science in late 18th and early 19th centuries were a pastime for aristocracy and upper middle class citizens. chemistry experiments were done in bedroom. it was an era of scientific curiosity and amateurship. this is an ideal circumstance for discoveries, for creativity and curiosity is never stifled by anything.
as time passed, governments realized that scientific edge actually meant power. research was taken under government control, through universities or through laws that prevented certain stuff or regulations. you cant experiment with advanced chemicals in your backyard no more. Please. Do you really think there's much you could discover in your backyard with "advanced chemicals"? What are "advanced chemicals" anyway? Seriously, this is where the "low hanging fruit" argument comes in. I doubt you could name a single valid line of inquiry in the field of chemistry that hasn't been experimented to death and published about to within an inch of its life that doesn't involve any piece of equipment more complex than glassware and burners. We've simply passed the point where a diddling amateur with a jar of sulfuric acid and a few rocks can discover anything we don't already know. It's not the government "stifling our creativity", it's the natural progression of knowledge. As new fields open up, they are initially explored by amateurs, who discover the basics, after which further discoveries become increasingly more expensive and difficult. In the 19th and early 20th century it was chemistry and mechanics. Building on that, the late 20th was electronics. Currently we are in the middle of the "amateur computer software" renaissance, building on the well-understood field of electronics. In time, the cutting edge of that too will become the realm of well-financed researchers with advanced equipment, and the next frontier will open up.
Basically, you just don't know what you're talking about because you have no grasp of the history of science and technology.
conservatives hat a man who spoke out against the status quo and against corporatism. Can you translate this into English for me?
If you want to understand why certain people seem to hate Bucky with an unreasonable passion, read Critical Path. Alternately, you can read Critical Path and discover that Bucky Fuller was a shameless self-promoter who liked to create nonsense words via hyphenation. Seriously, the man nearly dislocates his arm patting himself on the back for single-handedly changing the world... but only when he's not making bizarre claims, like that the Soviets were developing a submarine aircraft carrier, or that dolphins evolved from maritime humans in Indonesia.
I'd say that enthusiasm, unconventional thinking, salesmanship, and a reach to exceed one's grasp are traits that enginners should develop, not disparage.
I never disparaged them. I just said that they do not an engineer make. And Fuller was no engineer.
I have never quite
understood Woz worship. No doubt he was a very capable engineer. But
given the particular circumstances that he was in, it seems to me he was
more or less just doing his "job"...
There is nothing in particular that I see
stands out as so amazingly brilliant and insightful...
The 6502 processor was used by many, many
projects across industry. See, that's the problem with recognizing engineering genius. People attribute engineering genius to B.Fuller simply because he chanced upon the truncated icosahedron shape--- likely due simply to its being a near-enough analog of a sphere in wireframe--- which turned out to have some interesting structural characteristics, none of which the university dropout Fuller anticipated.
Conversely, people look at the Apple I and ][ and say "big deal; there were a lot of successful small home computers". This is because they, as laymen, just don't have the engineering chops to appreciate what the original Apple line represents. Those with the engineering background to understand, generally have not examined any of his work in detail. First, Woz largely designed the whole thing--- hardware, firmware, and software--- by himself, in a garage. All those other successful computers were team efforts, backed by sizable corporate resources. Second, the designs are practically works of art. Unless you've had to draw up multi-layer circuit schematics yourself, you really can't appreciate the sheer technical genius behind something like the Apple Disk ][ circuit board. Apparently, the "reduced IC count" circuit design he came up with for the Breakout arcade machine was so breathtakingly elegant and intricate that Atari couldn't manufacture it, and had to resort to a partial implementation that used more ICs.
Granted, Woz never did anything that was as big as the original Apple stuff after that, but really, that's enough! Woz is an engineer's engineer. His golden age was the birth of the personal computer, and few of that time were his equal.
Judging by Woz-worship standards, there were probably many features of
my design that might be considered innovative and brilliant Maybe. Perhaps you are also an engineering genius. The difference is, we don't have several million examples of your design to look at and admire. Don't take my word for it. Pick up a Disk ][ unit off eBay and judge for yourself. If you haven't, you really don't know what the "Woz worship standards" are.
but I
didn't think of them that way; I was only doing my job, part of which
was to use various tricks and designs to minimize cost. Well yeah, that's pretty much engineering in a nutshell. It's all a matter of degree, isn't it. Would it have occurred to you to create a soft-sector alignment system for the floppy disk when everyone else was using a complex hard-sector synchronization circuit that watched that hole punched near the center of the disk? Have a look at the Disk ][ circuit board and tell me you could design a similar circuit using no feedthroughs. I consider myself a pretty clever engineer too, but I know I couldn't.
Wonder what he might have done had he finished his studies at college? He wouldn't have been nearly as successful. It's difficult to maintain your wild flights of fancy on the face of education. When you don't know nuthin', anything seems possible. In fact, the less someone knows, the more likely they are to treat a given impossibility as trivial to accomplish. No, maintaining your "inner dreamer" is orders of magnitude harder when you truly understand the limitations of the real world. Those few that can--- Steve Wozniak comes to mind--- are the true precious gems of society. Gas bags like Bucky Fuller are just a circus sideshow.
You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.
Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight, I'd say it's more likely the engineering "talent" behind its design was chance, in that he happened to discover an interesting 3D geometric pattern. He had no particular knack for engineering. After that first dome collapsed, he tried to claim he intentionally built it too weakly, in order to see where it would fail. No one present was convinced. He imagined his "dymaxion car" would be able to cross any terrain, climb any mountain, and eventually even fly. He had no idea how this would happen, nor did he seem to care--- because he was a "visionary", not an engineer. The guy invented his own map geometry that avoided the use of pi because he found the indeterminate nature of pi "unsatisfying". A distaste for the facts of mathematics is not a trait found in engineers. No, he wasn't an engineer by any stretch of the definition of the word. The guy was a salesman, and what he sold was enthusiasm. He made most of his money on the lecture circuit, which he then blew on his harebrained "Dymaxion" crap, which lost money but generated "buzz", which drew people to his lectures. Good work if you can get it, but he was no engineer.
R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
Whoever modded the above "flamebait" has obviously never tried to read Critical Path.... or if they have, they're overly impressed with hyphenated nonsense words.
Sounds a bit like Tesla...Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
I'd say that comparison is a little unfair to Tesla. Tesla seems nutty, but largely because he was exploring and defining the cutting edge of the science of electricity. Conversely, Fuller seems nutty simply because he was a freakin' nut.
Tip for you to save more space, though- get rid of the Google bar and just set up a search shortcut. That wouldn't "save space", as there'd still be just the one bar before and after. Getting rid of the google search box would only "make more room". He has plenty of room for the search box, and made no claims of needing any additional room. Your suggestion is pointless.
Opera's interface is every bit as customisable if not more so. False. I challenge you to put a "back" button next to the Help menu on the menu bar, then. You can do it in IE. You can do it in Firefox. Opera forces that space after Help to be waste.
The first thing you notice when you launch Opera 9.5 is that it occupies less desktop real estate than Firefox 3, with less toolbar space and smaller borders, giving you more room to view pages. The thing I like about Firefox is how changeable it is:
Screenshot
I've been organizing the bars like that since I started using FF, and I find it makes for much better use of that space than just a gray, blank area. I was doing that with IE before I discovered Firefox, and was overjoyed when firefox decided to add that feature. A friend of mine suggested Opera a few years ago, and I was highly annoyed at how it made no provision for using that "dead space" after Help. I see they still don't allow it. The Opera devs apparently don't like any idea they didn't come up with themselves. And that quote above? What a crock! What idiot uses the toolbar layout as it comes out of the installer? Anyone with half a brain CUSTOMIZES.
Don't get me wrong here, I love FF, but there's no denying that some of their "latest greatest" features are ripped straight from Opera. So what you're saying is that the Firefox devs are keen observers of what constitutes good interface design and cool features, and add any such things that they see in other products to Firefox, while the Opera devs just turn up their noses at any feature they didn't come up with? That's fucking stupid. "Copying" is how all the best stuff from everyone gets put together into better and better products. Opera devs might do well to learn that. I tried opera once two or three versions ago. I was annoyed that I couldn't cram the Home-Reload-Back buttons, URL bar, and google search box onto the same line with the "File Edit View... Help" menus. This is a very useful capability on older laptops with small screens. I just now installed 9.5, and guess what: you still can't use that dead space between "Help" and the right edge of the screen. IE was the first to allow that. Firefox wisely "copied" IE to allow the same. What did the Opera guys do? Nothing. They apparently don't like anything they didn't come up with. Fuck them. Fuck bitch-whining about "copying". Give us the fucking features and make the product better.
* Reduced code complexity - get rid of cases where code has to look for sub-accounts within account. When you forget that account sometimes is 1 account, sometimes many accounts, bugs creep in. How the heck does software "forget"? Or are you saying it's too hard for a programmer to have a freakin' integer variable that called (say) CurrentSubqueue that lets him select the appropriate queue? You obviously don't program. This is trivial stuff. Their code may be a nightmare, but "remembering" which queue is being referenced is a no brainer.
It must be awful for reporting and data mining. You're suggesting it's easier to get accurate and meaningful data about three people when they're all randomly pulling movies from the same queue than it is when they all have individual queues? You're completely daft.
their business problems are not MY problems. Cripes, man, no one claimed it was your problem--- they're just disputing your assertion that a 24hr+ delay between receipt and mailout is intentional throttling.
Americans took out over 90% of the Native Americans they came across. That's stretching the definition of genocide. Most of those 90% died of diseases they had no defense to, and none of those were intentionally* spread. Outside of a few shitty but fairly inconsequential incidents, mostly what the US did was push the them around the country.
* don't bother bringing up the "smallpox blankets" fairy tale--- it has been thoroughly debunked and its fabricator is a white man who falsely claims to be native american.
Does this mean you can't win wars by giving the enemy a lollipop?
No, but if the overthrow of the popularly elected democratic government in Iran way back when is any indication, it does suggest that you can avoid wars by staying out of other people's business. Put another way, getting out of the habit of pissing people off might get you your own lollipop. My god, what fucking moron mods rated this "insightful"? You didn't even read the content of your own damn links. If you had, you might've found the truth: that Mossadeq had dissolved the parliament and demanded control of the military--- both unconstitutional acts for the Prime Minister of Iran's constitutional monarchy. That Mossadeq's "democratic" election was after he unconstitutionally abolished the secret ballot. That Mossadeq "won" with 99.4% of the vote--- a margin only achievable via a combination of ballot stuffing and polling place intimidation (no more secret ballot = "you SURE you don't want to put your ballot in the Mossadeq box, mister Hassan with three children?"). That Mossadeq was a power-hungry asshat trying to declare himself dictator and usurp the powers of the head of state: Shah Pahlavi, legitimate head of the constitutional monarchy and last in a continuous line of Shahs going back 2500 years.
You also might have noticed that Operation Ajax, for all its billing as a "coup", consisted of little more than handing out walking around money to anti-Mossadeq demonstrators and cajoling the Shah into exercising his legitimate powers as head of state and removing a would-be dictator from the Prime Minister's chair.
Go learn some actual history next time, instead of parroting what amounts to an international urban legend spread by ignorant/biased journalists and college professors.
Yes, upper mgmt decides for a strategy but usually *after* consulting with the tacticians whether that strategy is viable at all. Hah! You've obviously never been in the Army...
A strategy of patrolling the roads of Baghdad in unarmored HMMWV's under the absurd tactical presumption of "speed will be our armor" comes to mind...
You didn't like it when a bunch of leftist nationalists got democratically elected in Iran, so you overthrew the democratically elected government and put a puppet dictator in his place. Go read some history, ignoramus. Shah Pahlavi was the legitimate head of the constitutional monarchy of Iran. He took the throne in 1941 (six years before there even was a CIA) and was the last in a continuous monarchy going back 2500 years. What the CIA did was cajole the Shah into exercising his legitimate power as head of state by removing Mossadeq. Mossadeq was demanding control of the army and had dissolved the parliament, both of these being constitutionally prohibited to the PM. Furthermore, his final "democratic" election came only after he (again unconstitutionally) suspended the guarantee of the secret ballot in elections and won with 99.4% of the vote. Numbers like that only come from having thugs watching the ballot box taking note of who votes "red" and who votes "blue". Really, all the CIA did was back the legitimate asshat who was on their side against a power-grubbing asshat who wanted to name himself dictator.
Next time, try not to get your history third hand from lefty idiots with an axe to grind and a willingness to believe anything they hear.
Shrink, eh. Read up your own post and look in the mirror sometime. wow. stunning rebuttal. I particularly like the multiple bullet-pointed arguments. Your closing argument was also breathtaking.
I think most of special forces people are going to work for companies like Blackwater now... Being a mercenary used to be illegal but now its a very respectably multinational growth industry and a career. If you don't mind living in places like Iraq and a little danger I think Blackwater kind of rocks, you are accountable to almost no one for you actions and can make a lot of money. You can in fact shoot people at random and usually get away with it. You're confusing Special Forces with meatballs like Rangers. It's largely the conventional combat arms--- infantry, marines, Rangers, etc--- that go into Blackwater. Likewise, it's generally jerk-ass grunts and jarheads that like to shoot people at random*. Unconventional warfare guys like Special Forces aren't the kind of people who are motivated by a big paycheck and a free-fire permit.
* don't get me started on the macho bullshit the Marine Corps puts in those guys' heads. Notice how it's usually Marines who bust into a house and gun down a random family in "retaliation" for an ambush. The bizarro training strategy of the USMC of "discipline + aggression" is fucking stupid. I met plenty of bastards in the Army infantry, but nowhere did I see such a concentration of hotheaded asshats looking for a fight as I have in the USMC. Perhaps it's part of their inferiority-driven superiority complex that stems from being the Navy's little pet army that should never have been allowed to exist. They're a wasteful duplication of effort to cover a narrow niche the Army could do just as well--- Normandy, anyone?--- if only the petty, parochial actions of Adm Forrestal in WW2 could be undone and the Army sent back to sea with the Navy... ...but again I rant...
The amount of training per qualified special forces soldier is around 100k USD in year 2000 dollars. Hah. That might cover the cost of running 'em through the Q course, but the Q course is only their "basic" training. The cost of running me through intelligence training and language training approached a half million--- in 1987 dollars--- and I went through with more than a few SF guys.
many of those special forces folks come back and become your local police. Actually, no they don't. An energetic, enthusiastic polyglot who can think on his feet and lead people more often than not ends up in business.
Police departments and many security firms have a preference for ex-military. Being a policeman is not intellectual work. It attracts infantrymen, armor crewmen, MP's (of course), and the like. People without a lot of smarts, but lots of tolerance for rules. People who think driving around in a car all day eating donuts sounds like a fulfilling career. Haven't you ever watched the crime shows on A&E? The homicide investigators--- supposedly the cream of the cop crop--- still sound like illiterate trolls, using big words in the wrong places and making crass errors of logic, if not outright contradicting themselves, when discussing criminal investigations.
No, these are not Special Forces guys. SF guys tend to be much more thoughtful and intelligent than you'd expect. SF isn't a job for mindless thugs. It's very demanding both physically and mentally.
This is wrong. The guerrilla movement in Vietnam was roused against the French, which was the ruling class. America became involved after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. We weren't fighting against the existing governments peasants, we were fighting against peasants who were fighting the existing government's soldiers. Arguably we came in when we left Ho Chi Minh (an ally in WW2) hanging in the breeze because that shitbag deGaulle threatened to pull out of NATO unless we supported his attempt to reestablish French rule over her former colony of French Indochina(Vietnam). Ho Chi Minh, while a communist, was also a great admirer of the US founding fathers and saw his country's struggle for independence from France as very similar. I would have to agree with him, up to the point where the hardcore Stalinists pushed the elderly Ho aside and started the purges...
Oh and don't worry, despite the stupidity of accepting this "on sight", it will be proven a fake. Just give it enough time. Sorry man, it's real. This is essentially the same manual I read back in the late 80's when I was first assigned as an intelligence analyst in support of special operations (much better typesetting in this version though). The sheer weight of acronyms in this thing essentially proves its reality. That said, I don't see what the big deal is. It reads much like any other dry military field manual. It doesn't even cover some of the real fun stuff, like the proper way to blow up railroad tracks, or build a fougasse (I still have a stack of manuals for that stuff in my garage). There's no gory details on how to train "death squads" to terrorize people--- it's just standard "how to turn a bunch of yokels into an effective fighting force" stuff. It's what Special Forces does.
I say it's a fake. No, it's real. You've obviously never been in the military. Most of the Army field manuals look like they were typeset in the 40's or 50's. The reason for this is that the style guides for field manuals were set down back in the 40's and they haven't changed since. This is the government. It probably takes an act of congress to change the allowable size of the font one point, and there'd be opposition from forty congressmen who have the official government 12pt Courier Type manufacturing businesses in their districts. And don't even THINK of trying to oppose the Bad Line Drawing Plate Engravers Lobby to get quality diagrams and artwork.
FM layout quality is a running joke in the military. Seriously, those things make the layout and art quality of GURPS books look good.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, you just don't know what you're talking about because you have no grasp of the history of science and technology.
I'd say that enthusiasm, unconventional thinking, salesmanship, and a reach to exceed one's grasp are traits that enginners should develop, not disparage.
I never disparaged them. I just said that they do not an engineer make. And Fuller was no engineer.Conversely, people look at the Apple I and ][ and say "big deal; there were a lot of successful small home computers". This is because they, as laymen, just don't have the engineering chops to appreciate what the original Apple line represents. Those with the engineering background to understand, generally have not examined any of his work in detail. First, Woz largely designed the whole thing--- hardware, firmware, and software--- by himself, in a garage. All those other successful computers were team efforts, backed by sizable corporate resources. Second, the designs are practically works of art. Unless you've had to draw up multi-layer circuit schematics yourself, you really can't appreciate the sheer technical genius behind something like the Apple Disk ][ circuit board. Apparently, the "reduced IC count" circuit design he came up with for the Breakout arcade machine was so breathtakingly elegant and intricate that Atari couldn't manufacture it, and had to resort to a partial implementation that used more ICs.
Granted, Woz never did anything that was as big as the original Apple stuff after that, but really, that's enough! Woz is an engineer's engineer. His golden age was the birth of the personal computer, and few of that time were his equal. Judging by Woz-worship standards, there were probably many features of my design that might be considered innovative and brilliant Maybe. Perhaps you are also an engineering genius. The difference is, we don't have several million examples of your design to look at and admire. Don't take my word for it. Pick up a Disk ][ unit off eBay and judge for yourself. If you haven't, you really don't know what the "Woz worship standards" are. but I didn't think of them that way; I was only doing my job, part of which was to use various tricks and designs to minimize cost. Well yeah, that's pretty much engineering in a nutshell. It's all a matter of degree, isn't it. Would it have occurred to you to create a soft-sector alignment system for the floppy disk when everyone else was using a complex hard-sector synchronization circuit that watched that hole punched near the center of the disk? Have a look at the Disk ][ circuit board and tell me you could design a similar circuit using no feedthroughs. I consider myself a pretty clever engineer too, but I know I couldn't.
Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight, I'd say it's more likely the engineering "talent" behind its design was chance, in that he happened to discover an interesting 3D geometric pattern. He had no particular knack for engineering. After that first dome collapsed, he tried to claim he intentionally built it too weakly, in order to see where it would fail. No one present was convinced. He imagined his "dymaxion car" would be able to cross any terrain, climb any mountain, and eventually even fly. He had no idea how this would happen, nor did he seem to care--- because he was a "visionary", not an engineer. The guy invented his own map geometry that avoided the use of pi because he found the indeterminate nature of pi "unsatisfying". A distaste for the facts of mathematics is not a trait found in engineers. No, he wasn't an engineer by any stretch of the definition of the word. The guy was a salesman, and what he sold was enthusiasm. He made most of his money on the lecture circuit, which he then blew on his harebrained "Dymaxion" crap, which lost money but generated "buzz", which drew people to his lectures. Good work if you can get it, but he was no engineer.R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
Whoever modded the above "flamebait" has obviously never tried to read Critical Path.... or if they have, they're overly impressed with hyphenated nonsense words.Sounds a bit like Tesla...Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
I'd say that comparison is a little unfair to Tesla. Tesla seems nutty, but largely because he was exploring and defining the cutting edge of the science of electricity. Conversely, Fuller seems nutty simply because he was a freakin' nut.It must be awful for reporting and data mining. You're suggesting it's easier to get accurate and meaningful data about three people when they're all randomly pulling movies from the same queue than it is when they all have individual queues? You're completely daft.
* don't bother bringing up the "smallpox blankets" fairy tale--- it has been thoroughly debunked and its fabricator is a white man who falsely claims to be native american.
You also might have noticed that Operation Ajax, for all its billing as a "coup", consisted of little more than handing out walking around money to anti-Mossadeq demonstrators and cajoling the Shah into exercising his legitimate powers as head of state and removing a would-be dictator from the Prime Minister's chair.
Go learn some actual history next time, instead of parroting what amounts to an international urban legend spread by ignorant/biased journalists and college professors.
A strategy of patrolling the roads of Baghdad in unarmored HMMWV's under the absurd tactical presumption of "speed will be our armor" comes to mind...
Next time, try not to get your history third hand from lefty idiots with an axe to grind and a willingness to believe anything they hear.
tard
* don't get me started on the macho bullshit the Marine Corps puts in those guys' heads. Notice how it's usually Marines who bust into a house and gun down a random family in "retaliation" for an ambush. The bizarro training strategy of the USMC of "discipline + aggression" is fucking stupid. I met plenty of bastards in the Army infantry, but nowhere did I see such a concentration of hotheaded asshats looking for a fight as I have in the USMC. Perhaps it's part of their inferiority-driven superiority complex that stems from being the Navy's little pet army that should never have been allowed to exist. They're a wasteful duplication of effort to cover a narrow niche the Army could do just as well--- Normandy, anyone?--- if only the petty, parochial actions of Adm Forrestal in WW2 could be undone and the Army sent back to sea with the Navy...
No, these are not Special Forces guys. SF guys tend to be much more thoughtful and intelligent than you'd expect. SF isn't a job for mindless thugs. It's very demanding both physically and mentally.
FM layout quality is a running joke in the military. Seriously, those things make the layout and art quality of GURPS books look good.