I don't know about this. I've worked for many years with in networking device driver programming and testing, and I've never seen this kind of behavior in this field, even though it doesn't get much more low-level than this in software. It's just that the antisocial "hackers" aren't attracted to this field, as they'd rather work in security or games.
Vegas is also close to California; it's extremely close to LA, and a short flight from the Bay Area, and not far from the other west-coast tech cities too (cities where you'd expect a lot of "hackers" to be located). Orlando isn't close to anything; it's not even that close to the northeast corridor cities. Plus, there's lots to do in Vegas: shows, gambling, etc. In other cities, you'll just have to go back to your hotel room in the evening. For all these reasons, Vegas has become the ultimate convention locale.
Not likely. There's two kinds of men who treat women like shit; there's the extroverts who are really skilled at reading body language and figuring out which women actually like their treatment, and which don't. These men do indeed get lots of pussy; it's pretty sad really, for the women, but IMO the fault lies with their parents for not clueing them into this and warning them about these men.
The other kind is men who think they're like group 1 above, but they're not, they're introverted losers (note: I'm not saying all introverts are losers, just these men), and they can't read womens' body language at all, don't know what they can get away with and what's over the line (group 1 above knows the difference), so they make pathetic attempts at emulating group #1, but fail miserably. These men are pathetic, lonely, and despicable creatures. These are the men that apparently are very numerous at hacker conventions.
Seriously, what kind of moron thinks he's going to get into a woman's pants by grabbing her crotch at a bar, then disappearing into the crowd before she can do anything about it? It shows a seriously juvenile mentality.
Fuck you. This isn't about hurt feelings, it's about sexual assault; reaching up a woman's skirt and grabbing her crotch is a criminal offense, and deserves prison time.
Exactly. The stupid sociopaths wind up in prison usually, because they'll do illegal things but they're too dumb to avoid getting caught. The really smart sociopaths become tycoons and run corporations like Apple and Microsoft, while the ones either not quite as intelligent (but still smart) or more motivated by power than money become President or go into other high-up political positions.
Not exactly. "They" were also alone, and apparently not all that skilled (the moron in Colorado didn't use his rifle much, since it jammed up on him).
The Mumbai massacre had a whole team of terrorists operating together. A group of people operating together (esp. when they've trained for their mission) is much, much more effective than a lone nutcase. They can cover each other from anyone who'd try to stop them, they can separate into different groups to cover exits and make sure people can't escape, etc. True terrorists aren't just nutcases acting out, they put some thought into their actions and design them for maximum effectiveness; the goal is to maximize the terror, and of course maximizing the bodycount is part of that.
I can't speak to Samsung specifically, but one of the problems with Android, compared to regular Linux (and this is also true for many embedded versions of ARM Linux), is that a lot of the device drivers are not open-sourced. And a lot of the others may be open-source, but haven't been merged into the mainline kernel, so they only work with specific kernel versions. So if a phone maker doesn't release their drivers as open-source, then porting a different CM/Android version to their phone may be impossible or extremely difficult.
They had Mumbai-style attacks in Europe in the 1970s? (It's a little before my time, I was watching Sesame Street in those days, and we Americans are woefully ignorant about stuff on the other side of the pond, particularly if it's not recent news like the Greek crisis.)
I don't think your "Zombie apocalypse" idea is much to worry about, except in certain countries. Rwanda was a weird case, because you had two fairly large ethnic groups (that the population was comprised of) that didn't like each other too much, and some hatemongers fanned the flames, causing the situation to erupt into all-out genocide. There aren't many countries with ethnic divisions like this. Iraq is the biggest example I can think of off the top of my head, where the population is divided into three roughly equal-size groups that all hate each other; a "Zombie apocalypse" could very well happen there, and in fact some atrocities like this have already happened there. The biggest thing that prevents it from getting out of hand is that the different ethnic groups are located in different sections of the country, so random civilians would have to find some way of transporting themselves en masse to a different region to conduct an apocalypse. In most other countries, the worst it gets is that there's a pretty small ethnic minority that gets beat up by the majority; we saw this in the USA with natives and then blacks, we saw it in Australia with natives, and we saw it in Germany of course with Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, etc., though these were mostly cases where the government had a hand in things. Sure, something like this could happen again, and probably will unfortunately, somewhere, but it's a pretty far cry from the Rwanda-style genocide you spoke of. I have a hard time seeing anything like this happening in any first-world country, though I dunno, maybe if things get really bad here in the USA in the next 10 years, the religious nuts will push all their followers to get out their guns and shoot all the homosexuals they can find, since they really seem to hate gays more than anything else at the moment.
I disagree. I remember when the iPhone was coming out. People were hugely excited about it, and ran to Apple stores to pay $600 apiece for them, and they ran out. (Of course, then they dropped the price and everyone got mad that they paid too much...) It didn't have to be forced on anyone, they just showed some demos and everyone wanted one. MS has their own stores (which eerily look a lot like Apple stores...), so there's nothing stopping them from demoing Win8 in there to get customer feedback, and they've release preview editions for free downloads. The feedback isn't very good. This is nothing like the iPhone launch.
A very large part of the problem isn't the "Linux community" as such, but a few large distros. These distros have decided on Gnome3 and Unity, even though they're not what users want, and they're not exactly a Windows-like (pre-Metro) UI. KDE still has a Windows-like UI for its desktop mode, but how many large distros use that? Only SuSE, and they're not exactly super-popular like Fedora and Ubuntu. Even Mint (Ubuntu derivative), which has been blazing a different path in the wake of the Unity fiasco, has been mostly pushing Gnome, with their Cinnamon shell, though they have a much-less-popular KDE version as well.
Of course, back when Vista came out, KDE had shot itself in the foot too by releasing 4.0 much too early with tons of bugs and missing features, and there again the stupid distros didn't bother to do any QC and just loaded up KDE4.0, making 3.5 not an option any more, and users were outraged, so a big opportunity was missed there as well.
Yes, sometimes it does seem like a lot of Linux people are working for the enemy, but it's extremely unlikely because of the sheer number of people involved (e.g., look how many contributors work on Gnome, both in Red Hat's employ and not). Instead, this is a pretty good illustration of Napoleon's adage, "never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
The PulseAudio thing didn't help either, though to be fair that seemed to be needed to provide functionality missing in the Linux audio stack, which is present on Windows and Mac.
MS needs to appeal to billions that are confused by this stuff, that want all their devices to be consistent and easy to use.
What "billions"? Most people that want smartphones already have them by now, and almost everyone who wants a PC has one by now too, and is familiar with either the regular Windows UI or with MacOS, while the smartphone users are already familiar with iOS and Android. The PC market is saturated, and has been for a long time; almost all sales are to people or businesses who are just replacing existing desktops. Sure, there's several billion people in the third world that don't have PCs and smartphones yet, but they aren't all going to turn middle-class and get this stuff overnight.
Until a PC desktop is as easy to understand and use as a toaster (or at the outside, a car) then we've basically failed with our UI designs.
Bullshit. PCs are fundamentally far more complex and capable than a toaster. How the hell do you propose making it that simple? With a toaster, there isn't much you can do with it. You put bread (or a bagel) in it, press the lever, and it toasts it. You can adjust the brownness, and that's about it. Fancy models have two or three additional features, such as a display to count down the remaining time. You're not going to use your toaster to boil a mug of water, cook a steak, make spaghetti, make some ice cubes, wash the dishes, or do the laundry; it's a single-function device. Computers can be used for an infinite number of functions, and new ones are found every day. You can only make the UI so simple, and if you dumb it down too much, you make it cumbersome for people who actually know what they're doing.
Realistically for the next few years at least Windows phone isn't going to be the most familiar UI for people coming from a phone anyways so why mimic it on a desktop?
You're forgetting that this is Microsoft we're talking about. How is it relevant if only 1% of smartphone users have a Windows Phone? In the mind of MS's executives, that doesn't even register; they always assume they're king of the hill, in every market, and that their stuff is by far the most popular. So basically, you need to start with the assumption that 95% of smartphone users have a Windows Phone and are familiar with its interface and like it, and then this move actually makes a lot of sense.
It's hard to understand for most of us because basically you have to start from an assumption that bears zero resemblance to reality.
It sounds like this won't really work that well, because of the heat issue. I guess it depends on exactly how much this stuff heats up compared to human muscle, but human tissue isn't going to do too well with heating elements integrated into it. Linear electric motors are very energy-efficient, and it'd probably make more sense to adapt those to this use.
As for the BattleTech muscles, if they use magnetic fields or whatever instead of heat, then that alone is a giant difference, as again, the heating issue is also a big energy-efficiency issue. Of course, with battletech, don't they also supposedly use nuclear generators or something? So in that fictional world energy efficiency probably isn't a big deal any more, but these days it certainly is.
Things change over time. Back then, it was perfectly normal for people not to move around that much (though that said, the Native Americans were nomads, and for the time, tended to cover a lot of ground compared to the average European who probably never moved out of his village his whole life). Modern life is different, especially if you're a first-worlder. I'm sorry, but if I never left my state, and only read about far-away places or saw photos of them, I would feel rather confined. Apparently, even hundreds of years ago, lots of Europeans felt the same way, because many were happy to sign up for what back then were extremely dangerous voyages across the ocean. It's normal for people to want to go places and see new things. And you're never going to see anything new if you never leave America, since it's filled with mostly the same people speaking the same language and sharing the same culture, and all the same crappy national corporate chain stores. I've traveled between LA and NYC and many points between in the past 6 months alone, and while the differences are apparent to me as an American (just like a flock of chickens can tell themselves apart even though they all look the same to us humans), there really wasn't that much difference between most of those places. Things (people, culture, etc.) are really, really different when you cross oceans. Even in Hawaii things were pretty different from the mainland even though they're nominally Americans, though I guess that's something you'll probably never see since you can't drive to Hawaii, and unless you have one of those rare 6-week vacation plans (which you only get with government jobs), if you do find a boat to take you, you'l have just enough time there to take a couple of photos before you need to get back on the cruise ship.
Some nut did fly a Cessna 172 into a building recently, an IRS building in Texas. I think one person was killed (besides the pilot), and the building received a small amount of damage. Sucks for that one person, but in the grand scheme of things, that isn't much of a bodycount; the guy could have done a lot more damage with a Glock, a fertilizer bomb, or even a simple car when the employees were leaving the building for lunch.
You can easily kill 11 people just driving a car into a crowd, and you won't even be injured in the process, unlike crashing a plane.
Ok, and how do you get to Europe, unless you don't have a job, unless maybe you have one of those rare jobs that gives you 6 weeks/year?
And no, "I don't travel to Europe" (or insert Hawaii, Australia, or anyplace besides Canada and Mexico if Europe isn't your cup of tea) isn't a valid answer, because never leaving your local area and crossing an ocean to see someplace different doesn't qualify as a "thoroughly fulfilled life" to me.
I agree that the single-axis paradigm is BS, but I'm not so sure about your examples. The concealed weapon carrying liberal democrats works because, as Yegge said (in one of his better points) near the beginning, a lot of liberalism is a reaction to conservatism, and not very well organized or coherent. There's liberals who care a lot about animal rights, there's others that don't and only care about pushing socialism and are perfectly happy with animal testing, etc. Your CCW friends are probably "liberal" because they don't believe the government should be involved in people's bedrooms, but they obviously don't agree with the contingent of liberals that believe that everyone (except the government) needs to be forcibly disarmed. However, if you're a "social conservative" and you buy contraceptives, you're either a hypocrite, or you just aren't extreme enough on that axis to disagree with contraceptives. This issue is one that can be mapped onto a single axis: the most extreme social conservatives want to ban abortion and contraceptives and premarital sex and homosexuality, the less extreme ones are more tolerant: moving towards the liberal side, first they're OK with contraceptives, then they're OK with premarital sex, then they're OK with homosexuality, then they're OK with abortion (I might have mixed up the last two).
But yes, trying to apply this to programmers seems like mostly BS to me. Any good programmer should know that different languages, like different tools, are appropriate at different times. Risk aversion is very useful in certain tasks, and bugs are not acceptable. In other tasks, it's more important to get stuff out there quickly, and worry about bugs later. Would you want to use the latter approach with banking? "Oh sorry, sir! Your balance is negative because of a bug in our financial database. Don't worry, we'll fix that in the next version, but until then sorry that your house sale fell through! No, we won't compensate you for the trouble our error caused." But being that conservative and risk-averse with, say, a quick-n-dirty shell script that you whipped up in 3 minutes to save time today, and which you probably won't use again, is a waste of time.
I don't think I really agree with your assessment of liberals vs. conservatives. Usually, "conservative" implies that someone doesn't want change. They want to stick with the status quo, the "tried and true", etc. Liberals (in US terminology) are the opposite: they want change, because they want to improve things. So to borrow your shitty hamburger example (pun intended), conservatives want to allow shit in the hamburger because that's the way we've always done it, we haven't had a big problem with it before, etc. The liberals see someone get sick from a shitty hamburger and they want to fix the situation so it doesn't happen again, and of course this requires a lot of bureaucracy to make sure no one is serving shitty hamburgers. You're right, however, that this maps pretty well to risk aversion vs. cavalierness (?): the liberals want to create a more utopian society where risk is eliminated as much as possible, even though this brings additional costs, whereas conservatives don't want to bother.
Of course, at least here in the US, this is all greatly compromised by so-called liberals and so-called conservatives making these claims to sound good to their "base", and then when in power only doing things to benefit their rich donors. So the conservatives try to claim that the shit in the hamburger is God's will even though 100 years ago there was never a religious factor in shitty hamburgers, but they create one to get support of the religious conservatives. And the liberals give a giant bailout to the shitty hamburger companies because "they're too big to fail and too many people will be out of work if they do", even though their shitty product is the very thing they were complaining about before (but nevermind that the shitty hamburger companies were giving them giant "campaign donations").
But otherwise, I do agree: one of the main fundamental factors is risk aversion. However, another factor I saw in Yegge's writeup was performance, and that really seems to be a separate axis to me. For instance, he claims both assembly and PHP/Perl as "batshit" and "extreme" liberal, respectively, and straight C as moderately liberal, and languages like Erlang as conservative. But performance doesn't map here at all; the only reason anyone does assembly any more is 1) they want the utmost performance, or 2) they absolutely need to (mainly used in some narrow parts of OS code where something can't be done in C). Similarly, people usually use C because they want the best performance, as it's just one step up from assembly. People use C++ because it can perform almost as well as C (or maybe as well, depending on how you write it), but it adds a bunch of OOP features too. But then languages like PHP, Perl, etc. have pretty terrible performance, in comparison to C. And so do the "conservative" languages.
Exactly. The problem, of course, is that most Americans (at least 54%) also have authoritarian leanings. The whole idea about Americans being pro-freedom is a complete and total lie.
As for a jobs program, maybe we should just emulate the former Soviet countries in that regard. One guy I knew from Hungary told me about a box factory they had there during the communist regime: the factory had two sides. On one side, the workers would assemble these wooden boxes (the big kind used for shipping). Then, they'd ship these completed boxes to the other side of the factory, where a different team of workers would disassemble them, and send the pieces back to the other side. Highly productive place there...
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I don't know about this. I've worked for many years with in networking device driver programming and testing, and I've never seen this kind of behavior in this field, even though it doesn't get much more low-level than this in software. It's just that the antisocial "hackers" aren't attracted to this field, as they'd rather work in security or games.
Vegas is also close to California; it's extremely close to LA, and a short flight from the Bay Area, and not far from the other west-coast tech cities too (cities where you'd expect a lot of "hackers" to be located). Orlando isn't close to anything; it's not even that close to the northeast corridor cities. Plus, there's lots to do in Vegas: shows, gambling, etc. In other cities, you'll just have to go back to your hotel room in the evening. For all these reasons, Vegas has become the ultimate convention locale.
Not likely. There's two kinds of men who treat women like shit; there's the extroverts who are really skilled at reading body language and figuring out which women actually like their treatment, and which don't. These men do indeed get lots of pussy; it's pretty sad really, for the women, but IMO the fault lies with their parents for not clueing them into this and warning them about these men.
The other kind is men who think they're like group 1 above, but they're not, they're introverted losers (note: I'm not saying all introverts are losers, just these men), and they can't read womens' body language at all, don't know what they can get away with and what's over the line (group 1 above knows the difference), so they make pathetic attempts at emulating group #1, but fail miserably. These men are pathetic, lonely, and despicable creatures. These are the men that apparently are very numerous at hacker conventions.
Seriously, what kind of moron thinks he's going to get into a woman's pants by grabbing her crotch at a bar, then disappearing into the crowd before she can do anything about it? It shows a seriously juvenile mentality.
Fuck you. This isn't about hurt feelings, it's about sexual assault; reaching up a woman's skirt and grabbing her crotch is a criminal offense, and deserves prison time.
Exactly. The stupid sociopaths wind up in prison usually, because they'll do illegal things but they're too dumb to avoid getting caught. The really smart sociopaths become tycoons and run corporations like Apple and Microsoft, while the ones either not quite as intelligent (but still smart) or more motivated by power than money become President or go into other high-up political positions.
Not exactly. "They" were also alone, and apparently not all that skilled (the moron in Colorado didn't use his rifle much, since it jammed up on him).
The Mumbai massacre had a whole team of terrorists operating together. A group of people operating together (esp. when they've trained for their mission) is much, much more effective than a lone nutcase. They can cover each other from anyone who'd try to stop them, they can separate into different groups to cover exits and make sure people can't escape, etc. True terrorists aren't just nutcases acting out, they put some thought into their actions and design them for maximum effectiveness; the goal is to maximize the terror, and of course maximizing the bodycount is part of that.
Wayland has little to do with GUIs; it's the software layer underneath the graphics.
I can't speak to Samsung specifically, but one of the problems with Android, compared to regular Linux (and this is also true for many embedded versions of ARM Linux), is that a lot of the device drivers are not open-sourced. And a lot of the others may be open-source, but haven't been merged into the mainline kernel, so they only work with specific kernel versions. So if a phone maker doesn't release their drivers as open-source, then porting a different CM/Android version to their phone may be impossible or extremely difficult.
That's why the Colorado shooter was shot dead as soon as he could get a round off, right?
They had Mumbai-style attacks in Europe in the 1970s? (It's a little before my time, I was watching Sesame Street in those days, and we Americans are woefully ignorant about stuff on the other side of the pond, particularly if it's not recent news like the Greek crisis.)
I don't think your "Zombie apocalypse" idea is much to worry about, except in certain countries. Rwanda was a weird case, because you had two fairly large ethnic groups (that the population was comprised of) that didn't like each other too much, and some hatemongers fanned the flames, causing the situation to erupt into all-out genocide. There aren't many countries with ethnic divisions like this. Iraq is the biggest example I can think of off the top of my head, where the population is divided into three roughly equal-size groups that all hate each other; a "Zombie apocalypse" could very well happen there, and in fact some atrocities like this have already happened there. The biggest thing that prevents it from getting out of hand is that the different ethnic groups are located in different sections of the country, so random civilians would have to find some way of transporting themselves en masse to a different region to conduct an apocalypse. In most other countries, the worst it gets is that there's a pretty small ethnic minority that gets beat up by the majority; we saw this in the USA with natives and then blacks, we saw it in Australia with natives, and we saw it in Germany of course with Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, etc., though these were mostly cases where the government had a hand in things. Sure, something like this could happen again, and probably will unfortunately, somewhere, but it's a pretty far cry from the Rwanda-style genocide you spoke of. I have a hard time seeing anything like this happening in any first-world country, though I dunno, maybe if things get really bad here in the USA in the next 10 years, the religious nuts will push all their followers to get out their guns and shoot all the homosexuals they can find, since they really seem to hate gays more than anything else at the moment.
Which is what got me to Linux ten years ago. Change for the sake of change is stupid. Change to improve somthing is good.
Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid change for the sake of change with Linux too. Just look at Gnome3 and Unity.
I disagree. I remember when the iPhone was coming out. People were hugely excited about it, and ran to Apple stores to pay $600 apiece for them, and they ran out. (Of course, then they dropped the price and everyone got mad that they paid too much...) It didn't have to be forced on anyone, they just showed some demos and everyone wanted one. MS has their own stores (which eerily look a lot like Apple stores...), so there's nothing stopping them from demoing Win8 in there to get customer feedback, and they've release preview editions for free downloads. The feedback isn't very good. This is nothing like the iPhone launch.
A very large part of the problem isn't the "Linux community" as such, but a few large distros. These distros have decided on Gnome3 and Unity, even though they're not what users want, and they're not exactly a Windows-like (pre-Metro) UI. KDE still has a Windows-like UI for its desktop mode, but how many large distros use that? Only SuSE, and they're not exactly super-popular like Fedora and Ubuntu. Even Mint (Ubuntu derivative), which has been blazing a different path in the wake of the Unity fiasco, has been mostly pushing Gnome, with their Cinnamon shell, though they have a much-less-popular KDE version as well.
Of course, back when Vista came out, KDE had shot itself in the foot too by releasing 4.0 much too early with tons of bugs and missing features, and there again the stupid distros didn't bother to do any QC and just loaded up KDE4.0, making 3.5 not an option any more, and users were outraged, so a big opportunity was missed there as well.
Yes, sometimes it does seem like a lot of Linux people are working for the enemy, but it's extremely unlikely because of the sheer number of people involved (e.g., look how many contributors work on Gnome, both in Red Hat's employ and not). Instead, this is a pretty good illustration of Napoleon's adage, "never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
The PulseAudio thing didn't help either, though to be fair that seemed to be needed to provide functionality missing in the Linux audio stack, which is present on Windows and Mac.
MS needs to appeal to billions that are confused by this stuff, that want all their devices to be consistent and easy to use.
What "billions"? Most people that want smartphones already have them by now, and almost everyone who wants a PC has one by now too, and is familiar with either the regular Windows UI or with MacOS, while the smartphone users are already familiar with iOS and Android. The PC market is saturated, and has been for a long time; almost all sales are to people or businesses who are just replacing existing desktops. Sure, there's several billion people in the third world that don't have PCs and smartphones yet, but they aren't all going to turn middle-class and get this stuff overnight.
Until a PC desktop is as easy to understand and use as a toaster (or at the outside, a car) then we've basically failed with our UI designs.
Bullshit. PCs are fundamentally far more complex and capable than a toaster. How the hell do you propose making it that simple? With a toaster, there isn't much you can do with it. You put bread (or a bagel) in it, press the lever, and it toasts it. You can adjust the brownness, and that's about it. Fancy models have two or three additional features, such as a display to count down the remaining time. You're not going to use your toaster to boil a mug of water, cook a steak, make spaghetti, make some ice cubes, wash the dishes, or do the laundry; it's a single-function device. Computers can be used for an infinite number of functions, and new ones are found every day. You can only make the UI so simple, and if you dumb it down too much, you make it cumbersome for people who actually know what they're doing.
Realistically for the next few years at least Windows phone isn't going to be the most familiar UI for people coming from a phone anyways so why mimic it on a desktop?
You're forgetting that this is Microsoft we're talking about. How is it relevant if only 1% of smartphone users have a Windows Phone? In the mind of MS's executives, that doesn't even register; they always assume they're king of the hill, in every market, and that their stuff is by far the most popular. So basically, you need to start with the assumption that 95% of smartphone users have a Windows Phone and are familiar with its interface and like it, and then this move actually makes a lot of sense.
It's hard to understand for most of us because basically you have to start from an assumption that bears zero resemblance to reality.
Yes, nothing like demoralizing the enemy with AC/DC and pork.
It sounds like this won't really work that well, because of the heat issue. I guess it depends on exactly how much this stuff heats up compared to human muscle, but human tissue isn't going to do too well with heating elements integrated into it. Linear electric motors are very energy-efficient, and it'd probably make more sense to adapt those to this use.
As for the BattleTech muscles, if they use magnetic fields or whatever instead of heat, then that alone is a giant difference, as again, the heating issue is also a big energy-efficiency issue. Of course, with battletech, don't they also supposedly use nuclear generators or something? So in that fictional world energy efficiency probably isn't a big deal any more, but these days it certainly is.
Maybe, he sure sounded serious at the time. He wasn't even a friend, he was my boss.
Things change over time. Back then, it was perfectly normal for people not to move around that much (though that said, the Native Americans were nomads, and for the time, tended to cover a lot of ground compared to the average European who probably never moved out of his village his whole life). Modern life is different, especially if you're a first-worlder. I'm sorry, but if I never left my state, and only read about far-away places or saw photos of them, I would feel rather confined. Apparently, even hundreds of years ago, lots of Europeans felt the same way, because many were happy to sign up for what back then were extremely dangerous voyages across the ocean. It's normal for people to want to go places and see new things. And you're never going to see anything new if you never leave America, since it's filled with mostly the same people speaking the same language and sharing the same culture, and all the same crappy national corporate chain stores. I've traveled between LA and NYC and many points between in the past 6 months alone, and while the differences are apparent to me as an American (just like a flock of chickens can tell themselves apart even though they all look the same to us humans), there really wasn't that much difference between most of those places. Things (people, culture, etc.) are really, really different when you cross oceans. Even in Hawaii things were pretty different from the mainland even though they're nominally Americans, though I guess that's something you'll probably never see since you can't drive to Hawaii, and unless you have one of those rare 6-week vacation plans (which you only get with government jobs), if you do find a boat to take you, you'l have just enough time there to take a couple of photos before you need to get back on the cruise ship.
Some nut did fly a Cessna 172 into a building recently, an IRS building in Texas. I think one person was killed (besides the pilot), and the building received a small amount of damage. Sucks for that one person, but in the grand scheme of things, that isn't much of a bodycount; the guy could have done a lot more damage with a Glock, a fertilizer bomb, or even a simple car when the employees were leaving the building for lunch.
You can easily kill 11 people just driving a car into a crowd, and you won't even be injured in the process, unlike crashing a plane.
Ok, and how do you get to Europe, unless you don't have a job, unless maybe you have one of those rare jobs that gives you 6 weeks/year?
And no, "I don't travel to Europe" (or insert Hawaii, Australia, or anyplace besides Canada and Mexico if Europe isn't your cup of tea) isn't a valid answer, because never leaving your local area and crossing an ocean to see someplace different doesn't qualify as a "thoroughly fulfilled life" to me.
I agree that the single-axis paradigm is BS, but I'm not so sure about your examples. The concealed weapon carrying liberal democrats works because, as Yegge said (in one of his better points) near the beginning, a lot of liberalism is a reaction to conservatism, and not very well organized or coherent. There's liberals who care a lot about animal rights, there's others that don't and only care about pushing socialism and are perfectly happy with animal testing, etc. Your CCW friends are probably "liberal" because they don't believe the government should be involved in people's bedrooms, but they obviously don't agree with the contingent of liberals that believe that everyone (except the government) needs to be forcibly disarmed. However, if you're a "social conservative" and you buy contraceptives, you're either a hypocrite, or you just aren't extreme enough on that axis to disagree with contraceptives. This issue is one that can be mapped onto a single axis: the most extreme social conservatives want to ban abortion and contraceptives and premarital sex and homosexuality, the less extreme ones are more tolerant: moving towards the liberal side, first they're OK with contraceptives, then they're OK with premarital sex, then they're OK with homosexuality, then they're OK with abortion (I might have mixed up the last two).
But yes, trying to apply this to programmers seems like mostly BS to me. Any good programmer should know that different languages, like different tools, are appropriate at different times. Risk aversion is very useful in certain tasks, and bugs are not acceptable. In other tasks, it's more important to get stuff out there quickly, and worry about bugs later. Would you want to use the latter approach with banking? "Oh sorry, sir! Your balance is negative because of a bug in our financial database. Don't worry, we'll fix that in the next version, but until then sorry that your house sale fell through! No, we won't compensate you for the trouble our error caused." But being that conservative and risk-averse with, say, a quick-n-dirty shell script that you whipped up in 3 minutes to save time today, and which you probably won't use again, is a waste of time.
I don't think I really agree with your assessment of liberals vs. conservatives. Usually, "conservative" implies that someone doesn't want change. They want to stick with the status quo, the "tried and true", etc. Liberals (in US terminology) are the opposite: they want change, because they want to improve things. So to borrow your shitty hamburger example (pun intended), conservatives want to allow shit in the hamburger because that's the way we've always done it, we haven't had a big problem with it before, etc. The liberals see someone get sick from a shitty hamburger and they want to fix the situation so it doesn't happen again, and of course this requires a lot of bureaucracy to make sure no one is serving shitty hamburgers. You're right, however, that this maps pretty well to risk aversion vs. cavalierness (?): the liberals want to create a more utopian society where risk is eliminated as much as possible, even though this brings additional costs, whereas conservatives don't want to bother.
Of course, at least here in the US, this is all greatly compromised by so-called liberals and so-called conservatives making these claims to sound good to their "base", and then when in power only doing things to benefit their rich donors. So the conservatives try to claim that the shit in the hamburger is God's will even though 100 years ago there was never a religious factor in shitty hamburgers, but they create one to get support of the religious conservatives. And the liberals give a giant bailout to the shitty hamburger companies because "they're too big to fail and too many people will be out of work if they do", even though their shitty product is the very thing they were complaining about before (but nevermind that the shitty hamburger companies were giving them giant "campaign donations").
But otherwise, I do agree: one of the main fundamental factors is risk aversion. However, another factor I saw in Yegge's writeup was performance, and that really seems to be a separate axis to me. For instance, he claims both assembly and PHP/Perl as "batshit" and "extreme" liberal, respectively, and straight C as moderately liberal, and languages like Erlang as conservative. But performance doesn't map here at all; the only reason anyone does assembly any more is 1) they want the utmost performance, or 2) they absolutely need to (mainly used in some narrow parts of OS code where something can't be done in C). Similarly, people usually use C because they want the best performance, as it's just one step up from assembly. People use C++ because it can perform almost as well as C (or maybe as well, depending on how you write it), but it adds a bunch of OOP features too. But then languages like PHP, Perl, etc. have pretty terrible performance, in comparison to C. And so do the "conservative" languages.
Exactly. The problem, of course, is that most Americans (at least 54%) also have authoritarian leanings. The whole idea about Americans being pro-freedom is a complete and total lie.
As for a jobs program, maybe we should just emulate the former Soviet countries in that regard. One guy I knew from Hungary told me about a box factory they had there during the communist regime: the factory had two sides. On one side, the workers would assemble these wooden boxes (the big kind used for shipping). Then, they'd ship these completed boxes to the other side of the factory, where a different team of workers would disassemble them, and send the pieces back to the other side. Highly productive place there...
Yes, it shows there's something wrong with him and his associates: they're very out-of-step with the attitudes of most Americans.