Yeah, and well rehearsed "duck face" poses used whenever a camera comes out. Really, if this becomes the common theme for women, I'd be hanging on to heterosexuality by my finger nails.
FileMaker Pro and Excel cover the bulk of small-scale tools and automation needs in the office. AppleScript and Automator bind them together to be able to build some pretty good systems. You may be romanticizing the old days. Just as now, most people had neither the ability nor the inclination to make things easier. HyperCard was powerful and relatively accessible. Let's not kid ourselves though that the average number cruncher or sales guy in an office is going to fire it up and quickly churn-out a CRM system that isn't a piece of shit?
It's mostly pot-luck if someone in the office has a hacker mentality or even enough of an interest to begin coding/scripting. Given how computing in general has changed, I'd suspect that a smaller percentage of people are coming in to today's workforce with a hacker mentality. How many people below the age of 30 would have begun with computers that dropped them straight in to BASIC? How many computer magazines these days publish code listings, compared to in the 80s?
I'd certainly agree that they lack a sense of humor when their sensibilities are being offended or challenged, and that's certainly not restricted to religious people. Strong emotional attachments lead lead to protective outlooks. Someone with a severely handicapped daughter is perhaps less likely to laugh at Down Syndrome jokes than someone who has never had to deal with this horrible condition. One man's solemn and ritualistic religious service is another man's LARP session run by obsessively compulsive bead-fondlers.
That's what I want to know. I can see two "positive outcomes" he could have hoped for.
1) After signing his employment contract with Marriott he would dismantle his backdoors in their systems and Marriott would obviously be stuck with him because the contract.
2) He would keep his backdoors in place, to use as leverage should Marriott attempt to fire him or change the brand of coffee in the office to one that is not to his liking.
No-one above the age of six should consider his plan to be anything but hopeless lunacy.
If society is going to give you money, why should you not be required to do something for it? If you sweep a sidewalk, remove graffiti, or something, you are contributing to your society. Additionally, this keeps the person in the habit of working - of getting up in the morning, leaving the house, and doing something.
Keeping habits is a pretty key point there. Whether it's college courses or work, it's preferable to allowing people to slip in to the demographic that has been so long out of the workforce (or never been in it to begin with) that they become unemployable. A friend was headed this way, adopting a nocturnal existence and being content to live on welfare. He thankfully picked-up college and got back in to regular routines.
The work should not be intentionally demeaning - this isn't a chain gang. The intention here must be to help people back in to employment. Of course some work may be seen as demeaning, but who hasn't worked a shitty job at some point for the sake of having a job?
We don't need informed comments. What Slashdot needs is confident and angry action! That's how American politics works, so if it's good enough for Jesus and Gingrich it sure as Hell is good enough for Slashdot.
It's the "Islamic Republic" of Pakistan. You expect anything sensible to come out of a country that's happy to be subservient to the arabs' plagiarized and highly retarded excuse for a religion?
Pakistan would be little more than an amusing punchline to many jokes if it weren't eye-to-eye with India, playing stupid fucking war games with a country that is seemingly doing its best to be as retarded as Pakistan. Imagine Kansas with nuclear weapons, it's as scary as that.
You've just illustrated the point: you're so distracted by the gay marriage issue that you've missed the fact that the government is destroying all our other civil liberties (free speech, due process, no illegal search and seizure, etc.)!
Mr Internet man. Is there an official website somewhere with a list of the "real" civil liberties we should be demanding?
Yes, doctors ejaculate at the thought of a technology that would cause increased health risks in the population. I don't think they really need to make us ill. Shifting demographics and greater emphasis on regular screening and preventative medicine kind of pays quite well enough without them wishing for people to be struck down by "frankenfoods". You, sir, are an arse
What does gay marriage or the lack thereof actually do? Nothing at all. Which is why politicians love it so.
No great importance? Sure, if you've no appreciation for the civil liberties and legal issues caused by this anachronistic and inequitable prohibition.
Anecdotal evidence is proof of nothing, you surely know better than that. As for hockey, tell us how many black kids grow up with a hockey stick in their hands vs. a basketball? I can tell you plenty of white kids in the areas of Ontario and Michigan (where I grew up) had them. Does that make it racist?...we may have all been born the same, but we were raised in different cultures, and that doesn't make it racist.
You white people aren't very good at spotting humor, are you?
Fifty years it was considered constitutional to have laws forbidding marriages between blacks and white. Anyone arguing for a return to sterner times really needs to look at worldwide crime rates and explain why crime in the western world has generally been in decline for quite some time now - despite "trendy" methods of disciplining children and adults.
So, what's the message there? Beat children a little bit and tell them that a severe beating is that beating multiplied by ten? Yes, we all know some dicks. Whether we want to live in a society that allows these people to be flogged is a question that requires an argument more substantial than an appeal to tradition.
I see physical violence as being similar to honking the horn in a car. It should only be used to avert an immediate danger: If a child is about to touch a red hot stove, slapping their hand away makes sense. If a driver is about to cut across your lane, oblivious to the presence of your car, honking the horn may prevent an accident. Honking the horn as punishment, just like with beating a child, is more about punishment than an ernest attempt to teach a lesson. How often do we see people honking their horn as a warning? Most of the time I see it used to deliver a loud "fuck you!" With spankings, how often are they done in a calm and dispassionate manner? Do parents first talk to the child so they understand what is about to happen and why, or are they more likely to just reach for the belt and begin thrashing away? Are there not better ways of teaching a lesson - such as discussing actions and the denial of privileges?
It's really a double-edged knife. My parents went through a messy divorce, which was probably one of the reasons I ended-up spending a lot of my childhood hidden away in my room, playing around with computers. It has upsides and downsides.
It left me with somewhat stunted social skills, and difficulties in forming relationships. Those have improved, but I don't think they'll ever be as good as they should be. The short attention-span and habit of obsessing with a task were lessened when I took the time to understand how they were affecting my life. In work, I tend to occupy a position somewhere between visionary and mad scientist. I'm very good an analyzing problems and building processes and tools to fix them. The communication issues remain because I don't always realize how my way of thinking gives the wrong impression. i.e. a large staff meeting is not always the best time to lurch in to a very theoretical thought process. Colleagues are entertained though when I get that giddy schoolboy look on my face as I begin describing how x problem can be solved, and how it'll give us x results while saving x amount of money.
I don't think I'd like to have changed things back then. I would however wish that I'd become more self-aware earlier in life. I would have screwed around fewer people with my selfish and obsessive behavior - myself included. I would have had more success earlier in my career if I'd better understood how to present my ideas to people.
I completely agree that technology should not be a babysitter. Technology, like anything else, should complement life, not rule it. Books are even more important than before; the Internet is not a place where an unsupervised child can be expected to learn reading comprehension. Just like with any relationship, it's about engagement and interest. If a kid is playing WoW it really should not be difficult for the parent to know the basics of what they're doing, even if they have no interest in playing it. They'd quickly learn that it's a very socially-driven thing, and in some cases quite addictive. My parents didn't really understand computers, so they probably assumed that I was learning stuff while I was locked away in my room. I did a fair bit of hacking around, but it was mostly playing games. The former contributed to my technical and problem-solving abilities I have now, which from a job perspective means that the initiatives I take have probably more than paid my salary in the past year, on top of the main work I do. There remain social problems, albeit not as many as there used to be. I would have benefited from my parents just taking more time to get me out of that room.
My parents would beat the shit out of me if I ever stepped out of line and I still didn't turn into a sociopath. There are probably some emotional scars there but I managed to move past all that.
It's not as if having cunts for parents has left you with a bizarrely distorted understanding of what constitutes abuse.
The father sounds like an asshole but it isn't child abuse unless it leaves a mark.
SCO as a company has sold most of its assets, fired most of its employees, and changed its name. They've been litigating now for nearly 10 years, with little to show for it. During this period McBride ran a previously well-regarded company in to the ground. Here the thing I find most strange is that the owners didn't step-in earlier to remove McBride and his army of cunts. How do companies have any reasonable expectation of reclaiming costs of such an extended period of legal bullshit when the plaintiff appears willing to continue suing while they still have enough money to buy tea bags for the office? IBM can absorb this, smaller business could not. Where does this end? Can a judge at some point tell SCO's lawyers to fuck off. For bonus points, is there a legal way to have McBride kicked to death by his own grandchildren?
The fundamentalist-atheist claim that religion and science are fundamentally at odds is no less a religious belief than traditional theistic religions, and more to the point, is an utterly arrogant belief that effectively spits on the countless contributions of the religious to the very foundations of science as we know it today. And although it is held with the same arrogant religious fervor as the beliefs of the most devout faithful, it is a comically naÃve belief built on nothing more solid than smugness and the believer's own desire to feel superior to someone else, usually to make themselves feel less inferior. Frankly, whenever I see such rubbish, it almost makes me ashamed of the human race as a whole.
As Einstein put it, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Claims to the contrary demand extraordinary proof.
This whole discussion is muddy as Hell. I'll make my position clear:
Religious people can do science. The church has historically supported science, mainly by virtue of it providing the only centers of learning. Religion can inspire a desire to understand creation. How much of this though is due to religion being the only game in town?
Religion and science can be fundamentally at odds; heard of young earth creationism and Biblical literalism? How about the persistent Catholic belief of transubstantiation? What about the Scientologist's e-meter, or the claim that praying can alter physical reality? It is not fundamentalist atheism to say that beliefs such as these are incompatible with science, but even so, a creationist could do science so long as they don't insert their beliefs in to their work. That is the important distinction. One may as well ask if rape is compatible with being a good doctor? The answer is yes, so long as the doctor doesn't rape any of his patients. Bacon had a mustache. Are mustaches compatible with science, well yes, except perhaps if the scientist uses their mustache in lieu of beakers and a bunsen burner.
Oh, and Voltaire said "A witty saying proves nothing." Einstein's beliefs are notoriously difficult to pin-down.
These people need to be seen in their culture. Could Michelangelo have been a great artist without religion? Sure, so long as someone else was around to act as a patron.
Re:how 'bout papa vi?
on
Vim Turns 20
·
· Score: 1
I thought that most Linux distros had stopped including vi in the base install. OpenBSD is the only Unix-like I've used in recent memory that had vi, with vim coming via the ports tree.
There's more to it than that. This asshat is a minister. He got a fucking minister to respond from the fucking white house to a petition for increased separation of church and state.
I'm more bothered by the White House choosing to have the man drawing a salary for undermining separation of church and state respond to a petition to protect the wall of separation. The insecure need to have God printed on paper, or included in the bizarrely paranoid pledge, isn't as big an issue for me as the existence of DuBois' department.
How ithe flying fuck can he keep a straight face while saying that the government "guarantees citizens' rights to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all", while going on to support the claim that children should be compelled to invoke the Christian god when affirming their fealty to the magical flag?
His response can be more concisely written as "Shush now. This is how we've always done things."
Similar issues arise in the corporate world, which is why we need courses in training development and delivery, and presentation skills. It's unfortunate that many people come in to the workforce with little knowledge of either - leading to those immensely forgettable presentations where the slides and notes (if any) are pretty much identical walls of text with little thought given to how they'll help attendees retain the important information.
From a corporate perspective I there'd be a lot of benefits found in critical thinking skills and in teaching people how to present their ideas and information in convincing and useful ways. I learnt the mechanics of Powerpoint in college, but little about how to professionally get my message across. With critical thinking people would learn how to evaluate proposals, others and their own, to arrive at something that's actually going to help the business.
1) Release to laser disc 2) Do that cool effect behind Jobs and Cringely to make it appear as if they're on a roller coaster 3) Add fart noises 4) Give them glowing yellow eyes 5) Have the video playing on four sides of a video cube caught in a giant whirlpool in space
That's why I like it. I'm a manager, and I cannot see any reason to disagree with this manager. Thinking this way is why I decided to utilize Cloud in my upstream processes to allow myself more time for soliciting sex from hobos and the terminally ill.
On a more serious side, can you imagine the 14 trillion interpretations that would come with that disaster?
Heh, very good point. I suspect most interpretations will be oddly supportive of the views of the person in question. Hardly surprising when what they're worshiping must simultaneously be Ultimate Santa and the Ultimate Cancer Fairy (and everything else in between). Small wonder it's difficult to interpret his actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and well rehearsed "duck face" poses used whenever a camera comes out. Really, if this becomes the common theme for women, I'd be hanging on to heterosexuality by my finger nails.
FileMaker Pro and Excel cover the bulk of small-scale tools and automation needs in the office. AppleScript and Automator bind them together to be able to build some pretty good systems. You may be romanticizing the old days. Just as now, most people had neither the ability nor the inclination to make things easier. HyperCard was powerful and relatively accessible. Let's not kid ourselves though that the average number cruncher or sales guy in an office is going to fire it up and quickly churn-out a CRM system that isn't a piece of shit?
It's mostly pot-luck if someone in the office has a hacker mentality or even enough of an interest to begin coding/scripting. Given how computing in general has changed, I'd suspect that a smaller percentage of people are coming in to today's workforce with a hacker mentality. How many people below the age of 30 would have begun with computers that dropped them straight in to BASIC? How many computer magazines these days publish code listings, compared to in the 80s?
I'd certainly agree that they lack a sense of humor when their sensibilities are being offended or challenged, and that's certainly not restricted to religious people. Strong emotional attachments lead lead to protective outlooks. Someone with a severely handicapped daughter is perhaps less likely to laugh at Down Syndrome jokes than someone who has never had to deal with this horrible condition. One man's solemn and ritualistic religious service is another man's LARP session run by obsessively compulsive bead-fondlers.
That's what I want to know. I can see two "positive outcomes" he could have hoped for.
1) After signing his employment contract with Marriott he would dismantle his backdoors in their systems and Marriott would obviously be stuck with him because the contract.
2) He would keep his backdoors in place, to use as leverage should Marriott attempt to fire him or change the brand of coffee in the office to one that is not to his liking.
No-one above the age of six should consider his plan to be anything but hopeless lunacy.
If society is going to give you money, why should you not be required to do something for it? If you sweep a sidewalk, remove graffiti, or something, you are contributing to your society. Additionally, this keeps the person in the habit of working - of getting up in the morning, leaving the house, and doing something.
Keeping habits is a pretty key point there. Whether it's college courses or work, it's preferable to allowing people to slip in to the demographic that has been so long out of the workforce (or never been in it to begin with) that they become unemployable. A friend was headed this way, adopting a nocturnal existence and being content to live on welfare. He thankfully picked-up college and got back in to regular routines. The work should not be intentionally demeaning - this isn't a chain gang. The intention here must be to help people back in to employment. Of course some work may be seen as demeaning, but who hasn't worked a shitty job at some point for the sake of having a job?
We don't need informed comments. What Slashdot needs is confident and angry action! That's how American politics works, so if it's good enough for Jesus and Gingrich it sure as Hell is good enough for Slashdot.
It's the "Islamic Republic" of Pakistan. You expect anything sensible to come out of a country that's happy to be subservient to the arabs' plagiarized and highly retarded excuse for a religion?
Pakistan would be little more than an amusing punchline to many jokes if it weren't eye-to-eye with India, playing stupid fucking war games with a country that is seemingly doing its best to be as retarded as Pakistan. Imagine Kansas with nuclear weapons, it's as scary as that.
You've just illustrated the point: you're so distracted by the gay marriage issue that you've missed the fact that the government is destroying all our other civil liberties (free speech, due process, no illegal search and seizure, etc.)!
Mr Internet man. Is there an official website somewhere with a list of the "real" civil liberties we should be demanding?
Yes, doctors ejaculate at the thought of a technology that would cause increased health risks in the population. I don't think they really need to make us ill. Shifting demographics and greater emphasis on regular screening and preventative medicine kind of pays quite well enough without them wishing for people to be struck down by "frankenfoods". You, sir, are an arse
What does gay marriage or the lack thereof actually do? Nothing at all. Which is why politicians love it so.
No great importance? Sure, if you've no appreciation for the civil liberties and legal issues caused by this anachronistic and inequitable prohibition.
Anecdotal evidence is proof of nothing, you surely know better than that. As for hockey, tell us how many black kids grow up with a hockey stick in their hands vs. a basketball? I can tell you plenty of white kids in the areas of Ontario and Michigan (where I grew up) had them. Does that make it racist?...we may have all been born the same, but we were raised in different cultures, and that doesn't make it racist.
You white people aren't very good at spotting humor, are you?
Fifty years it was considered constitutional to have laws forbidding marriages between blacks and white. Anyone arguing for a return to sterner times really needs to look at worldwide crime rates and explain why crime in the western world has generally been in decline for quite some time now - despite "trendy" methods of disciplining children and adults.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/viortrdtab.cfm
So, what's the message there? Beat children a little bit and tell them that a severe beating is that beating multiplied by ten? Yes, we all know some dicks. Whether we want to live in a society that allows these people to be flogged is a question that requires an argument more substantial than an appeal to tradition.
I see physical violence as being similar to honking the horn in a car. It should only be used to avert an immediate danger: If a child is about to touch a red hot stove, slapping their hand away makes sense. If a driver is about to cut across your lane, oblivious to the presence of your car, honking the horn may prevent an accident. Honking the horn as punishment, just like with beating a child, is more about punishment than an ernest attempt to teach a lesson. How often do we see people honking their horn as a warning? Most of the time I see it used to deliver a loud "fuck you!" With spankings, how often are they done in a calm and dispassionate manner? Do parents first talk to the child so they understand what is about to happen and why, or are they more likely to just reach for the belt and begin thrashing away? Are there not better ways of teaching a lesson - such as discussing actions and the denial of privileges?
A tl;dr coming your way.
It's really a double-edged knife. My parents went through a messy divorce, which was probably one of the reasons I ended-up spending a lot of my childhood hidden away in my room, playing around with computers. It has upsides and downsides.
It left me with somewhat stunted social skills, and difficulties in forming relationships. Those have improved, but I don't think they'll ever be as good as they should be. The short attention-span and habit of obsessing with a task were lessened when I took the time to understand how they were affecting my life. In work, I tend to occupy a position somewhere between visionary and mad scientist. I'm very good an analyzing problems and building processes and tools to fix them. The communication issues remain because I don't always realize how my way of thinking gives the wrong impression. i.e. a large staff meeting is not always the best time to lurch in to a very theoretical thought process. Colleagues are entertained though when I get that giddy schoolboy look on my face as I begin describing how x problem can be solved, and how it'll give us x results while saving x amount of money.
I don't think I'd like to have changed things back then. I would however wish that I'd become more self-aware earlier in life. I would have screwed around fewer people with my selfish and obsessive behavior - myself included. I would have had more success earlier in my career if I'd better understood how to present my ideas to people.
I completely agree that technology should not be a babysitter. Technology, like anything else, should complement life, not rule it. Books are even more important than before; the Internet is not a place where an unsupervised child can be expected to learn reading comprehension. Just like with any relationship, it's about engagement and interest. If a kid is playing WoW it really should not be difficult for the parent to know the basics of what they're doing, even if they have no interest in playing it. They'd quickly learn that it's a very socially-driven thing, and in some cases quite addictive. My parents didn't really understand computers, so they probably assumed that I was learning stuff while I was locked away in my room. I did a fair bit of hacking around, but it was mostly playing games. The former contributed to my technical and problem-solving abilities I have now, which from a job perspective means that the initiatives I take have probably more than paid my salary in the past year, on top of the main work I do. There remain social problems, albeit not as many as there used to be. I would have benefited from my parents just taking more time to get me out of that room.
My parents would beat the shit out of me if I ever stepped out of line and I still didn't turn into a sociopath. There are probably some emotional scars there but I managed to move past all that.
It's not as if having cunts for parents has left you with a bizarrely distorted understanding of what constitutes abuse.
The father sounds like an asshole but it isn't child abuse unless it leaves a mark.
Oh wait...
SCO as a company has sold most of its assets, fired most of its employees, and changed its name. They've been litigating now for nearly 10 years, with little to show for it. During this period McBride ran a previously well-regarded company in to the ground. Here the thing I find most strange is that the owners didn't step-in earlier to remove McBride and his army of cunts. How do companies have any reasonable expectation of reclaiming costs of such an extended period of legal bullshit when the plaintiff appears willing to continue suing while they still have enough money to buy tea bags for the office? IBM can absorb this, smaller business could not. Where does this end? Can a judge at some point tell SCO's lawyers to fuck off. For bonus points, is there a legal way to have McBride kicked to death by his own grandchildren?
The fundamentalist-atheist claim that religion and science are fundamentally at odds is no less a religious belief than traditional theistic religions, and more to the point, is an utterly arrogant belief that effectively spits on the countless contributions of the religious to the very foundations of science as we know it today. And although it is held with the same arrogant religious fervor as the beliefs of the most devout faithful, it is a comically naÃve belief built on nothing more solid than smugness and the believer's own desire to feel superior to someone else, usually to make themselves feel less inferior. Frankly, whenever I see such rubbish, it almost makes me ashamed of the human race as a whole.
As Einstein put it, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Claims to the contrary demand extraordinary proof.
This whole discussion is muddy as Hell. I'll make my position clear:
Religious people can do science. The church has historically supported science, mainly by virtue of it providing the only centers of learning. Religion can inspire a desire to understand creation. How much of this though is due to religion being the only game in town?
Religion and science can be fundamentally at odds; heard of young earth creationism and Biblical literalism? How about the persistent Catholic belief of transubstantiation? What about the Scientologist's e-meter, or the claim that praying can alter physical reality? It is not fundamentalist atheism to say that beliefs such as these are incompatible with science, but even so, a creationist could do science so long as they don't insert their beliefs in to their work. That is the important distinction. One may as well ask if rape is compatible with being a good doctor? The answer is yes, so long as the doctor doesn't rape any of his patients. Bacon had a mustache. Are mustaches compatible with science, well yes, except perhaps if the scientist uses their mustache in lieu of beakers and a bunsen burner.
Oh, and Voltaire said "A witty saying proves nothing." Einstein's beliefs are notoriously difficult to pin-down.
These people need to be seen in their culture. Could Michelangelo have been a great artist without religion? Sure, so long as someone else was around to act as a patron.
I thought that most Linux distros had stopped including vi in the base install. OpenBSD is the only Unix-like I've used in recent memory that had vi, with vim coming via the ports tree.
There's more to it than that. This asshat is a minister. He got a fucking minister to respond from the fucking white house to a petition for increased separation of church and state.
I'm more bothered by the White House choosing to have the man drawing a salary for undermining separation of church and state respond to a petition to protect the wall of separation. The insecure need to have God printed on paper, or included in the bizarrely paranoid pledge, isn't as big an issue for me as the existence of DuBois' department.
How ithe flying fuck can he keep a straight face while saying that the government "guarantees citizens' rights to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all", while going on to support the claim that children should be compelled to invoke the Christian god when affirming their fealty to the magical flag?
His response can be more concisely written as "Shush now. This is how we've always done things."
More to the point, taking the actions of a small foundation to be representative of Europe as a whole is not very clever. Consider this example:
America is planning some under-age ball fondling fun tonight http://www.nambla.org/
Similar issues arise in the corporate world, which is why we need courses in training development and delivery, and presentation skills. It's unfortunate that many people come in to the workforce with little knowledge of either - leading to those immensely forgettable presentations where the slides and notes (if any) are pretty much identical walls of text with little thought given to how they'll help attendees retain the important information.
From a corporate perspective I there'd be a lot of benefits found in critical thinking skills and in teaching people how to present their ideas and information in convincing and useful ways. I learnt the mechanics of Powerpoint in college, but little about how to professionally get my message across. With critical thinking people would learn how to evaluate proposals, others and their own, to arrive at something that's actually going to help the business.
1) Release to laser disc
2) Do that cool effect behind Jobs and Cringely to make it appear as if they're on a roller coaster
3) Add fart noises
4) Give them glowing yellow eyes
5) Have the video playing on four sides of a video cube caught in a giant whirlpool in space
Seriously, needs to be done beyond restoration?
That's why I like it. I'm a manager, and I cannot see any reason to disagree with this manager. Thinking this way is why I decided to utilize Cloud in my upstream processes to allow myself more time for soliciting sex from hobos and the terminally ill.
On a more serious side, can you imagine the 14 trillion interpretations that would come with that disaster?
Heh, very good point. I suspect most interpretations will be oddly supportive of the views of the person in question. Hardly surprising when what they're worshiping must simultaneously be Ultimate Santa and the Ultimate Cancer Fairy (and everything else in between). Small wonder it's difficult to interpret his actions.
They'll just fight for control of their holy smoking crater. These people are deranged.
Fucking autocorrect. I meant "wank fantasy".