There isn't a single dollar figure that separates "enough" from "too much". A lot depends on your needs, which vary from person to person. For example, some people have higher medical expenses than others.
However, I would say that if you could bank one year's salary, and use it to pay for basic food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care, and entertainment for the rest of your life, you're making "too much". Not "too much" as in, "You must immediately hand all your excess over to Fearless Leader", but as in, "We spent our country into the ground to build the society we have now, and you've obviously done very well in that society. When it comes time to pay back China, don't whine when we raise your tax rate well above what the guy making $30K is paying."
Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
I think you're being unfair to the guy. Re-read his personal anecdote. There were things about the job that he loved, but he felt a lot of stress because he wanted to provide better service to the customers, and his employer was being an obstacle. So he sat down with somebody in charge, explained his troubles and what he would like to see happen, and got a promise that things would change. They didn't, and so the guy quit the job.
From his recitation, it sounds like he did all the right things. What should he have done differently?
You're right to urge everyone to start getting their finances under control. Not being able to leave a bad job for financial reasons is a terrible feeling. Tear up the credit cards. Share a car with your spouse, or better yet, bike. Cancel the cable. Do some clothes shopping at Goodwill. Trade in your favorite restaurant for Ramen (call them "Freedom Noodles" if it helps you keep the proper mindset). Eat less (it'll probably do you good). If you can't walk away from your current job *today* without dooming yourself, then money has made itself your master. It's time for a revolution.
1) It's hard to tell when fundamental research will have big payoffs, and whether those payoffs will be solely academic or also economic. Before we accept your question, you have to show that the research "doesn't actually matter".
2) Because the government needs to do things that "provide for the common defense," "promote the general welfare" and whatnot, and therefore the government needs to "forcibly confiscate" from somewhere.
3) Given #2, it's hard to feel sorry for somebody when they'll still have $11M/year to live on.
4) You're working under the simplistic idea that there is a perfect link between a person's economic value and their economic compensation. In the era of Carly-style CEOs, the evidence for the premise that wealth is earned isn't as strong as it might be.
However, if people don't find a way to get rid of the crappy torrents, things could get bad for anyone who wants to distribute something that someone else doesn't want them distributing.
Okay, here's a doomsday scenario for you: Hacker releases virus. Virus causes infected boxen to publish craptorrents, masquerading as material hacker wants people not to download, and to register said craptorrents on major torrent sites. Suddenly, it becomes very difficult to figure out which files are legitimate, and people give up on Bittorrent.
If this means that people can't get their bootlegged copy of "The Wedding Crashers," or other material that people really oughtn't be downloading, that's one thing. But what if the person trying to crapflood the torrent sites wants to take out legitimate downloads?
Now, this technique doesn't have an effect on legitimate trackers, except making them hard to find on certain sites. So this technique should be seen more as an attack on sites that aggregate trackers, rather than on the Bittorrent protocol itself. They'll have to fight back, most likely with some sort of reputation system.
Violating copyright is illegal, yes. But sometimes the best way to get the law changed is to break it frequently and vigorously.
I'm not talking about civil disobedience, where people publicly commit the crime and publicly accept the consequences of their actions. I'm thinking more along the lines of Prohibition during the 1920's. Millions of Americans were sneaking around, distilling and drinking hooch, making life hard on the authorities. People generally weren't trying to "make a statement"; they just wanted booze. Eventually society decided that the harm caused by alcohol was less troublesome to deal with than the violent crime and disrespect for the law caused by the ban.
I think the prohibition on marijuana is going to end the same way: enforcement costs are simply too high to justify whatever benefit marijuana opponents claim the ban may have. Further, because people are out there riding the magic dragon, their experience acts as a counterbalance to the sort of nitwitted propaganda the government keeps putting out.
If everyone took the attitude you did, the government would never have to think, "Okay, if I try to ban this, how difficult will it be to enforce the ban?" The only question would be whether they can discard all the protest letters before they pile up in the halls of the Senate. Hint: They can.
I'm not saying that the people who stayed made a rational decision. I'm sure that, given the hindsight we all have now, they would have been grabbing anything with four wheels to escape. But when faced with the prospect of abandoning the only home they had, without the security of knowing that they had somewhere to go and some way to get there, I can see why they might have stayed put and hoped for a miracle. Maybe they thought God would save them. I wish people would just figure out that God doesn't exist, or that he's a malicious rat-bastard. Then they could do a more reasonable risk analysis.
We really are a bunch of superstitious feces-flingers. I get that. We do stupid, incomprehensible things. My feeling is that, however stupid people were, they're still people. Survival of the fittest, right? Only not so much. Evolution got us here, and got us these big old brains. But these brains, they're big enough to learn to understand the programming, and even to defy it in some measure.
I want for us to stop quibbling about who deserves to live and who deserves to die. We're not smart enough to make that determination, and we never will be. So we may as well come to terms with our inability to make the distinction, and then set about trying to save us all. Even the stupid, the shiftless, the deranged.
I'm something of a genetic determinist. I don't believe that anybody can grow up to be President (even though the bar does seem to be set shockingly low at the moment), or that America is the land of boundless opportunity. The way I see it, the path of a person's life is determined 75% by his or her genes, and another 15% by his or her upbringing. Neither is under that person's control, so why spend time faulting them for who they are?
On some level, I think New Orleans was a failure of our collective humanity. I mean, those poor people have been crapped on their whole lives. Why in the world would they leave? It's not like we can fault them if they thought nobody outside the city would stop and give them a lift. We've never given them a reason to believe in us before. Our entire society takes what we can from them, offering minimum wage in return. We give them government assistance that isn't enough to live on, then revile them as "welfare queens" or whatever.
I'm sitting here on the verge of tears, just thinking about how thoroughly fucked we all are.
You're a good guy, and I respect you. You're probably right when you say that you would never stay in poverty for very long. Even in poverty, the genes you got from birth and the values you got from your upbringing would help you rise. But those are riches that not everybody has, and not everyone can be taught to have them. But I have to believe that, if we were all committed to the goal of making the best possible life for everyone, rather than inflicting pain on the down-and-out in order to weed out the undeserving, we might all be able to salvage this mess.
You know, you'd make one hell of a bartender. Thanks for your time.
So, the people killed and trapped by Hurricane Katrina were "ignorant fuckspittles?"
You clearly don't understand what it's like to be impoverished to the point where you can't get transportation. You clearly don't understand the fear that comes with being told to leave your home, and knowing you don't have anywhere to go. You clearly don't understand the average person's capacity for convincing themselves that things will be okay, even when more objective people recognize that it clearly won't.
Moreover, you clearly don't want to learn. You're happy in your ignorance, blaming the victims for their poverty, and blaming liberals for everything else.
This, I believe, is a textbook case of the pot casting the first stone at the kettle.
First, regarding Modern Portfolio Theory: Most people are very prone towards the "If I don't know how to do it, it can't be hard" mentality. I certainly am.
Second, I think IT's mission is far different from that of the janitorial staff, the mail room, etc., and that it's makes more sense to give them some measure of control than your mockery would indicate. But I think it would make more sense to just give IT some measure of control over the policies governing computer use within the company, and then treat violations of those policies as seriously as any other violations. This seldom happens, because the people in charge of setting policies don't understand the computer system well enough to understand the sort of hassle that some violations cause.
For example, the IT department might be allowed to say, "You should be storing your files on the network, not your local hard drive. We will not assist you in recovering data not stored on the network." Given that policy, if the CIO loses his spreadsheet because he insists on keeping things local "so he can access them faster", any complaints and threats of termination should fall on deaf ears.
Another example: If an otherwise competent person keeps hosing the network by running suspicious executables, that person's manager should be willing to recognize the inconvenience this causes. It shouldn't be up to the IT department to fire the guy; it should be up to the guy's boss to recognize the overall effect the behavior is having on the company, and do whatever it takes (disciplinary action, new IT procedures, etc.) to ensure that the IT people can keep the infrastructure reliable.
As it stands at many companies, IT people take the blame when the users trash the network, even though the management won't give the IT people the tools or authority needed to keep them from trashing the network. Sometimes, it really is a case of people needing to do X with their computer, even though forbidding X would make administration much easier. IT folks can be insensitive to business needs. But other times it's just a case of management not wanting to be told how they can and cannot use their computers, and figuring administration can't be hard because they don't know how to do it.
It's tricky to strike a balance between those competing needs.
Distinction without a difference. If a person's race is one of the factors used to determine whether a person is searched, detained, arrested, etc., then it's racial profiling. Beyond that, it's just a matter of degrees.
"Driving while black" is exactly the same thing you're describing. Police think that young black males are more likely to commit crimes than the average person. So they arrest, detain, harass, and pull over young black males more frequently. According to your reasoning, this makes perfect sense because statistically, you should be eyeing those who are most likely to commit crimes.
The reason we shouldn't be doing racial profiling are threefold:
1) Pragmatic: Racial profiling focuses the attention of authorities on people and stereotypes that hold for those people. It's generally more effective to be focused on actions.
2) Moral: Every person, regardless of their membership in various categories like race, age, or gender, deserves to be treated as an individual under the law. This holds true regardless of whether a given stereotype has any statistical basis.
3) Pragmatic/Moral: Mistreating entire groups for the actions of individuals simply alienates members of the group, possibly making them more willing to become criminals, terrorists, or whatever.
1) If this is the London police "doing their best", then terrorists probably don't need to be worried.
2) Criticism of the authorities may bring constructive change. Terrorists are less easily swayed by public criticism.
3) I'm pretty sure public sentiment is foresquare against terrorists, the killing of innocent people, etc. That's one bandwagon I don't need to jump on.
4) The actions of the terrorists cannot rob an entire society of its fundamental freedoms. The actions of the authorities can.
5) The authorities are supposed to represent the will of the people. When they abuse the power which we've entrusted to them, they deserve to be called on the carpet.
Good points, all. But the numbers I've seen thrown about say that a successful elevator could reduce the cost of putting material in orbit from $20,000/kg to $200/kg. As you say, that's probably overly optimistic. Still, think about the synergistic effects of such a massive drop in price. Lots of difficult aerospace problems become vastly simpler when "throw more hardware at it" becomes a viable option.
Shielding? No need to wait for a breakthrough in ultralight radiation protection. Bulk quantities of lead/water will do. Power source? No need to make the solar panels ten times more efficient. Just use ten times as many. R&D costs plummet.
There's nothing special about the target date 2020 (or 2018, or whatever). Under the current plan, we'll end up finding all these nifty mining spots, test out the mining technology, and suddenly realize that no amount of refinement of the current "chemically propelled booster" model is going to be sufficiently cheap to make mining profitable.
Finally, the Space Shuttle was supposed to be reusable, too. As in "a flight every month" reusable. I'm not buying that this plan will accomplish what it claims, I'm not convinced that America's commitment is sufficient to implement it, and I'm really leery of the pricetag given our current national debt. You've presented me with the choice between spending $100B on one plan, or $10B on a plan that has a 1% chance of successfully doing what the $100B plan would do. But this ignores two things. 1) We can't afford the $100B plan. 2) The $10B plan, if successful, would not just be a 10x improvement over the $100B plan, but would also reduce the cost of any subsequent initiatives by the same sort of magnitude.
So here's my plan: Throw a few billion at nanotube research and hope the little tubey things cooperate, build a replacement for the Space Shuttle, but do the mining-related Moon research with robots. I still see the current proposal as a waste of money, which will take NASA's focus away from the exceptional unmanned work it's doing right now. There was a time when I would have said we should do it all: manned, unmanned, whatever. Give NASA every penny it asks for, and twenty billion more besides. Our future lies in the heavens!
But now I'm convinced that we're spending money we really, really don't have, all so Bush can claim the title of "The president who took us back to the Moon." My hope for the space elevator borders on the rabid and irrational because I'm convinced that it's the only way to keep space exploration within the razor thin budgets we'll be facing for the forseeable future.
Okay. Class balancing is hard work. They're workin' hard. We get it.
But regarding the end of your post: the PR department isn't doing its job, unless "its job" is "keep the developers from saying something embarrassing or stupid," rather than "help the public relate to this company, and give the company a good public face."
As you said, this is Slashdot. Home of the geek, the troll, the antisocial, the borderline psychopath, the epic flamewar, and the rare computer genius. We're not looking for bland chatter about how great a company Blizzard is. We want to hear about the nitty gritty of the development process. We want to hear about the failed practical joke that resulted in a server fire 72 hours before they went live*. We want to hear the developers tell about how this one algorithm tweak saved their collective butts when all seemed doomed. We want to be regaled with the tales of blood, sweat, and courage by the steely-eyed code warriors we all aspire to become. We want to slap them on their backs and buy them beer.
These "answers" show that the PR Department at Blizzard is either too incompetent or too risk averse to interface with its audience in a way that will speak to that audience. Unchain some developers from their desks, let them spill some of Blizzard's less critical secrets, and keep the cattle prod on hand if they breathe a word about The Goat Incident. But for grandma's sake, let us hear something that sounds genuine.
* Note: This is a hypothetical incident. Please, Blizzard, call off your demon lawyer horde.
Excuse me, but what exactly is so wrong with me not playing a part in the next moon mission? Are you nagging your wife about not pitching in? Calling up your parents and asking when you can expect that radiation shielding? If this thing ever gets off the ground, are you going to tell your neighbors, "If you didn't design one of the components on that rocket, shut up and let me bask in glory?" There are hundreds of millions of people in this country who aren't going to do anything for this project beyond paying their taxes, so I don't see how being one is a mark of shame, nor do I see how it disqualifies me from having an opinion.
Whatever this program promises today, we're not actually going to make a sustained, committed effort until the Chinese shame us into it. Barring that, we're going to take the same plodding, neglectful approach to the proposed moon base that we took to the ISS. Like the ISS, it will be staffed with precisely as many people as it takes to perform maintenance on it. Like the ISS, only token effort will be spent on the basic research that is supposed to be its reason for existing.
The only advantage I see for having this new program is the fact that it will increase the demand for engineers, and scientists in the aerospace field, which will be vital to any future space exploration initiatives. But since the program will be drawing resources away from current, successful NASA projects, (NASA doesn't actually get a budget increase for doing this), I don't see this making a huge difference.
Finally, it really bugs me that Bush wants credit for bold, innovative plans even as he ensures that this is the last expensive government program the U.S. will ever be able to afford.
We've thrown billions at far less promising technologies than the Space Elevator before.
You misunderstand me. I wasn't claiming that a space elevator should be NASA's replacement for the Space Shuttle. All I was saying was that, in some endeavors, the most efficient way to accomplish a big task is to wait for the technology to catch up with your ambitions.
For example, there is talk of going back to the Moon. Why the pick for? Do we want to collect some more moon rocks? Or maybe we want to give this generation's astronauts the chance to hit golf balls a long, long way. Given the current costs of moving material into space, and our current level of commitment to the space program, we're certainly not going to be committing to a sustained human presence on the Moon.
So what I'm proposing is, rather than embarking on the current $100B corporate welfare program^W^W^W plan to put a man on the Moon by 2018 (using today's technology), we put some of that money into basic materials research. If it pans out, we might get to the Moon within a few years of the target date, at a much lower cost, and with the capacity needed to stay there without ruining the country financially.
There is no denying that we need a replacement for the Space Shuttle, and as quickly as possible. I'm not suggesting that we hold up that program while we wait for the technology to mature (though if your goal is to make me sound stupid, I can certainly see why you'd want to leave the impression that I did). What I'm saying is that using a relatively small amount of money to pursue a promising technology makes more sense than investing tens of billions building lots of our current technologies, to pull off a one-time stunt.
No, the moderation system isn't the sort of preference system the article is describing. If they did have that sort of system, the Microsoft zealots would see all the pro-MS posts at +5 and the Linux crowd would (fail to) see them at -1. The two groups would share the same space, but be mostly unaware of each others' existence.
What you're seeing is a different sort of selection, one done by individuals rather than by automation. Slashdot's fans tend to have certain biases, so those who share those biases are more likely to enjoy being here. Those who don't? Well, it's a big Internet out there, so most of them just find someplace more condusive to their ideas.
I think there's still a pretty wide range of opinions here, and well-researched, well-written posts get modded up regardless of the opinion being expressed. The biases only really show up when people bluntly state their opinion without justifying them properly. That's when people are likely to break out the -1, Disagree mod.
On reading the post you cited, I have to say that its score is actually good evidence that the moderation system is working as intended.
I've always thought they should consider a variation on the space elevator, where the top was in LEO, and the bottom hung down into the atmosphere. To get things to the top, you simply fly something up high enough that it can latch onto the bottom. Then when you get to the top, you wait for a second one to swing by and take you higher.
It would be like Jungle Hunt, but without the alligators.
I once read an interesting article on cluster computing, which basically said that the fastest and cheapest way to solve any truly big computational problem was, "Wait a few years before buying the cluster." Given the rates at which prices for storage, processing, and networking were plummeting, a problem that would take eight years to solve today could be solvable in four years two years out, and in two years two years from now. So by putting it off for two years, you'd shave two years off the project.
The current plan doesn't get us to the moon until 2018 anyways, and without a cheap way to keep things flowing between here and the moon, the chance of a sustained human presence is nil. So we could spend $100B building basically the same propulsion-based solutions we've always been building, or we could spend a much smaller sum on fundamental materials research.
I don't see it as a gamble, because without a drastically cheaper way to get into space, we'll just retrace the journeys of the Apollo missions. Then the whole nation will kick back, pop open a beer, mutter "Yep, still got it," and wait to do it all over again in 2050.
Given that Linux is a multi-user system, the inability to trash data belonging to other people is a not-inconsequential advantage. Even "normal" people often have spouses and children, who should each have their own account.
However, given that most people don't use more than a tiny fraction of their hard drives, it seems like Linux should come with some utility that periodically makes a read-only copy of users' home directories. I know such things exist (in my CS department, everyone has a ~/.snapshot directory that has weekly, daily, and hourly backups), but I haven't found the script that does it.
Quick and easy backup utilities would be a real selling point for potential Linux home users.
$69 for Dragon Warrior II. What a dumb twelve year old I was. After saving up the whole summer for that game, damned straight I had an emotional investment in it.
I think you're being silly. But I honestly thought Zork:Nemesis was a nice mix of plot and eye-candy. Forbidden love, betrayal, vengeance, whatnot.
The Myst theme park is a non-starter, because the people in charge of creating it would make people solve intricate puzzles before they could use the restroom, flushing the urinals in the proper sequence would open up the concession stand outside, and an evil monster would block your exit until you washed your hands.
Lots of people here seem to misunderstand the service that Google is currently offering. As far as I understand, they are merely offering their own VPN, instead of full-blown WiFi hotspots. Those may be in the future, but at the moment it's not clear if Google is even the entity running the hotspot in Frisco.
Offtopic: Regarding your sig. You don't seem to understand what "freedom from religion" actually means. In essence, what the vast majority of nonbelievers are actually asking for is the ability to live their lives without having the government treat them as second-class citizens, and without having the government used to promote sectarian beliefs that they don't share.
Freedom from religion doesn't mean that Mormon missionaries can be arrested for trying to strike up a conversation with me, or that the guy with "THE END IS NIH!" scrawled on a piece of cardboard needs to be dragged off in chains. Nobody need be "silenced" to protect freedom from religion, except those who would use the government (which is supposed to represent all citizens) in order to promote their private agendas.
As a die-hard Emacs fan, I would suggest that you stay with vi. You've got lots of experience with it, it's always available, the number of fans it has would indicate that Emacs can't be all that superior, etc.
Having said that, if you're still interested in learning Emacs, the best way to do it is cold turkey. You start using Emacs for your daily text-editing activities. All of them. Make yourself a cheat sheet, and stick it on the side of your monitor for easy reference.
Just try to get the basics at first. Simple navigation, selecting regions, cutting, pasting, and the saving and loading of files should be enough to get you started. Once you're comfortable with those, add in searching, switching between buffers, "autocomplete", find-and-replace, etc. Only add a couple of new features at a time, and give yourself time to make them instinctive before moving on.
One last thing: Don't touch the mouse. This will help you in the long run, as it will be an incentive to learn to navigate around a buffer. Avoiding the mouse will soon feel very natural.
My biggest hurdle with Emacs was the fact that I'd never used the Ctrl key, and I kept hitting Shift instead.
In summary, don't "take a few months off" to learn Emacs in its own right. You'll learn it better by simply using it for whatever project you're already working on. Remember that the learning curve is always steep when compared with sticking to the status quo, but don't be surprised if, once you get up the mountain, you find that you're approximately as productive as you were in vi.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't a single dollar figure that separates "enough" from "too much". A lot depends on your needs, which vary from person to person. For example, some people have higher medical expenses than others.
However, I would say that if you could bank one year's salary, and use it to pay for basic food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care, and entertainment for the rest of your life, you're making "too much". Not "too much" as in, "You must immediately hand all your excess over to Fearless Leader", but as in, "We spent our country into the ground to build the society we have now, and you've obviously done very well in that society. When it comes time to pay back China, don't whine when we raise your tax rate well above what the guy making $30K is paying."
I think you're being unfair to the guy. Re-read his personal anecdote. There were things about the job that he loved, but he felt a lot of stress because he wanted to provide better service to the customers, and his employer was being an obstacle. So he sat down with somebody in charge, explained his troubles and what he would like to see happen, and got a promise that things would change. They didn't, and so the guy quit the job.
From his recitation, it sounds like he did all the right things. What should he have done differently?
You're right to urge everyone to start getting their finances under control. Not being able to leave a bad job for financial reasons is a terrible feeling. Tear up the credit cards. Share a car with your spouse, or better yet, bike. Cancel the cable. Do some clothes shopping at Goodwill. Trade in your favorite restaurant for Ramen (call them "Freedom Noodles" if it helps you keep the proper mindset). Eat less (it'll probably do you good). If you can't walk away from your current job *today* without dooming yourself, then money has made itself your master. It's time for a revolution.
1) It's hard to tell when fundamental research will have big payoffs, and whether those payoffs will be solely academic or also economic. Before we accept your question, you have to show that the research "doesn't actually matter".
2) Because the government needs to do things that "provide for the common defense," "promote the general welfare" and whatnot, and therefore the government needs to "forcibly confiscate" from somewhere.
3) Given #2, it's hard to feel sorry for somebody when they'll still have $11M/year to live on.
4) You're working under the simplistic idea that there is a perfect link between a person's economic value and their economic compensation. In the era of Carly-style CEOs, the evidence for the premise that wealth is earned isn't as strong as it might be.
In practice, probably not.
However, if people don't find a way to get rid of the crappy torrents, things could get bad for anyone who wants to distribute something that someone else doesn't want them distributing.
Okay, here's a doomsday scenario for you: Hacker releases virus. Virus causes infected boxen to publish craptorrents, masquerading as material hacker wants people not to download, and to register said craptorrents on major torrent sites. Suddenly, it becomes very difficult to figure out which files are legitimate, and people give up on Bittorrent.
If this means that people can't get their bootlegged copy of "The Wedding Crashers," or other material that people really oughtn't be downloading, that's one thing. But what if the person trying to crapflood the torrent sites wants to take out legitimate downloads?
Now, this technique doesn't have an effect on legitimate trackers, except making them hard to find on certain sites. So this technique should be seen more as an attack on sites that aggregate trackers, rather than on the Bittorrent protocol itself. They'll have to fight back, most likely with some sort of reputation system.
Violating copyright is illegal, yes. But sometimes the best way to get the law changed is to break it frequently and vigorously.
I'm not talking about civil disobedience, where people publicly commit the crime and publicly accept the consequences of their actions. I'm thinking more along the lines of Prohibition during the 1920's. Millions of Americans were sneaking around, distilling and drinking hooch, making life hard on the authorities. People generally weren't trying to "make a statement"; they just wanted booze. Eventually society decided that the harm caused by alcohol was less troublesome to deal with than the violent crime and disrespect for the law caused by the ban.
I think the prohibition on marijuana is going to end the same way: enforcement costs are simply too high to justify whatever benefit marijuana opponents claim the ban may have. Further, because people are out there riding the magic dragon, their experience acts as a counterbalance to the sort of nitwitted propaganda the government keeps putting out.
If everyone took the attitude you did, the government would never have to think, "Okay, if I try to ban this, how difficult will it be to enforce the ban?" The only question would be whether they can discard all the protest letters before they pile up in the halls of the Senate. Hint: They can.
I hear you. For the most part, I agree with you.
I'm not saying that the people who stayed made a rational decision. I'm sure that, given the hindsight we all have now, they would have been grabbing anything with four wheels to escape. But when faced with the prospect of abandoning the only home they had, without the security of knowing that they had somewhere to go and some way to get there, I can see why they might have stayed put and hoped for a miracle. Maybe they thought God would save them. I wish people would just figure out that God doesn't exist, or that he's a malicious rat-bastard. Then they could do a more reasonable risk analysis.
We really are a bunch of superstitious feces-flingers. I get that. We do stupid, incomprehensible things. My feeling is that, however stupid people were, they're still people. Survival of the fittest, right? Only not so much. Evolution got us here, and got us these big old brains. But these brains, they're big enough to learn to understand the programming, and even to defy it in some measure.
I want for us to stop quibbling about who deserves to live and who deserves to die. We're not smart enough to make that determination, and we never will be. So we may as well come to terms with our inability to make the distinction, and then set about trying to save us all. Even the stupid, the shiftless, the deranged.
I'm something of a genetic determinist. I don't believe that anybody can grow up to be President (even though the bar does seem to be set shockingly low at the moment), or that America is the land of boundless opportunity. The way I see it, the path of a person's life is determined 75% by his or her genes, and another 15% by his or her upbringing. Neither is under that person's control, so why spend time faulting them for who they are?
On some level, I think New Orleans was a failure of our collective humanity. I mean, those poor people have been crapped on their whole lives. Why in the world would they leave? It's not like we can fault them if they thought nobody outside the city would stop and give them a lift. We've never given them a reason to believe in us before. Our entire society takes what we can from them, offering minimum wage in return. We give them government assistance that isn't enough to live on, then revile them as "welfare queens" or whatever.
I'm sitting here on the verge of tears, just thinking about how thoroughly fucked we all are.
You're a good guy, and I respect you. You're probably right when you say that you would never stay in poverty for very long. Even in poverty, the genes you got from birth and the values you got from your upbringing would help you rise. But those are riches that not everybody has, and not everyone can be taught to have them. But I have to believe that, if we were all committed to the goal of making the best possible life for everyone, rather than inflicting pain on the down-and-out in order to weed out the undeserving, we might all be able to salvage this mess.
You know, you'd make one hell of a bartender. Thanks for your time.
So, the people killed and trapped by Hurricane Katrina were "ignorant fuckspittles?"
You clearly don't understand what it's like to be impoverished to the point where you can't get transportation. You clearly don't understand the fear that comes with being told to leave your home, and knowing you don't have anywhere to go. You clearly don't understand the average person's capacity for convincing themselves that things will be okay, even when more objective people recognize that it clearly won't.
Moreover, you clearly don't want to learn. You're happy in your ignorance, blaming the victims for their poverty, and blaming liberals for everything else.
This, I believe, is a textbook case of the pot casting the first stone at the kettle.
Here's my take on this thread.
First, regarding Modern Portfolio Theory: Most people are very prone towards the "If I don't know how to do it, it can't be hard" mentality. I certainly am.
Second, I think IT's mission is far different from that of the janitorial staff, the mail room, etc., and that it's makes more sense to give them some measure of control than your mockery would indicate. But I think it would make more sense to just give IT some measure of control over the policies governing computer use within the company, and then treat violations of those policies as seriously as any other violations. This seldom happens, because the people in charge of setting policies don't understand the computer system well enough to understand the sort of hassle that some violations cause.
For example, the IT department might be allowed to say, "You should be storing your files on the network, not your local hard drive. We will not assist you in recovering data not stored on the network." Given that policy, if the CIO loses his spreadsheet because he insists on keeping things local "so he can access them faster", any complaints and threats of termination should fall on deaf ears.
Another example: If an otherwise competent person keeps hosing the network by running suspicious executables, that person's manager should be willing to recognize the inconvenience this causes. It shouldn't be up to the IT department to fire the guy; it should be up to the guy's boss to recognize the overall effect the behavior is having on the company, and do whatever it takes (disciplinary action, new IT procedures, etc.) to ensure that the IT people can keep the infrastructure reliable.
As it stands at many companies, IT people take the blame when the users trash the network, even though the management won't give the IT people the tools or authority needed to keep them from trashing the network. Sometimes, it really is a case of people needing to do X with their computer, even though forbidding X would make administration much easier. IT folks can be insensitive to business needs. But other times it's just a case of management not wanting to be told how they can and cannot use their computers, and figuring administration can't be hard because they don't know how to do it.
It's tricky to strike a balance between those competing needs.
Distinction without a difference. If a person's race is one of the factors used to determine whether a person is searched, detained, arrested, etc., then it's racial profiling. Beyond that, it's just a matter of degrees.
"Driving while black" is exactly the same thing you're describing. Police think that young black males are more likely to commit crimes than the average person. So they arrest, detain, harass, and pull over young black males more frequently. According to your reasoning, this makes perfect sense because statistically, you should be eyeing those who are most likely to commit crimes.
The reason we shouldn't be doing racial profiling are threefold:
1) Pragmatic: Racial profiling focuses the attention of authorities on people and stereotypes that hold for those people. It's generally more effective to be focused on actions.
2) Moral: Every person, regardless of their membership in various categories like race, age, or gender, deserves to be treated as an individual under the law. This holds true regardless of whether a given stereotype has any statistical basis.
3) Pragmatic/Moral: Mistreating entire groups for the actions of individuals simply alienates members of the group, possibly making them more willing to become criminals, terrorists, or whatever.
Or at least learn to capitalize.
1) If this is the London police "doing their best", then terrorists probably don't need to be worried.
2) Criticism of the authorities may bring constructive change. Terrorists are less easily swayed by public criticism.
3) I'm pretty sure public sentiment is foresquare against terrorists, the killing of innocent people, etc. That's one bandwagon I don't need to jump on.
4) The actions of the terrorists cannot rob an entire society of its fundamental freedoms. The actions of the authorities can.
5) The authorities are supposed to represent the will of the people. When they abuse the power which we've entrusted to them, they deserve to be called on the carpet.
Good points, all. But the numbers I've seen thrown about say that a successful elevator could reduce the cost of putting material in orbit from $20,000/kg to $200/kg. As you say, that's probably overly optimistic. Still, think about the synergistic effects of such a massive drop in price. Lots of difficult aerospace problems become vastly simpler when "throw more hardware at it" becomes a viable option.
Shielding? No need to wait for a breakthrough in ultralight radiation protection. Bulk quantities of lead/water will do. Power source? No need to make the solar panels ten times more efficient. Just use ten times as many. R&D costs plummet.
There's nothing special about the target date 2020 (or 2018, or whatever). Under the current plan, we'll end up finding all these nifty mining spots, test out the mining technology, and suddenly realize that no amount of refinement of the current "chemically propelled booster" model is going to be sufficiently cheap to make mining profitable.
Finally, the Space Shuttle was supposed to be reusable, too. As in "a flight every month" reusable. I'm not buying that this plan will accomplish what it claims, I'm not convinced that America's commitment is sufficient to implement it, and I'm really leery of the pricetag given our current national debt. You've presented me with the choice between spending $100B on one plan, or $10B on a plan that has a 1% chance of successfully doing what the $100B plan would do. But this ignores two things. 1) We can't afford the $100B plan. 2) The $10B plan, if successful, would not just be a 10x improvement over the $100B plan, but would also reduce the cost of any subsequent initiatives by the same sort of magnitude.
So here's my plan: Throw a few billion at nanotube research and hope the little tubey things cooperate, build a replacement for the Space Shuttle, but do the mining-related Moon research with robots. I still see the current proposal as a waste of money, which will take NASA's focus away from the exceptional unmanned work it's doing right now. There was a time when I would have said we should do it all: manned, unmanned, whatever. Give NASA every penny it asks for, and twenty billion more besides. Our future lies in the heavens!
But now I'm convinced that we're spending money we really, really don't have, all so Bush can claim the title of "The president who took us back to the Moon." My hope for the space elevator borders on the rabid and irrational because I'm convinced that it's the only way to keep space exploration within the razor thin budgets we'll be facing for the forseeable future.
Erm, depends. Patches are distributed using a sort-of Bittorrent system. The game itself shouldn't be much harder.
I think the whole thing amounts to, "We'd prefer earning $50 on the guy who plays it for a week and then drops it, rather than $15."
Okay. Class balancing is hard work. They're workin' hard. We get it.
But regarding the end of your post: the PR department isn't doing its job, unless "its job" is "keep the developers from saying something embarrassing or stupid," rather than "help the public relate to this company, and give the company a good public face."
As you said, this is Slashdot. Home of the geek, the troll, the antisocial, the borderline psychopath, the epic flamewar, and the rare computer genius. We're not looking for bland chatter about how great a company Blizzard is. We want to hear about the nitty gritty of the development process. We want to hear about the failed practical joke that resulted in a server fire 72 hours before they went live*. We want to hear the developers tell about how this one algorithm tweak saved their collective butts when all seemed doomed. We want to be regaled with the tales of blood, sweat, and courage by the steely-eyed code warriors we all aspire to become. We want to slap them on their backs and buy them beer.
These "answers" show that the PR Department at Blizzard is either too incompetent or too risk averse to interface with its audience in a way that will speak to that audience. Unchain some developers from their desks, let them spill some of Blizzard's less critical secrets, and keep the cattle prod on hand if they breathe a word about The Goat Incident. But for grandma's sake, let us hear something that sounds genuine.
* Note: This is a hypothetical incident. Please, Blizzard, call off your demon lawyer horde.
Excuse me, but what exactly is so wrong with me not playing a part in the next moon mission? Are you nagging your wife about not pitching in? Calling up your parents and asking when you can expect that radiation shielding? If this thing ever gets off the ground, are you going to tell your neighbors, "If you didn't design one of the components on that rocket, shut up and let me bask in glory?" There are hundreds of millions of people in this country who aren't going to do anything for this project beyond paying their taxes, so I don't see how being one is a mark of shame, nor do I see how it disqualifies me from having an opinion.
Whatever this program promises today, we're not actually going to make a sustained, committed effort until the Chinese shame us into it. Barring that, we're going to take the same plodding, neglectful approach to the proposed moon base that we took to the ISS. Like the ISS, it will be staffed with precisely as many people as it takes to perform maintenance on it. Like the ISS, only token effort will be spent on the basic research that is supposed to be its reason for existing.
The only advantage I see for having this new program is the fact that it will increase the demand for engineers, and scientists in the aerospace field, which will be vital to any future space exploration initiatives. But since the program will be drawing resources away from current, successful NASA projects, (NASA doesn't actually get a budget increase for doing this), I don't see this making a huge difference.
Finally, it really bugs me that Bush wants credit for bold, innovative plans even as he ensures that this is the last expensive government program the U.S. will ever be able to afford.
We've thrown billions at far less promising technologies than the Space Elevator before.
You misunderstand me. I wasn't claiming that a space elevator should be NASA's replacement for the Space Shuttle. All I was saying was that, in some endeavors, the most efficient way to accomplish a big task is to wait for the technology to catch up with your ambitions.
For example, there is talk of going back to the Moon. Why the pick for? Do we want to collect some more moon rocks? Or maybe we want to give this generation's astronauts the chance to hit golf balls a long, long way. Given the current costs of moving material into space, and our current level of commitment to the space program, we're certainly not going to be committing to a sustained human presence on the Moon.
So what I'm proposing is, rather than embarking on the current $100B corporate welfare program^W^W^W plan to put a man on the Moon by 2018 (using today's technology), we put some of that money into basic materials research. If it pans out, we might get to the Moon within a few years of the target date, at a much lower cost, and with the capacity needed to stay there without ruining the country financially.
There is no denying that we need a replacement for the Space Shuttle, and as quickly as possible. I'm not suggesting that we hold up that program while we wait for the technology to mature (though if your goal is to make me sound stupid, I can certainly see why you'd want to leave the impression that I did). What I'm saying is that using a relatively small amount of money to pursue a promising technology makes more sense than investing tens of billions building lots of our current technologies, to pull off a one-time stunt.
No, the moderation system isn't the sort of preference system the article is describing. If they did have that sort of system, the Microsoft zealots would see all the pro-MS posts at +5 and the Linux crowd would (fail to) see them at -1. The two groups would share the same space, but be mostly unaware of each others' existence.
What you're seeing is a different sort of selection, one done by individuals rather than by automation. Slashdot's fans tend to have certain biases, so those who share those biases are more likely to enjoy being here. Those who don't? Well, it's a big Internet out there, so most of them just find someplace more condusive to their ideas.
I think there's still a pretty wide range of opinions here, and well-researched, well-written posts get modded up regardless of the opinion being expressed. The biases only really show up when people bluntly state their opinion without justifying them properly. That's when people are likely to break out the -1, Disagree mod.
On reading the post you cited, I have to say that its score is actually good evidence that the moderation system is working as intended.
Wow.
:)
You've obviously put more thought into this than I have.
I've always thought they should consider a variation on the space elevator, where the top was in LEO, and the bottom hung down into the atmosphere. To get things to the top, you simply fly something up high enough that it can latch onto the bottom. Then when you get to the top, you wait for a second one to swing by and take you higher.
It would be like Jungle Hunt, but without the alligators.
I once read an interesting article on cluster computing, which basically said that the fastest and cheapest way to solve any truly big computational problem was, "Wait a few years before buying the cluster." Given the rates at which prices for storage, processing, and networking were plummeting, a problem that would take eight years to solve today could be solvable in four years two years out, and in two years two years from now. So by putting it off for two years, you'd shave two years off the project.
The current plan doesn't get us to the moon until 2018 anyways, and without a cheap way to keep things flowing between here and the moon, the chance of a sustained human presence is nil. So we could spend $100B building basically the same propulsion-based solutions we've always been building, or we could spend a much smaller sum on fundamental materials research.
I don't see it as a gamble, because without a drastically cheaper way to get into space, we'll just retrace the journeys of the Apollo missions. Then the whole nation will kick back, pop open a beer, mutter "Yep, still got it," and wait to do it all over again in 2050.
Count me in with the pixie dusters.
That is an irresponsible slur that tarnishes the reputations of lots and lots of innocent people.
You have to be management before you start eating babies.
Given that Linux is a multi-user system, the inability to trash data belonging to other people is a not-inconsequential advantage. Even "normal" people often have spouses and children, who should each have their own account.
However, given that most people don't use more than a tiny fraction of their hard drives, it seems like Linux should come with some utility that periodically makes a read-only copy of users' home directories. I know such things exist (in my CS department, everyone has a ~/.snapshot directory that has weekly, daily, and hourly backups), but I haven't found the script that does it.
Quick and easy backup utilities would be a real selling point for potential Linux home users.
$69 for Dragon Warrior II. What a dumb twelve year old I was. After saving up the whole summer for that game, damned straight I had an emotional investment in it.
I think you're being silly. But I honestly thought Zork:Nemesis was a nice mix of plot and eye-candy. Forbidden love, betrayal, vengeance, whatnot.
The Myst theme park is a non-starter, because the people in charge of creating it would make people solve intricate puzzles before they could use the restroom, flushing the urinals in the proper sequence would open up the concession stand outside, and an evil monster would block your exit until you washed your hands.
Lots of people here seem to misunderstand the service that Google is currently offering. As far as I understand, they are merely offering their own VPN, instead of full-blown WiFi hotspots. Those may be in the future, but at the moment it's not clear if Google is even the entity running the hotspot in Frisco.
Offtopic: Regarding your sig. You don't seem to understand what "freedom from religion" actually means. In essence, what the vast majority of nonbelievers are actually asking for is the ability to live their lives without having the government treat them as second-class citizens, and without having the government used to promote sectarian beliefs that they don't share.
Freedom from religion doesn't mean that Mormon missionaries can be arrested for trying to strike up a conversation with me, or that the guy with "THE END IS NIH!" scrawled on a piece of cardboard needs to be dragged off in chains. Nobody need be "silenced" to protect freedom from religion, except those who would use the government (which is supposed to represent all citizens) in order to promote their private agendas.
As a die-hard Emacs fan, I would suggest that you stay with vi. You've got lots of experience with it, it's always available, the number of fans it has would indicate that Emacs can't be all that superior, etc.
Having said that, if you're still interested in learning Emacs, the best way to do it is cold turkey. You start using Emacs for your daily text-editing activities. All of them. Make yourself a cheat sheet, and stick it on the side of your monitor for easy reference.
Just try to get the basics at first. Simple navigation, selecting regions, cutting, pasting, and the saving and loading of files should be enough to get you started. Once you're comfortable with those, add in searching, switching between buffers, "autocomplete", find-and-replace, etc. Only add a couple of new features at a time, and give yourself time to make them instinctive before moving on.
One last thing: Don't touch the mouse. This will help you in the long run, as it will be an incentive to learn to navigate around a buffer. Avoiding the mouse will soon feel very natural.
My biggest hurdle with Emacs was the fact that I'd never used the Ctrl key, and I kept hitting Shift instead.
In summary, don't "take a few months off" to learn Emacs in its own right. You'll learn it better by simply using it for whatever project you're already working on. Remember that the learning curve is always steep when compared with sticking to the status quo, but don't be surprised if, once you get up the mountain, you find that you're approximately as productive as you were in vi.