Confidence is being able to do something and doing it. One can have humility and confidence. The guy in the back of the room who says "I think I can fix your server" and after much discussion, does it, is confident, but humble. The guy who walks up and says "I got your server fix right here!" but has no idea WTF he's doing, fails at it, but blames someone else is arrogant and confident (he probably really believes this). The main difference being competent.
Obama's made a career out of refusing to take a definitive position (see Iran, government run healthcare: he refuses to say he won't sign a bill without a gov't option) until all facts are in, but as a consensus evolves, he's ready to champion the consensus and try and convince or trample over any naysayers. Contrast this with Bush who took a position immediately (e.g. axis of evil) and then defend or refute it even after he's proven wrong (WMD in Iraq).
I think nerds are generally technocratic and fact-based, but are willing to champion the solution against naysayers which the experts (e.g. Bernanke (Fed Chair), Krugman (this year's Nobel Laureate in econ), Summers (Harvard pres) w.r.t economic stimulus) agree on. It's a far cry from making policy and let the experts decide the details.
He has the right for privacy, but investors have the right to speculate -- that's what investors do.
Steve Jobs being at Apple must have some measurable financing impact on the company or else he wouldn't get paid his bonuses.
If Steve wants his privacy, that comes with a share price that's volatile on the basis of speculation. I don't think that's too high a price to pay personally, but he seems very irritable about that reality.
I wasn't say it's not meat, merely that quality matters.
My Dad's side of the family are all farmers, and when I go to one of their cook-outs, I can definitely taste the difference between their freshly slaughtered chickens and a chicken sandwich from McD's. Maybe it's freshness. Maybe it's that the meat's not been frozen, put in a freezer, and reheated in a microwave. Maybe they know how to cook. I could taste the difference between a cucumber grown in my family's garden and one bought at the supermarket that wasn't particularly fresh.
I'm happy there's a USDA but they only set minimum standards and allow a grading process.
I'm sure McD's burgers are meat. Now, it's cooked so that it's either dry or greasy, was once frozen, and now microwaved. (My friend's sister is a manager for a Sonic.)
I'm not jaded so much as I enjoy good food and I have an appreciation for the work it takes for everyone involved to make it.
The ground beef at McD's, the chicken wings at KFC, etc, are all exactly what they claim to be
McD:hamburgers::Natural Light:beer.
As an omnivore, I prefer soy burgers over McDonald's patties, but if someone wants to grill up some angus at a BBQ, I'll devour that;) But maybe that's just from living in Texas.
This degradation continually happens. A mass produced product's quality is trimmed to meet the bare minimum definition of what it is to cut costs, but protect the legal definition at the expense of the word itself.
Ask your grandfather or great grandfather what they thought of when someone said "hamburger" in their day, and I'll bet it tasted better. Or lemon aide* We now have diet grape juice, with splenda. The wonders of consumerism.
*Minute maid lemon aide is 100% natural and contains only the finest ingredients. Excluding lemons.
Restrict the sale of technology to that which has legitimate legal uses.
If you make an anti-AIDs medication, that works, but kills the user 15 days after use, it's not useful to sell. Nuclear weapons? Is there a legal use for nuclear weapons? Nope.
Courts commonly uses this test to determine the legality of technology. Bittorrent? Lots of illegal downloaders, but Blizzard uses it as do a lot of Linux distros. Pass.
Further, if the developer of a product discovers some risk *cough* death *cough* that can arise from use of their product *cough* cigarettes *cough*, and fail to properly disclose it, they can be sued as well. *cough*
If the person is in Chemistry/Math/etc just to learn the subject matter and learn tools for the subject matter, it makes complete sense to teach a language so that they know it later.
I'd rather have a bad coder in Basic who at least uses the language after graduation for doing basic tasks than someone who "knew" assembly/Fortran/C++ backwards and forwards, but forgot it all and never learned any more, since it wasn't "useful".
Yeah, I'm right there with you. I love PvP for the most part. I play everything from Chess to Magic the Gathering to Warcraft 3 to Left 4 Dead to Super Smash Bros.
I played a couple months a friend told me PvP in WoW was amazing, so I started a character, leveled 'em to 80. Then I found out the PvP is terrible.
The game is laggy, especially in large matches, and you need addons just for the most basic of functionality (e.g. list of raid member with health) are provided by addons. Instanced PvP is slightly better though, but even there, the gameplay just seems to lack the sophistication of other PvP games.
Another real problem is scale. A game with numbers flying around the screen just doesn't scale well to 25 player raids (TF2 is quite playable with 32 people, WoW (IMHO) is just not). But WoW does it anyway. Wintergrasp is by far the worst offender.
While suicide should never be celebrated, there's a certain honor in doing it as a result of professional failure.
As opposed to you know, screwing the company over, taking a huge bonus, and running to the Bahamas (*cough* AIG, Bank of America, Chase, GM, WaMu *cough*)
The government has recently been a circus of one distraction after another. Yeah, health care, the economy, and Afghanistan are distractions to the real issues facing America: why didn't Lambert win American idol? Will Michael Vick play football again? And why didn't the president asked for change when he got a hamburger?
I demand real answers to these very real questions facing America!
...and the 2 hours it takes me to uninstall all the crap Dell puts on my box or reformat and reinstall is free?
Granted, OCing is a bit much, but it's pretty trivial to put a system together in an evening...assuming you know what you're doing. If not, congrats, you've just saved yourself a $300 community college course;)
Was it the support for Boris Yeltsin even when he was a drunk? So he helped bring Russia from totalitarianism to democracy and he shouldn't be supported because he drinks? Putin's soberly bringing Russia back to authoritarianism.
Was it picking the wrong side in the Balkans war? Fighting against the Milosevich, the Butcher of the Balkans who murdereed tens of thousands in an act of genocide? And giving those involved war trials for crimes against humanity. (He also managed to finish the war, something we're not so good at right now)
Was it all those failed peace agreements? Like the 400 year old conflict in Northern Ireland? 10 years of peace and counting.
I'm going with Sage's theory. IP is not Biden's forte and never has been. He's more concerned foreign relations and international law.
Find anyone in congress over 60 who has both used the internet and understands its implications as a technology.
Biden simply legislates IP law like it's 1980.
If you can find any evidence that anyone in Hollywood actually contributed to his political campaign, then there's some evidence of corruption. The only thing I could find was that Michael J. Fox and Aaron Sorrin each gave him $1,000 in 2002, which out of a few million, is a drop in the bucket.
The good news is that one can educate and influence the ignorant, but not the corrupt.
He also brought connections to special interest groups, who are powerful in terms of elections. Obama himself didn't have many of those connections, since he is a young politician. [Politician I don't like] on the other hand is deep within Hollywood's pocket, among others.
Can we get off the old saw about corruption in politics? Biden is one of the poorest members of the senate despite being one of the most senior. Obama has more money.
The Hollywood part is amusing. Delaware politics revolves more around the disposal of chicken shit than it does around Hollywood. The last movie of any significance filmed in Delaware was Fight Club.
Biden is the Democratic senior member of the foreign relations committee. He presided over Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which has been widely seen as more successful than Dubya, who hadn't even been to Europe before he became president (why do we need "experience" in quotes?)
There's already a train from Portland to Seattle, operated by Amtrack. I took it last winter and it didn't take significantly longer by car -- in fact it was probably shorter
The thing that everyone seems to miss is TRAFFIC. Rush hour on the highway is terrible. However, trains scale much better. If there's a huge rush hour between 4-6 PM, have a train leave every 10 minutes rather than every 30. Solves the traffic issue and in doing so, makes it even more convenient.
Next time you're sitting in gridlock, imagine going to a train station and leisurely getting on a train (oh darn, I missed the train...another one comes in a 5 minutes) and surfing the internet...and getting to your destination in half the time.
Copyright ends tomorrow and I still won't have the source code for Windows....which is half the purpose of the GPL. (1) Freedom to access source code and (2) freedom to copy. I'd even argue (2) is a consequence of (1) since any distributed modification is pretty much copying (altering 1 word on an encyclopedia article doesn't make it yours to turn into a history class).
Commercial software won't end either, I hate to break it to anyone. Blizzard will still sell WoW -- they let you download the DVDs over bit torrent anyway. Windows may even continue with more draconian DRM than ever to prevent piracy now that the law won't help.
The early Christians -- who were not Gnostics -- were considered an apocalyptic cult by early writers. Since they considered the second coming to be relatively soon, families weren't exactly on everyone's mind and very early church/doctrine and teachings reflected this.
And while the gospel quotes are relevant, keep in mind at this point Luke hadn't even been written yet. And the OT has a very very different reading for Gnostics as I'm sure you're aware. As for early Christians, their attitude as a Jewish Reformation movement was overshadowed by the aforementioned concerns about the end of the world and ethics developed out of that (e.g. not having kids).
My point in my original post is that there exist religions (or "sects" (which I'd describe as a pejorative word)) that in no way attempt to balance the carnal with the cerebral except where necessary for survival (and even then you have to feel guilty about it).
The Christian Gnostics held that the spirit was imprisoned inside the body. As a result, anything vaguely carnal was bad: good food, sex, having kids, etc. (Strangely, the early Pauline Christians who would survive and become Catholicism changed their policy regarding sex and kids very early on..wonder why...) Some believe this view evolved from the Samkya tradition of Hinduism which held very similar metaphysical views about matter (prkrti) and spirit (perusa).
Now contrast that with a religion where having sex with an oracle while under the influence is considered a means of attaining wisdom.
It's not exactly a trivial or hard-to-understand difference, but practitioners of "natural" religions use the term to beg you to ask that question. Like "pro-life" (no, I'm...anti-life!)
(Likewise, I prefer certain foods "organic" as I prefer my apples not marinated in insecticide.)
Some of the ideas work really well and are adopted in the marketplace (Qt's Designer), but others (like Jambi) die because no one uses them. It's natural and healthy. Besides, if anyone really does find it useful and wants to use it and extend it, Qt has left the license in such a way as to say "Go for it!"
Jambi's changing status, I think, is due to Java's evolution as THE backend language for server heavy processing things like databases (Oracle) or massively parallel scientific computations. At the same time, Java isn't used for graphical applications nearly as much as it was back in say '99.
Jambi tried to solve the problem with Java (namely the UI libraries are terrible), but maybe it was too late?
You forget Ron Paul is a Texan who's district is a couple hours drive from here;)
My point was more in the diversity of the paper itself (call it the left to right spectrum) where you've got military nationalists and communists working at the same paper you're going to get more editorial diversity than a paper whose ultimately determined by the parent company rather than its staff.
Since you mentioned, WSJ, by the way, is currently undergoing a loss of independence and editorial control since acquisition by Rupert Murdoch (Fox New, et al).
It's not only "liberal" opinion that is beholden to its masters.
The "does it suck" is covered by the metacritic rating which is an aggregate rating from various reviewing services. Anything over 90% has received an AVERAGE score of 9/10 from every reviewer.
Your average budget game, from Barbie's New Pony to Nintendogs Clone 4 have a rating around 70% -- and that's generous.
Nobody's ever heard of it may be more likely -- but the major websites covering gaming aren't shy about their praise for it.
There's 3 papers (I'm aware of anyway) in Houston Texas.: The Chronicle, The Houston Press, and Free Press Houston (listed from most corporate to most independent). The Chronicle endorsed GW for re-election in 2004, for example, despite Houston going for Kerry. The Press is much more liberal/independent and are less afraid to run stories about police brutality for example. FPH is very much your High School Yearbook team.
What's funny is that the subscription newspaper (Chronicle) is the least independent of the 3. FPH and the Press are both ad-supported and free. And it's not limited to Houston.
Seattle (the Stranger), Portland, Austin, and Denver all seem to follow the same model where the more independent paper tends to finance itself via advertising to local businesses and it's actually nice. The advertisements are generally extremely informative and let you know everything from what non-pizza hut places there are to get a decent pie, to when [favorite indie band] is coming to town.
[Disclaimer: I don't work for any of the papers. I do go to their parties and am acquaintances with some of their writers.]
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Or you could have cows eat grass which does the same thing, and has nutritional benefits for the consumer. I know, it's radical.
Confidence is being able to do something and doing it. One can have humility and confidence. The guy in the back of the room who says "I think I can fix your server" and after much discussion, does it, is confident, but humble. The guy who walks up and says "I got your server fix right here!" but has no idea WTF he's doing, fails at it, but blames someone else is arrogant and confident (he probably really believes this). The main difference being competent.
Obama's made a career out of refusing to take a definitive position (see Iran, government run healthcare: he refuses to say he won't sign a bill without a gov't option) until all facts are in, but as a consensus evolves, he's ready to champion the consensus and try and convince or trample over any naysayers. Contrast this with Bush who took a position immediately (e.g. axis of evil) and then defend or refute it even after he's proven wrong (WMD in Iraq).
I think nerds are generally technocratic and fact-based, but are willing to champion the solution against naysayers which the experts (e.g. Bernanke (Fed Chair), Krugman (this year's Nobel Laureate in econ), Summers (Harvard pres) w.r.t economic stimulus) agree on. It's a far cry from making policy and let the experts decide the details.
He has the right for privacy, but investors have the right to speculate -- that's what investors do.
Steve Jobs being at Apple must have some measurable financing impact on the company or else he wouldn't get paid his bonuses.
If Steve wants his privacy, that comes with a share price that's volatile on the basis of speculation. I don't think that's too high a price to pay personally, but he seems very irritable about that reality.
I wasn't say it's not meat, merely that quality matters.
My Dad's side of the family are all farmers, and when I go to one of their cook-outs, I can definitely taste the difference between their freshly slaughtered chickens and a chicken sandwich from McD's. Maybe it's freshness. Maybe it's that the meat's not been frozen, put in a freezer, and reheated in a microwave. Maybe they know how to cook. I could taste the difference between a cucumber grown in my family's garden and one bought at the supermarket that wasn't particularly fresh.
I'm happy there's a USDA but they only set minimum standards and allow a grading process.
I'm sure McD's burgers are meat. Now, it's cooked so that it's either dry or greasy, was once frozen, and now microwaved. (My friend's sister is a manager for a Sonic.)
I'm not jaded so much as I enjoy good food and I have an appreciation for the work it takes for everyone involved to make it.
The ground beef at McD's, the chicken wings at KFC, etc, are all exactly what they claim to be
McD:hamburgers::Natural Light:beer.
As an omnivore, I prefer soy burgers over McDonald's patties, but if someone wants to grill up some angus at a BBQ, I'll devour that;) But maybe that's just from living in Texas.
This degradation continually happens. A mass produced product's quality is trimmed to meet the bare minimum definition of what it is to cut costs, but protect the legal definition at the expense of the word itself.
Ask your grandfather or great grandfather what they thought of when someone said "hamburger" in their day, and I'll bet it tasted better. Or lemon aide* We now have diet grape juice, with splenda. The wonders of consumerism.
*Minute maid lemon aide is 100% natural and contains only the finest ingredients. Excluding lemons.
Restrict the sale of technology to that which has legitimate legal uses.
If you make an anti-AIDs medication, that works, but kills the user 15 days after use, it's not useful to sell. Nuclear weapons? Is there a legal use for nuclear weapons? Nope.
Courts commonly uses this test to determine the legality of technology. Bittorrent? Lots of illegal downloaders, but Blizzard uses it as do a lot of Linux distros. Pass.
Further, if the developer of a product discovers some risk *cough* death *cough* that can arise from use of their product *cough* cigarettes *cough*, and fail to properly disclose it, they can be sued as well. *cough*
Seriously, I ought to quit smoking;)
Exercise is like sex
And sex is exercise.
You can watch the girl in spandex all you want. I'll be getting my exercise helping her "cool down".
Giggity.
You don't teach a language so someone will know it later. That makes no sense at all.
Thank you, Yogi Berra.
If the person is in Chemistry/Math/etc just to learn the subject matter and learn tools for the subject matter, it makes complete sense to teach a language so that they know it later.
I'd rather have a bad coder in Basic who at least uses the language after graduation for doing basic tasks than someone who "knew" assembly/Fortran/C++ backwards and forwards, but forgot it all and never learned any more, since it wasn't "useful".
Yeah, I'm right there with you. I love PvP for the most part. I play everything from Chess to Magic the Gathering to Warcraft 3 to Left 4 Dead to Super Smash Bros.
I played a couple months a friend told me PvP in WoW was amazing, so I started a character, leveled 'em to 80. Then I found out the PvP is terrible.
The game is laggy, especially in large matches, and you need addons just for the most basic of functionality (e.g. list of raid member with health) are provided by addons. Instanced PvP is slightly better though, but even there, the gameplay just seems to lack the sophistication of other PvP games.
Another real problem is scale. A game with numbers flying around the screen just doesn't scale well to 25 player raids (TF2 is quite playable with 32 people, WoW (IMHO) is just not). But WoW does it anyway. Wintergrasp is by far the worst offender.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one;)
While suicide should never be celebrated, there's a certain honor in doing it as a result of professional failure.
As opposed to you know, screwing the company over, taking a huge bonus, and running to the Bahamas (*cough* AIG, Bank of America, Chase, GM, WaMu *cough*)
The government has recently been a circus of one distraction after another.
Yeah, health care, the economy, and Afghanistan are distractions to the real issues facing America: why didn't Lambert win American idol? Will Michael Vick play football again? And why didn't the president asked for change when he got a hamburger?
I demand real answers to these very real questions facing America!
...and the 2 hours it takes me to uninstall all the crap Dell puts on my box or reformat and reinstall is free?
Granted, OCing is a bit much, but it's pretty trivial to put a system together in an evening...assuming you know what you're doing. If not, congrats, you've just saved yourself a $300 community college course;)
Was it the support for Boris Yeltsin even when he was a drunk?
So he helped bring Russia from totalitarianism to democracy and he shouldn't be supported because he drinks? Putin's soberly bringing Russia back to authoritarianism.
Was it picking the wrong side in the Balkans war?
Fighting against the Milosevich, the Butcher of the Balkans who murdereed tens of thousands in an act of genocide? And giving those involved war trials for crimes against humanity. (He also managed to finish the war, something we're not so good at right now)
Was it all those failed peace agreements?
Like the 400 year old conflict in Northern Ireland? 10 years of peace and counting.
Are you trying to help my point?
I'm going with Sage's theory. IP is not Biden's forte and never has been. He's more concerned foreign relations and international law.
Find anyone in congress over 60 who has both used the internet and understands its implications as a technology.
Biden simply legislates IP law like it's 1980.
If you can find any evidence that anyone in Hollywood actually contributed to his political campaign, then there's some evidence of corruption. The only thing I could find was that Michael J. Fox and Aaron Sorrin each gave him $1,000 in 2002, which out of a few million, is a drop in the bucket.
The good news is that one can educate and influence the ignorant, but not the corrupt.
He also brought connections to special interest groups, who are powerful in terms of elections. Obama himself didn't have many of those connections, since he is a young politician. [Politician I don't like] on the other hand is deep within Hollywood's pocket, among others.
Can we get off the old saw about corruption in politics? Biden is one of the poorest members of the senate despite being one of the most senior. Obama has more money.
The Hollywood part is amusing. Delaware politics revolves more around the disposal of chicken shit than it does around Hollywood. The last movie of any significance filmed in Delaware was Fight Club.
Biden is the Democratic senior member of the foreign relations committee. He presided over Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which has been widely seen as more successful than Dubya, who hadn't even been to Europe before he became president (why do we need "experience" in quotes?)
This makes it less profitable to rape children...
'cause pedophiles are so in it for the money!
It's not like they're sick or anything....
There's already a train from Portland to Seattle, operated by Amtrack. I took it last winter and it didn't take significantly longer by car -- in fact it was probably shorter
The thing that everyone seems to miss is TRAFFIC. Rush hour on the highway is terrible. However, trains scale much better. If there's a huge rush hour between 4-6 PM, have a train leave every 10 minutes rather than every 30. Solves the traffic issue and in doing so, makes it even more convenient.
Next time you're sitting in gridlock, imagine going to a train station and leisurely getting on a train (oh darn, I missed the train...another one comes in a 5 minutes) and surfing the internet...and getting to your destination in half the time.
Copyright ends tomorrow and I still won't have the source code for Windows. ...which is half the purpose of the GPL. (1) Freedom to access source code and (2) freedom to copy. I'd even argue (2) is a consequence of (1) since any distributed modification is pretty much copying (altering 1 word on an encyclopedia article doesn't make it yours to turn into a history class).
Commercial software won't end either, I hate to break it to anyone. Blizzard will still sell WoW -- they let you download the DVDs over bit torrent anyway. Windows may even continue with more draconian DRM than ever to prevent piracy now that the law won't help.
Everyone knows carrot juice is murder! I hear the screams of the vegetables!
You're right historically, but so am I;)
The early Christians -- who were not Gnostics -- were considered an apocalyptic cult by early writers. Since they considered the second coming to be relatively soon, families weren't exactly on everyone's mind and very early church/doctrine and teachings reflected this.
And while the gospel quotes are relevant, keep in mind at this point Luke hadn't even been written yet. And the OT has a very very different reading for Gnostics as I'm sure you're aware. As for early Christians, their attitude as a Jewish Reformation movement was overshadowed by the aforementioned concerns about the end of the world and ethics developed out of that (e.g. not having kids).
My point in my original post is that there exist religions (or "sects" (which I'd describe as a pejorative word)) that in no way attempt to balance the carnal with the cerebral except where necessary for survival (and even then you have to feel guilty about it).
Carnal religions vs cerebral religions possibly?
The Christian Gnostics held that the spirit was imprisoned inside the body. As a result, anything vaguely carnal was bad: good food, sex, having kids, etc. (Strangely, the early Pauline Christians who would survive and become Catholicism changed their policy regarding sex and kids very early on..wonder why...) Some believe this view evolved from the Samkya tradition of Hinduism which held very similar metaphysical views about matter (prkrti) and spirit (perusa).
Now contrast that with a religion where having sex with an oracle while under the influence is considered a means of attaining wisdom.
It's not exactly a trivial or hard-to-understand difference, but practitioners of "natural" religions use the term to beg you to ask that question. Like "pro-life" (no, I'm...anti-life!)
(Likewise, I prefer certain foods "organic" as I prefer my apples not marinated in insecticide.)
The guys at Qt don't have an infinite budget.
Some of the ideas work really well and are adopted in the marketplace (Qt's Designer), but others (like Jambi) die because no one uses them. It's natural and healthy. Besides, if anyone really does find it useful and wants to use it and extend it, Qt has left the license in such a way as to say "Go for it!"
Jambi's changing status, I think, is due to Java's evolution as THE backend language for server heavy processing things like databases (Oracle) or massively parallel scientific computations. At the same time, Java isn't used for graphical applications nearly as much as it was back in say '99.
Jambi tried to solve the problem with Java (namely the UI libraries are terrible), but maybe it was too late?
Nope.
You forget Ron Paul is a Texan who's district is a couple hours drive from here;)
My point was more in the diversity of the paper itself (call it the left to right spectrum) where you've got military nationalists and communists working at the same paper you're going to get more editorial diversity than a paper whose ultimately determined by the parent company rather than its staff.
Since you mentioned, WSJ, by the way, is currently undergoing a loss of independence and editorial control since acquisition by Rupert Murdoch (Fox New, et al).
It's not only "liberal" opinion that is beholden to its masters.
The "does it suck" is covered by the metacritic rating which is an aggregate rating from various reviewing services. Anything over 90% has received an AVERAGE score of 9/10 from every reviewer.
Your average budget game, from Barbie's New Pony to Nintendogs Clone 4 have a rating around 70% -- and that's generous.
Nobody's ever heard of it may be more likely -- but the major websites covering gaming aren't shy about their praise for it.
From where I stand the opposite is true.
There's 3 papers (I'm aware of anyway) in Houston Texas.: The Chronicle, The Houston Press, and Free Press Houston (listed from most corporate to most independent). The Chronicle endorsed GW for re-election in 2004, for example, despite Houston going for Kerry. The Press is much more liberal/independent and are less afraid to run stories about police brutality for example. FPH is very much your High School Yearbook team.
What's funny is that the subscription newspaper (Chronicle) is the least independent of the 3. FPH and the Press are both ad-supported and free. And it's not limited to Houston.
Seattle (the Stranger), Portland, Austin, and Denver all seem to follow the same model where the more independent paper tends to finance itself via advertising to local businesses and it's actually nice. The advertisements are generally extremely informative and let you know everything from what non-pizza hut places there are to get a decent pie, to when [favorite indie band] is coming to town.
[Disclaimer: I don't work for any of the papers. I do go to their parties and am acquaintances with some of their writers.]