Yeah, I get the joke, but I think it's important that people don't let this performative speech overly cloud their true historic judgements.
It's one thing to criticise the French officer corps circa 1935, it's a whole other to infer national character from the blunder that is the Maginot Line. It may have been the most evil army, but it was also the most powerful army in the history of mankind. Plenty of other countries got their ass kicked in WW2, and I don't see you calling all of them cowards.
WW1 was stalemated before the US stepped in, and you concede that French was militarily successful before that. So really, this whole France = cowards judgement is made entirely on their post WW2 record, which is not only a small span of time, but also a period of reconstruction and extraneous geopolitical circumstances.
The US has been extremely fortunate in its short history, and it has far from won every war it engaged in.
I know you have alternative parties, but they're not really viable choices. Although I suppose in a winner-takes-all system like the US executive election, multiple choices has a very different meaning than in an assembly.
Regardless, Emperor Bush would have a lot less power if the Republicans didn't also control both assemblies. Voters were clearly still happy with Bush in 2002 or else they would have moved to limit his power.
Finally, I take everything said about Nader's spoilership with a grain of salt: yes, a tiny percentage of voters could have changed the outcome, but when 40% of the people don't vote, clearly it doesn't really matter to the majority who wins.
No, my argument is that it is okay to do them (and therefore to support people doing them), because, at least in some circumstances, there is no cost to society. Pederasty, of course, does have a significant cost and therefore is different in kind.
Too bad there still isn't a solid Illustrator replacement as I suspect more casual graphic work is done (or at least: would be easier done) with vectors. Just look at the way Adobe names them: Photoshop is for photo manipulation, Illustrator is for image creation. How much time do most people spend touching up photos compared to making little webpage widgets and stuff?
I realise this is probably not the election to be saying it during, but you guys could always try and create a third party? When you have three or more parties, centrism is no longer an equilibrium, so you'll actually find politicians with progressive policies.
Personally I don't envy you guys at all, and I'm not sure I'd be able to stomach vote for Nader, but I'd at least give it some thought.
I think you folks down there are wise to worry that Kerry will serve the interests of his peers, however up here in Canada things are a bit backwards:
The current Prime Minister (Paul Martin) is the son of a Prime Minister runner-up (Paul Martin Sr, believe it or not). One of the most quoted pieces of advice passed from father to son is that if he wanted to be PM, Jr should get rich first so he couldn't be controlled by special interests. So he when his father lost the leadership convention, Jr went out and became a millionaire before going into politics. Then, just before stepping down as PM, Jr's rival Jean Chretien passed legislation severly limiting campaign contributions. So in the end politicians don't even have the choice of being controlled by special interests anymore.
Although there's some skepticism about Jr's social policies, in general Canadians don't distrust politicians just because they're rich: because if money was important to them, they would have moved somewhere with lower taxes and privatised health care long ago!
FireWorks is the most henious personification of evil the web has ever seen. It takes an expanse of pixels, puts them through a paper shredder, mixes the bits in water, and then forces you to eat the unrecognizable paste. (What else would you call a bunch of tiny image-filled table cells with no semantics that are only aligned properly in IE?) I can only hope you're not being accurate when you say it has FireWorks-esq features...
You're right in that the world banking system, which is largely controlled by US corporations, is colonialism by other means. But I think that average American citizens would benefit more from raping a country's natural resources than slowly embezzeling their funds.
Sure there are lots of connections, but they're all in theoretical stuff. It's news to me that employers like philosophy majors (statistically, the whole humanities-grads-are-wonderful thing doesn't pan out), but then I suppose I haven't been in the job market for a while...
It's cool that your school lets you do something so unorthodox -- I thought my alma matter was the exception.
From an economics perspective, at least in the long run, there's no difference between raising the prices for non-members and offering members a discount. They're acknowledging that this information has value and rewarding those who give it to them. I agree with you that it sucks, but I don't really think that you have a legitimate complaint.
A quick perusal of the QuickPar website suggests that at least some Par2 clients can restore based on two damaged files and incomplete recovery files:
At this point you can have QuickPar load additional PAR2 files (to provide more recovery blocks) or scan additional data files (to see if they contain some of the data from the original files).
In the past, however, I've been dealing with getting remote files over a noisy connection where the remote server wasn't so thoughtful to create Par files or even set up Rsync. What I've thought would be a nice is an application that can look for correspondances between three checksum-failed files to try and create one good one. I don't suppose Parchive can do that?
HTML is for semantic markup, so unless the app can read your mind, it's just going to spit out garbage (might look okay...until you try it in another browser). The best you can hope for is writing the HTML with an editing helper (closes the tags for you, deals with indent) and then using a wizard like Dreamweaver to help you make it look right.
The Zen Garden may be what graphic designers like to see, but as far as I'm concerned it's smoke and mirrors. The problem is that all the significant positioning is absolute, and therefore it doesn't scale with window size, etc. I'd be much more impressed by a DIV that moved to each compass point around a vertical and horizontally centered image and took up half the space to the edge of the page unless doing so would make it too small to be readable (hint: as far as I know, it's not doable without CSS3 or scripting).
On the other hand, I'd rather have my stupid graphic designer friends pumping out absolutely positioned DIVs than cross-shredding content like Macromedia Fireworks.
Not only am I embarassed because the authour is a fellow Canadian, but because the list of French Military Defeats is incorrect:
France has, at some time in the last thousand years, controlled most of mainland Europe, half of Africa, and some nice places in South East Asia and North America. In comparison the US has controlled, what, the Philippines? Sounds to me like winning wars isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The problem I see with an IT or IS degree is that it's essentially a technologist designation. You don't necessarily get the broad-based education which many university degrees are famous for. I suspect MIS degrees include a bit more theory because IS is seen as a tool to help the business rather than a pursuit in of itself, but it's still not high-brow. With CompSci you get all the theory courses which can really be applied to every part of life (eg: lineups in banks are more efficient than lineups in grocery stores) and include concepts that open your mind (eg: computability).
Mind you, it is possible for an IS program to include liberal arts and science components. For example my alma matter had an IS Prof who used IBM and the Holocaust as a text book, talked about corporations-as-organisms, and taught a senior course in general systems theory.
I have a joint degree in CompSci and Philosophy, care to tell me what my niche is?:)
But seriously, the parent has a very good point: pure programming is all being off-shored. It's foolish to graduate with a pure CS degree in this day and age, even if that's all you want. Your niche will be much less competitive (and probably more interesting) if it's multidisciplinary.
May I recommend Bioinformatics or Computational Finance if you like money?
Academia is in a sense designed to move slowly and be unresponsive to industry. Unfortunately, CompSci Depts tend to be just responsive enough that they throw out some of the blessed theory and instead teach decade old technology. So universities will start pumping out software architects just around the time the last programming job leaves our fair shores.
Personally I think that universities shouldn't waste their time trying to teach practical concepts when they're obviously not designed for it. If they think that the degree should have some practical component, then make it a joint degree with a college and let their instructors stay up on stuff.
Are guidance counsellors and their tests actually useful for anything? Personally I've always steered clear, but if someone has a success story I'd be interested in hearing it.
I TA'd a "Introduction to Programming for People Who Will Never Take Another Programming Course" last year and because the Computing Dept standardized on Java (I have yet to meet a Professor who admits to being in favour of that, interestingly enough) it was also taught in Java. Despite the language, they managed to learn some important basic concepts like functions (we called them "methods", of course) and control structures. Still, I feel guilty to this day that these students will never understand why they had to write
public class Foo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Guess what: when most of the potential CompSci teachers are going to industry, it doesn't get taught properly. For example: I love theory and I enjoy teaching, but half way through my Master's degree I realised that I'm not willing to put up with the bullshit required to get to a position where I have the opportunity to teach.
And actually I'd have to disagree with you somewhat: higher-level courses should have purely theoretical lectures, but students should get the opportunity to implement those theories in labs. Labs in CompSci?! A novel idea, I know. It's almost enough to make it into a real science...
So?! That's totally within their rights! At least companies are putting a price on your privacy and offering you the choice of selling it for that price rather than just trying to take it.
And who knows, there could be other benefits for selling your privacy -- the (government-owned) liquor stores in Ontario are currently asking every customer for their postal code, presumably so they can figure out where to build more stores and save customers travel time.
No, there was more to it than that! 2.6 uses/lib/modules/modules.conf instead of/etc/modules.conf and, IIRC, Debian's update-modules is still designed for the old method (or at least it was when I installed 2.6.0). It actually took me a while to figure out why my modules weren't being loaded properly.
Another problem I ran into, although this is no one's fault but mine, is that the size of all the modules in the kernel image keeps growing. Back when I was moving to a new HD I was still going through all the work of making a custom kernel, therefore I was using less than 40 MB in / and so 80 MB seemed like it would give me room to grow. Of course now that each kernel I install takes up 35 MBs, I end up having to install them to/usr/lib/modules and copy over only the modules I need, which was made even harder with 2.6 because lots of the modules changed location and name.:(
Safe and secret necrophilia, assuming it isn't precluded by murder (just as most pederast cases do not include kidnapping), has zero cost to society. Instead, we should ban defiling corpses in front of loved ones and all sorts of high-health risk activities (like smoking -- off the top of my head I'd guess lung cancer costs more to treat than whatever you get from necrophilia).
Similarly, cannibalism of people who died for other causes, weren't "downers" (this is how they tell if cattle are safe to eat), and have no loved ones whose griving will be aided by a corpse, has zero cost to society. Actually it would have negative cost if John Doe's meat were sold instead of just being worm food.
You're right, I haven't actually asked any taikonauts how they'd feel about a one-way trip. But from what I've read about Eastern Philosophy, and from what I know about the sacrifices made in the USSR space program, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the Chinese would be *more likely* to accept a one-way solution than the US.
Good point, although the reason the US enacted the embargos was because they were planning for the inevitability of war with Japan. It could also be argued that the embargos were effectively an act of war just as OPEC cutting off US oil supply would be today.
And Yamamoto's intention was that Pearl Harbor would destabilize and demoralize the US enough that when they entered the war they would not be able to quickly pose a threat. The reason he was authorized to do this was because of the embargo.
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Yeah, I get the joke, but I think it's important that people don't let this performative speech overly cloud their true historic judgements.
It's one thing to criticise the French officer corps circa 1935, it's a whole other to infer national character from the blunder that is the Maginot Line. It may have been the most evil army, but it was also the most powerful army in the history of mankind. Plenty of other countries got their ass kicked in WW2, and I don't see you calling all of them cowards.
WW1 was stalemated before the US stepped in, and you concede that French was militarily successful before that. So really, this whole France = cowards judgement is made entirely on their post WW2 record, which is not only a small span of time, but also a period of reconstruction and extraneous geopolitical circumstances.
The US has been extremely fortunate in its short history, and it has far from won every war it engaged in.
I know you have alternative parties, but they're not really viable choices. Although I suppose in a winner-takes-all system like the US executive election, multiple choices has a very different meaning than in an assembly.
Regardless, Emperor Bush would have a lot less power if the Republicans didn't also control both assemblies. Voters were clearly still happy with Bush in 2002 or else they would have moved to limit his power.
Finally, I take everything said about Nader's spoilership with a grain of salt: yes, a tiny percentage of voters could have changed the outcome, but when 40% of the people don't vote, clearly it doesn't really matter to the majority who wins.
No, my argument is that it is okay to do them (and therefore to support people doing them), because, at least in some circumstances, there is no cost to society. Pederasty, of course, does have a significant cost and therefore is different in kind.
Too bad there still isn't a solid Illustrator replacement as I suspect more casual graphic work is done (or at least: would be easier done) with vectors. Just look at the way Adobe names them: Photoshop is for photo manipulation, Illustrator is for image creation. How much time do most people spend touching up photos compared to making little webpage widgets and stuff?
I realise this is probably not the election to be saying it during, but you guys could always try and create a third party? When you have three or more parties, centrism is no longer an equilibrium, so you'll actually find politicians with progressive policies.
Personally I don't envy you guys at all, and I'm not sure I'd be able to stomach vote for Nader, but I'd at least give it some thought.
I think you folks down there are wise to worry that Kerry will serve the interests of his peers, however up here in Canada things are a bit backwards:
The current Prime Minister (Paul Martin) is the son of a Prime Minister runner-up (Paul Martin Sr, believe it or not). One of the most quoted pieces of advice passed from father to son is that if he wanted to be PM, Jr should get rich first so he couldn't be controlled by special interests. So he when his father lost the leadership convention, Jr went out and became a millionaire before going into politics. Then, just before stepping down as PM, Jr's rival Jean Chretien passed legislation severly limiting campaign contributions. So in the end politicians don't even have the choice of being controlled by special interests anymore.
Although there's some skepticism about Jr's social policies, in general Canadians don't distrust politicians just because they're rich: because if money was important to them, they would have moved somewhere with lower taxes and privatised health care long ago!
FireWorks is the most henious personification of evil the web has ever seen. It takes an expanse of pixels, puts them through a paper shredder, mixes the bits in water, and then forces you to eat the unrecognizable paste. (What else would you call a bunch of tiny image-filled table cells with no semantics that are only aligned properly in IE?) I can only hope you're not being accurate when you say it has FireWorks-esq features...
You're right in that the world banking system, which is largely controlled by US corporations, is colonialism by other means. But I think that average American citizens would benefit more from raping a country's natural resources than slowly embezzeling their funds.
Sure there are lots of connections, but they're all in theoretical stuff. It's news to me that employers like philosophy majors (statistically, the whole humanities-grads-are-wonderful thing doesn't pan out), but then I suppose I haven't been in the job market for a while...
It's cool that your school lets you do something so unorthodox -- I thought my alma matter was the exception.
From an economics perspective, at least in the long run, there's no difference between raising the prices for non-members and offering members a discount. They're acknowledging that this information has value and rewarding those who give it to them. I agree with you that it sucks, but I don't really think that you have a legitimate complaint.
A quick perusal of the QuickPar website suggests that at least some Par2 clients can restore based on two damaged files and incomplete recovery files:
In the past, however, I've been dealing with getting remote files over a noisy connection where the remote server wasn't so thoughtful to create Par files or even set up Rsync. What I've thought would be a nice is an application that can look for correspondances between three checksum-failed files to try and create one good one. I don't suppose Parchive can do that?
HTML is for semantic markup, so unless the app can read your mind, it's just going to spit out garbage (might look okay...until you try it in another browser). The best you can hope for is writing the HTML with an editing helper (closes the tags for you, deals with indent) and then using a wizard like Dreamweaver to help you make it look right.
The Zen Garden may be what graphic designers like to see, but as far as I'm concerned it's smoke and mirrors. The problem is that all the significant positioning is absolute, and therefore it doesn't scale with window size, etc. I'd be much more impressed by a DIV that moved to each compass point around a vertical and horizontally centered image and took up half the space to the edge of the page unless doing so would make it too small to be readable (hint: as far as I know, it's not doable without CSS3 or scripting).
On the other hand, I'd rather have my stupid graphic designer friends pumping out absolutely positioned DIVs than cross-shredding content like Macromedia Fireworks.
Not only am I embarassed because the authour is a fellow Canadian, but because the list of French Military Defeats is incorrect:
France has, at some time in the last thousand years, controlled most of mainland Europe, half of Africa, and some nice places in South East Asia and North America. In comparison the US has controlled, what, the Philippines? Sounds to me like winning wars isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The problem I see with an IT or IS degree is that it's essentially a technologist designation. You don't necessarily get the broad-based education which many university degrees are famous for. I suspect MIS degrees include a bit more theory because IS is seen as a tool to help the business rather than a pursuit in of itself, but it's still not high-brow. With CompSci you get all the theory courses which can really be applied to every part of life (eg: lineups in banks are more efficient than lineups in grocery stores) and include concepts that open your mind (eg: computability).
Mind you, it is possible for an IS program to include liberal arts and science components. For example my alma matter had an IS Prof who used IBM and the Holocaust as a text book, talked about corporations-as-organisms, and taught a senior course in general systems theory.
I have a joint degree in CompSci and Philosophy, care to tell me what my niche is? :)
But seriously, the parent has a very good point: pure programming is all being off-shored. It's foolish to graduate with a pure CS degree in this day and age, even if that's all you want. Your niche will be much less competitive (and probably more interesting) if it's multidisciplinary.
May I recommend Bioinformatics or Computational Finance if you like money?
Academia is in a sense designed to move slowly and be unresponsive to industry. Unfortunately, CompSci Depts tend to be just responsive enough that they throw out some of the blessed theory and instead teach decade old technology. So universities will start pumping out software architects just around the time the last programming job leaves our fair shores.
Personally I think that universities shouldn't waste their time trying to teach practical concepts when they're obviously not designed for it. If they think that the degree should have some practical component, then make it a joint degree with a college and let their instructors stay up on stuff.
Are guidance counsellors and their tests actually useful for anything? Personally I've always steered clear, but if someone has a success story I'd be interested in hearing it.
I TA'd a "Introduction to Programming for People Who Will Never Take Another Programming Course" last year and because the Computing Dept standardized on Java (I have yet to meet a Professor who admits to being in favour of that, interestingly enough) it was also taught in Java. Despite the language, they managed to learn some important basic concepts like functions (we called them "methods", of course) and control structures. Still, I feel guilty to this day that these students will never understand why they had to write
at the top of every file. :(
Guess what: when most of the potential CompSci teachers are going to industry, it doesn't get taught properly. For example: I love theory and I enjoy teaching, but half way through my Master's degree I realised that I'm not willing to put up with the bullshit required to get to a position where I have the opportunity to teach.
And actually I'd have to disagree with you somewhat: higher-level courses should have purely theoretical lectures, but students should get the opportunity to implement those theories in labs. Labs in CompSci?! A novel idea, I know. It's almost enough to make it into a real science...
So?! That's totally within their rights! At least companies are putting a price on your privacy and offering you the choice of selling it for that price rather than just trying to take it.
And who knows, there could be other benefits for selling your privacy -- the (government-owned) liquor stores in Ontario are currently asking every customer for their postal code, presumably so they can figure out where to build more stores and save customers travel time.
No, there was more to it than that! 2.6 uses /lib/modules/modules.conf instead of /etc/modules.conf and, IIRC, Debian's update-modules is still designed for the old method (or at least it was when I installed 2.6.0). It actually took me a while to figure out why my modules weren't being loaded properly.
Another problem I ran into, although this is no one's fault but mine, is that the size of all the modules in the kernel image keeps growing. Back when I was moving to a new HD I was still going through all the work of making a custom kernel, therefore I was using less than 40 MB in / and so 80 MB seemed like it would give me room to grow. Of course now that each kernel I install takes up 35 MBs, I end up having to install them to /usr/lib/modules and copy over only the modules I need, which was made even harder with 2.6 because lots of the modules changed location and name. :(
Safe and secret necrophilia, assuming it isn't precluded by murder (just as most pederast cases do not include kidnapping), has zero cost to society. Instead, we should ban defiling corpses in front of loved ones and all sorts of high-health risk activities (like smoking -- off the top of my head I'd guess lung cancer costs more to treat than whatever you get from necrophilia).
Similarly, cannibalism of people who died for other causes, weren't "downers" (this is how they tell if cattle are safe to eat), and have no loved ones whose griving will be aided by a corpse, has zero cost to society. Actually it would have negative cost if John Doe's meat were sold instead of just being worm food.
You're right, I haven't actually asked any taikonauts how they'd feel about a one-way trip. But from what I've read about Eastern Philosophy, and from what I know about the sacrifices made in the USSR space program, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the Chinese would be *more likely* to accept a one-way solution than the US.
Good point, although the reason the US enacted the embargos was because they were planning for the inevitability of war with Japan. It could also be argued that the embargos were effectively an act of war just as OPEC cutting off US oil supply would be today.
And Yamamoto's intention was that Pearl Harbor would destabilize and demoralize the US enough that when they entered the war they would not be able to quickly pose a threat. The reason he was authorized to do this was because of the embargo.