For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.
Meh. People have different senses of humor. There's nothing wrong with not sharing someone else's sense of humor. There's arguably something wrong with wishing them dead because their sense of humor differs from yours...
* Time travel without space travel would suck too, since you'd most likely re-materialize in empty space.
This criticism has always bugged me. Setting aside the fact that it's probably as absurd to postulate time travel without space travel as it is to postulate space travel without time travel (you arrive at your destination at the moment you leave your starting point? I don't think so...), it implies an absolute space-time frame that violates the fundamental assumptions of relativity. Somehow, the moment you activate your time machine, relativity is supposed to get thrown out the window and we're to assume you arrive at some absolute space-time coordinate that's the same as the absolute space-time coordinate you left from, despite the fact that there's no such thing as an absolute space-time coordinate. You moved (you're no longer on Earth) because you didn't move (relative to whom? it's never specified, implying absolute space-time) really doesn't make much sense...
In any case, without knowing more details of the mechanics of how such a device operates, one cannot say whether you would end up in space or not. Saying you might or might not is sensible. Saying one alternative or the other is "most likely" is absurd. How can you rate the probability if you haven't worked out those details? Any claim about the "likelihood" of one alternative or the other is absurd.
Has it ever crossed your mind that they might not be conmen, but in fact were as surprised by the bursting of the dot.com bubble as everyone else? Note that, if it was obvious, it would never have occurred to begin with. The fact that the bubble inflated to begin with is incontrovertible proof that it wasn't obviously a bubble. You seem to be promoting them as being either part of a conspiracy or of being both omniscient and dishonest (for not telling us the truth they supposedly knew when millions of other people did not), rather than simply wrong...
... It's like, now that pretty much any thing is possible technologically, talking about something that's not present but possible is just an exercise in talking about something that will be here when the engineers figure out how to make it profitably.
Yeah, unfortunately everything futuristic you might talk about falls into two categories: (1) things that half the people you talk to will be surprised doesn't already exist, or (2) things that will convince people you're a nut waiting to upload. There is no middle ground, everything is either here (at least in the lab) or techno-religion in the common view. We simply don't believe in the future anymore. It's either the present, or it's fantasy...
Q2: Do humans, in general, abuse power when they have it?
Q3: Is there some reason to believe IT pros different from most humans in this regard?
I'm kinda curious why this question even got asked. Unless the answer to any of the above questions is anything less than as patently obvious as I think they all are, ("Yes", "Yes", and "No", for the record), simple logic would make the answer to the posted question obvious. Q1 & Q2 fall to the same simple "Socrates is mortal" syllogism, unless Q3 is assumed to also be "Yes", but why on earth would anyone think that?
This has nothing to do with "duct-tape programming". It also has nothing to do with solutions that don't take the future into account. The SMS spec is perfectly fine, and most code that deals with it would work fine for the next million years if needed. The problem here is, someone never read the spec. "Not even reading the spec" is not an attribute of "duct-tape programming" in the Joel sense.
Either way, 2010 and 2016 are both shorter than Y2K10 or Y2K16, so the 'abbreviation' is absurd.
Not really. It would be absurd if it was an abbreviation for the year alone. As a moniker for a particular kind of bug, it's quite concise and sensible. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a different five symbols that would convey both the nature of the bug and the time when it occurs instantly and unambiguously to any reader with even a passing knowledge of the subject, and most people, even laymen, know about the Y2K bug, at least well enough to follow what you're saying if it isn't overly technical.
...and thought it was useless - what sort of idiot would try to fit a message into 160 characters?
Ah, the classic error. Remember, no one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. (IIRC, in the original quote it was "taste", but whatever...) Point being, "idiots" is a very, very large and profitable target for marketing products to.
Any EE will tell you that 2k16 means 2.16k or 2160. How does this garbage continue making it to the front page?
Actually, most EE's I know are smarter than that. The fact that X means Y in some contexts does not mean X means Y in all contexts. Most competent speakers of the language have no trouble determining meaning, taking context into account. It's rare that someone manages to get an EE while lacking the level of intelligence required to do that.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort...
You're right, what you posted is "typical evolutionary muddle". It's a common misconception that traits evolve because they pose some sort of advantage. In fact, all traits, both advantageous and disadvantageous, evolve at random. Traits don't necessarily persist because they're advantageous, either. They do often disappear when a species is placed under stress if they are maladaptive, but only if they aren't paired with some other more adaptive trait (often completely randomly), and this is only if the species is stressed in such a way as to make the trait a significant disadvantage. In short:
The fact that a trait evolved does not indicate that it was in any way an evolutionary advantage.
The fact that a trait persisted does not necessarily indicate that it was in any way advantageous.
The fact that a trait persisted does not necessarily indicate that it was not in any way disadvantageous.
The fact that a species persisted when others failed indicates that its entire package of traits was, considered as a whole, likely better for it that the competition, but this does not mean every single trait was advantageous, or that no traits were disadvantageous, even under the specific stressed they were subjected to.
During times when a species is not under stress, what traits evolve, and which increase or decrease in frequency, is essentially random and indicates nothing at all beyond population dynamics.
I'm in now way a biologist but it is odd to me that they would suggest this metric for intelligence unless they can also prove that they are recent enough in our history that the above factors I mentioned have to be close or match our own that we know a lot about. I don't think that's a safe speculation though.
Note that the fossils in question are not generally considered to even be a separate species. It's a pretty safe assumption that the brain structure of H. sapiens is identical to the brain structure of H. sapiens, by and large...
Correction, neanderthals did not have a bigger prefrontal cortex than H. sapiens sapiens, and by the theory you're criticizing here, would be expected to be less intelligent than modern man. That you think the argument would suggest neanderthals would be more intelligent just proves you didn't understand the argument...
The point being here, the article links brain/body size ratio to high IQ. Using Einstein as a counterexample doesn't work, because despite the unarguable truth of what you say, he was not the kind of person who would score all that spectacularly on an IQ test. Granted, what an IQ test primarily measures is your ability to take IQ tests, but TFA's point is valid, if limited in scope.
Much of your "everything else" you list is very much concerned with protecting the members of that society. History tells us time and time again that the police and even the military cannot protect you from the bloody revolution that comes when you don't take care of those other things. You won't have much of a military, or very good weapons for them, without those schools producing members of the society well-off enough to pay for it and invent the next generation of weapons. You won't be able to provide those essential, fundamental services without that communications systems. Your so-called non-fundamentals are so fundamental that what you call fundamental wouldn't be functional otherwise...
Also, if you use ls -a ~ you get a screenful of dotfiles mixed with regular directories.
Huh. When I do that, I get my dotfiles on top, followed by my other files, with no mixing. IIRC, this was the main reason I put "export LANG=C" in my shell startup file. (The fact that it also specifies my preferred language is coincidental.;)
Features such as implementing the separate directory levels in a path as buttons, splitting the directory view pane in the same window, implementing both a "places" and a directory tree view and adding a toolbar to let the user select how to display the files are features which are not around for 40 years.
Well, I don't know about 40, but it's been around at least 24 years. I first saw it on my Apple//c in 1985.
Yes, it was very useful on the file manager I used under ProDOS on my Apple//c. Alas, I'm afraid I've since forgotten the name of it, but I was happy when I found a program called Norton Commander for the PC that could mimic it.
There are people who say always use the command line. Then there are people who say always use the GUI. All of these people are idiots. Use whatever works best for the task at hand. Sometimes a command line-based solution works best. Sometimes a nice GUI does. You can have more than one tool in a toolbox...
Microsoft has had Interix, then Services For UNIX, and now Subsystem for Unix Applications originally since around 2000 but both SFU/SUA and Cygwin are pretty much just different shells on top of the limited cmd.exe window, unless you happen to use rxvt (which is usually not worth the trouble).
*blink* *blink*
It never even occurred to me that anyone would NOT use rxvt or some other Unix terminal program if they bothered to go through the effort of installing Cygwin. That would be... kinda pointless I would think. Do you even install Xwindows at all then? If not... are you sure you wanted any sort of Unix compatibility to begin with? o.O
I was trying to drink my Pepsi when I read that. Should we be charging you with attempted murder or merely manslaughter? Can a metaphor be considered a deadly weapon? (If an algorithm can be a "munition"...)
Can we afford such massive expenditures of energy on such a frequent basis?
Can't we? Don't we expend several orders of magnitude more energy every day "launching" millions of cars onto the roads of America? Compared to that, launching one rocket a week is trivial...
Slashdot Mirror
For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.
Meh. People have different senses of humor. There's nothing wrong with not sharing someone else's sense of humor. There's arguably something wrong with wishing them dead because their sense of humor differs from yours...
It's a little distasteful to insult the dead. I may get -1 flamed for this, but am I the only one who feels this way?
It is impossible to insult the dead, although it's possible to offend their living friends and relatives...
* Time travel without space travel would suck too, since you'd most likely re-materialize in empty space.
This criticism has always bugged me. Setting aside the fact that it's probably as absurd to postulate time travel without space travel as it is to postulate space travel without time travel (you arrive at your destination at the moment you leave your starting point? I don't think so...), it implies an absolute space-time frame that violates the fundamental assumptions of relativity. Somehow, the moment you activate your time machine, relativity is supposed to get thrown out the window and we're to assume you arrive at some absolute space-time coordinate that's the same as the absolute space-time coordinate you left from, despite the fact that there's no such thing as an absolute space-time coordinate. You moved (you're no longer on Earth) because you didn't move (relative to whom? it's never specified, implying absolute space-time) really doesn't make much sense...
In any case, without knowing more details of the mechanics of how such a device operates, one cannot say whether you would end up in space or not. Saying you might or might not is sensible. Saying one alternative or the other is "most likely" is absurd. How can you rate the probability if you haven't worked out those details? Any claim about the "likelihood" of one alternative or the other is absurd.
Has it ever crossed your mind that they might not be conmen, but in fact were as surprised by the bursting of the dot.com bubble as everyone else? Note that, if it was obvious, it would never have occurred to begin with. The fact that the bubble inflated to begin with is incontrovertible proof that it wasn't obviously a bubble. You seem to be promoting them as being either part of a conspiracy or of being both omniscient and dishonest (for not telling us the truth they supposedly knew when millions of other people did not), rather than simply wrong...
... It's like, now that pretty much any thing is possible technologically, talking about something that's not present but possible is just an exercise in talking about something that will be here when the engineers figure out how to make it profitably.
Yeah, unfortunately everything futuristic you might talk about falls into two categories: (1) things that half the people you talk to will be surprised doesn't already exist, or (2) things that will convince people you're a nut waiting to upload. There is no middle ground, everything is either here (at least in the lab) or techno-religion in the common view. We simply don't believe in the future anymore. It's either the present, or it's fantasy...
Q1: Are IT pros, in general, humans?
Q2: Do humans, in general, abuse power when they have it?
Q3: Is there some reason to believe IT pros different from most humans in this regard?
I'm kinda curious why this question even got asked. Unless the answer to any of the above questions is anything less than as patently obvious as I think they all are, ("Yes", "Yes", and "No", for the record), simple logic would make the answer to the posted question obvious. Q1 & Q2 fall to the same simple "Socrates is mortal" syllogism, unless Q3 is assumed to also be "Yes", but why on earth would anyone think that?
This has nothing to do with "duct-tape programming". It also has nothing to do with solutions that don't take the future into account. The SMS spec is perfectly fine, and most code that deals with it would work fine for the next million years if needed. The problem here is, someone never read the spec. "Not even reading the spec" is not an attribute of "duct-tape programming" in the Joel sense.
Either way, 2010 and 2016 are both shorter than Y2K10 or Y2K16, so the 'abbreviation' is absurd.
Not really. It would be absurd if it was an abbreviation for the year alone. As a moniker for a particular kind of bug, it's quite concise and sensible. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a different five symbols that would convey both the nature of the bug and the time when it occurs instantly and unambiguously to any reader with even a passing knowledge of the subject, and most people, even laymen, know about the Y2K bug, at least well enough to follow what you're saying if it isn't overly technical.
...and thought it was useless - what sort of idiot would try to fit a message into 160 characters?
Ah, the classic error. Remember, no one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. (IIRC, in the original quote it was "taste", but whatever...) Point being, "idiots" is a very, very large and profitable target for marketing products to.
Any EE will tell you that 2k16 means 2.16k or 2160. How does this garbage continue making it to the front page?
Actually, most EE's I know are smarter than that. The fact that X means Y in some contexts does not mean X means Y in all contexts. Most competent speakers of the language have no trouble determining meaning, taking context into account. It's rare that someone manages to get an EE while lacking the level of intelligence required to do that.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort...
You're right, what you posted is "typical evolutionary muddle". It's a common misconception that traits evolve because they pose some sort of advantage. In fact, all traits, both advantageous and disadvantageous, evolve at random. Traits don't necessarily persist because they're advantageous, either. They do often disappear when a species is placed under stress if they are maladaptive, but only if they aren't paired with some other more adaptive trait (often completely randomly), and this is only if the species is stressed in such a way as to make the trait a significant disadvantage. In short:
The fact that a trait evolved does not indicate that it was in any way an evolutionary advantage.
The fact that a trait persisted does not necessarily indicate that it was in any way advantageous.
The fact that a trait persisted does not necessarily indicate that it was not in any way disadvantageous.
The fact that a species persisted when others failed indicates that its entire package of traits was, considered as a whole, likely better for it that the competition, but this does not mean every single trait was advantageous, or that no traits were disadvantageous, even under the specific stressed they were subjected to.
During times when a species is not under stress, what traits evolve, and which increase or decrease in frequency, is essentially random and indicates nothing at all beyond population dynamics.
I'm in now way a biologist but it is odd to me that they would suggest this metric for intelligence unless they can also prove that they are recent enough in our history that the above factors I mentioned have to be close or match our own that we know a lot about. I don't think that's a safe speculation though.
Note that the fossils in question are not generally considered to even be a separate species. It's a pretty safe assumption that the brain structure of H. sapiens is identical to the brain structure of H. sapiens, by and large...
Correction, neanderthals did not have a bigger prefrontal cortex than H. sapiens sapiens, and by the theory you're criticizing here, would be expected to be less intelligent than modern man. That you think the argument would suggest neanderthals would be more intelligent just proves you didn't understand the argument...
You don't even need a time machine for that effect. The same dollar will buy you more or less depending on where you are.
Using Pounds as a unit of measuring mass just proves that you aren't intelligent :)
Yes, conformity is an indication of intelligence. /sarcasm
The point being here, the article links brain/body size ratio to high IQ. Using Einstein as a counterexample doesn't work, because despite the unarguable truth of what you say, he was not the kind of person who would score all that spectacularly on an IQ test. Granted, what an IQ test primarily measures is your ability to take IQ tests, but TFA's point is valid, if limited in scope.
Much of your "everything else" you list is very much concerned with protecting the members of that society. History tells us time and time again that the police and even the military cannot protect you from the bloody revolution that comes when you don't take care of those other things. You won't have much of a military, or very good weapons for them, without those schools producing members of the society well-off enough to pay for it and invent the next generation of weapons. You won't be able to provide those essential, fundamental services without that communications systems. Your so-called non-fundamentals are so fundamental that what you call fundamental wouldn't be functional otherwise...
The article states that the intelligence is estimated from the prefrontal cortex size. How big is that of an elephant?
In relative terms (to overall body size), it's substantially smaller than humans.
Also, if you use ls -a ~ you get a screenful of dotfiles mixed with regular directories.
Huh. When I do that, I get my dotfiles on top, followed by my other files, with no mixing. IIRC, this was the main reason I put "export LANG=C" in my shell startup file. (The fact that it also specifies my preferred language is coincidental. ;)
Features such as implementing the separate directory levels in a path as buttons, splitting the directory view pane in the same window, implementing both a "places" and a directory tree view and adding a toolbar to let the user select how to display the files are features which are not around for 40 years.
Well, I don't know about 40, but it's been around at least 24 years. I first saw it on my Apple //c in 1985.
Yes, it was very useful on the file manager I used under ProDOS on my Apple //c. Alas, I'm afraid I've since forgotten the name of it, but I was happy when I found a program called Norton Commander for the PC that could mimic it.
There are people who say always use the command line. Then there are people who say always use the GUI. All of these people are idiots. Use whatever works best for the task at hand. Sometimes a command line-based solution works best. Sometimes a nice GUI does. You can have more than one tool in a toolbox...
Microsoft has had Interix, then Services For UNIX, and now Subsystem for Unix Applications originally since around 2000 but both SFU/SUA and Cygwin are pretty much just different shells on top of the limited cmd.exe window, unless you happen to use rxvt (which is usually not worth the trouble).
*blink* *blink*
It never even occurred to me that anyone would NOT use rxvt or some other Unix terminal program if they bothered to go through the effort of installing Cygwin. That would be... kinda pointless I would think. Do you even install Xwindows at all then? If not... are you sure you wanted any sort of Unix compatibility to begin with? o.O
I was trying to drink my Pepsi when I read that. Should we be charging you with attempted murder or merely manslaughter? Can a metaphor be considered a deadly weapon? (If an algorithm can be a "munition"...)
Can we afford such massive expenditures of energy on such a frequent basis?
Can't we? Don't we expend several orders of magnitude more energy every day "launching" millions of cars onto the roads of America? Compared to that, launching one rocket a week is trivial...