the world. That comes pretty much from Feynman's stories about the work on the Manhattan project and how they were treated. Of course physics the field existed through antiquity: ever since people noticed things fall down. Up through Newton and possibly Maxwell, it was all just lumped in under the general term "Science". As a distinct field it rose in mainstream awareness in the late 40s. At least according to Feyman's account.
As always, I could be wrong, especially using a single source, but my statement is purely regarding the terminology used, not the body of knowledge. From what I understand from his account, what is now taught under the rubric of "physics" was just called "science" until recently, and it was not a common term in mainstream use (newspapers, dinner conversation, etc) until the late 40s. Of course physics itself pre-dates mankind.
For what it's worth, if you like it, it's pretty much a direct lift from the classic Doc Savage, "Man of Bronze" pulps of the 30s and 40s. They weren't camp at the time, just from a different era, both in terms of literature and science. This was before physics was considered a major branch of science, so much of the wizz-bang new inventions are through the modern miracle of cutting edge chemistry. The characters were painted in bright, broad strokes, just like Buckaroo's sidekicks. One even carries around a long eared pig. Ethnic stereotypes and slurs weren't considered politically incorrect, and women had only had the ability to vote for ten years, so you have to take some things with an understanding of the era (i.e., if you're offended by such things, don't read 'em).
Fun stuff, and highly recommended if you really like Science Fiction, as you can see where much of it came from. The Philip José Farmer take on the characters later in the century is a different beast (enjoyable, but not what we're talking about). Things like ice bullets and enzymes are the high tech weapons, plus a little dabbling in the (even at the time) classics of SF like hollow world theory. (There was an official Doc Savage movie that was done to be camp and sucked monkey balls).
Or they could be publishing their findings, one of the hallmarks of legitimate scientific research that allows your peers in the field to reproduce or fail to reproduce your findings. This is how science works.
Honestly, I do understand your complaint. A paper gets published by a grad student, or some joker who can't even get their PhD and is squeaking out a master's degree shows up at a poster session with a pile of photocopied papers and some newspaper reporter wandering through turns it into a wire story that goes across the headlines of the global news industry. It's not terribly uncommon, but the problem is not with the scientists or the way scientific research works, it's in how the mainstream media reports on it. It's hard to get published in the big name journals like Cell, so it's likely this has gone past a sharp eyed committee of experts in the field. It may well be preliminary, but if so, that's made clear in the source paper. By the time it hits Slashdot it has passed through a game of telephone and has become a miracle cure.
But don't say they reported prematurely. They published their results, which is not only their job, it's their duty as ethical researchers.
I agree, it was poorly written. Amusing that people seem to have interpreted my simple statement as some sort of statement on the issue when I was merely defending the poor fellow who was struggling to say what was essentially correct (however incomplete it was). I have no opinion on the issue... the only reason I jumped in was because he said the same thing the person correcting him was restating. Perhaps the original comment was written in a less than eloquent manner, but it hardly warranted the reply it got.
Of course, Neil was an expert at hibernation. I'm fairly sure that would be at least one solution to the issue -- make all of our computers hippies. Of course, the slow start would be replaced with no start (but a nice Cliff Richards startup sound would play continuously). If you could ever get it going, you'd have have seventeen arms for multitasking...
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Evan "Flashbacks to Mtv airing that in the 80s. Has it been shown since?"
Yet another huge point here is that when C++ was designed and written it really had one goal in mind, which was to bring the wonders of object orientedness to the unwashed masses of computer programming. At the time real code was written in C, Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, and Cobol primarilly.
I followed the development in his columns, and the object oriented part of C++ was only one of many extensions to the language he was trying to create. If you list them all, most have nothing to do with being object oriented. C++ code can be written perfectly nicely with no object oriented features, and those that do exist are a subset intended to be the most useful parts (and I personally think it was influenced a bit by what could be compiled using Cfront).
Your other comment is amusing too... at this time (i.e., late 2006), quite a bit of real code is still written in C and Fortran. My fiance does all her quantum simulations using maintained and fairly new Fortran codebases. But then your comment is logically obvious: of course those were the languages that were used. Few people were using Ruby, Python or PHP in the 80s. (And if you're trying to list non-OO languages, Smalltalk and Lisp had already had their orgy and Lisp had contracted OO capabilities from it before C++ came along).
I believe you misunderstand the meaning of liberty if you think society should demand a reason before allowing an individual to possess or use something. What do you need speech for? I mean, really... who wants to listen to you? There's no real reason to allow it.
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Evan "Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo... use those four boxes to defend liberty in that order"
Yes, but withholding is voluntary -- you can choose to have your employer not withhold and be presented with a (rather large) bill at the end of the year. Or you can go way overboard with withholding and get a large amount back (within reason, there's some limit to keep it rational). Withholding is based on the forms the employee fills out and is incumbent upon the employer. Almost everybody goes by the standard formula, but it's not strictly required, and there are very sound reasons to do something other than standard witholding, especially if you know in advance your pay scale will change drastically during your employment year.
Hell, skip that and go straight to trilithium. If it's good enough for Romulan weaponry, it's good enough to power my laptop... which is placed on my lap... right over my genitals...
Okay, maybe we should rethink this whole battery thing and go back to luggables.
Assuming you're not dealing with a libertarian socialist, at which point they have to form a free union to build the light bulb first. (No, not all libertarians are capitalists).
Slashdot Mirror
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I am intensely uncomfortable with the morality in that statement: that it is acceptable to have a separate group of people being paid less than minimum wage in order to make living easier for the rest of the country. I am making no statement regarding immigration, legal or not. I just think that the concept of "well, we have to keep a lesser class of people around because they accept wages below the norm in order to make products cheaper" is not a valid argument.
Again, the fact that the single argument is invalid is not in any way support for any other side of the debate. It just strikes me that this particular line of argument is morally repugnant.
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Evan
IIRC, wasn't there a contest when the original Punch Out (with Mike Tyson) was first released where you could win actual physical prizes? (Of course, there were other physical prizes offered in the past, including some damn expensive jeweled swords and such in the Atari days, but it's Mike Tyson that triggered the memory of something having to do with beating Punch Out).
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Evan
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Anyway, some of the bulbs I have have the delay, some don't. I also buy "brighter" bulbs than I'd normally use, as they tend to be a bit more dim than the "equivalent to a n watt" rating they have. As I buy them, I move the bulbs with a delay to some locations, the instant on ones to other locations.
I still use incandescents in three locations, only one of which might eventually go fluorescent: I have vanity mirrors in the bathrooms with four bare sockets that use the large frosted bulbs. The other two uses are my clamp lights in the basement I use for photography, and the bigass incandescents in my stage lighting (the follow spot and various other lighting instruments). I also have fluorescent grow lights for my bonsai (which I don't want to expose to winter).
--
Evan
As always, I could be wrong, especially using a single source, but my statement is purely regarding the terminology used, not the body of knowledge. From what I understand from his account, what is now taught under the rubric of "physics" was just called "science" until recently, and it was not a common term in mainstream use (newspapers, dinner conversation, etc) until the late 40s. Of course physics itself pre-dates mankind.
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Evan
Fun stuff, and highly recommended if you really like Science Fiction, as you can see where much of it came from. The Philip José Farmer take on the characters later in the century is a different beast (enjoyable, but not what we're talking about). Things like ice bullets and enzymes are the high tech weapons, plus a little dabbling in the (even at the time) classics of SF like hollow world theory. (There was an official Doc Savage movie that was done to be camp and sucked monkey balls).
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Evan
Honestly, I do understand your complaint. A paper gets published by a grad student, or some joker who can't even get their PhD and is squeaking out a master's degree shows up at a poster session with a pile of photocopied papers and some newspaper reporter wandering through turns it into a wire story that goes across the headlines of the global news industry. It's not terribly uncommon, but the problem is not with the scientists or the way scientific research works, it's in how the mainstream media reports on it. It's hard to get published in the big name journals like Cell, so it's likely this has gone past a sharp eyed committee of experts in the field. It may well be preliminary, but if so, that's made clear in the source paper. By the time it hits Slashdot it has passed through a game of telephone and has become a miracle cure.
But don't say they reported prematurely. They published their results, which is not only their job, it's their duty as ethical researchers.
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I believe that's precisely what he said in the sentences located directly after the one you quoted.
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Evan "Flashbacks to Mtv airing that in the 80s. Has it been shown since?"
I followed the development in his columns, and the object oriented part of C++ was only one of many extensions to the language he was trying to create. If you list them all, most have nothing to do with being object oriented. C++ code can be written perfectly nicely with no object oriented features, and those that do exist are a subset intended to be the most useful parts (and I personally think it was influenced a bit by what could be compiled using Cfront).
Your other comment is amusing too... at this time (i.e., late 2006), quite a bit of real code is still written in C and Fortran. My fiance does all her quantum simulations using maintained and fairly new Fortran codebases. But then your comment is logically obvious: of course those were the languages that were used. Few people were using Ruby, Python or PHP in the 80s. (And if you're trying to list non-OO languages, Smalltalk and Lisp had already had their orgy and Lisp had contracted OO capabilities from it before C++ came along).
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Evan
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Evan "Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo... use those four boxes to defend liberty in that order"
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Okay, maybe we should rethink this whole battery thing and go back to luggables.
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Evan