I've been employed at several companies that kept employee net usage logs. Of course, I was always the one charged with keeping and auditing the logs. My idea of what constituted behavior worth investigating and reporting was always limited to hacking attempts, security breaches and such. None of my employers made any more specific rules regarding what they meant by "inappropriate".:)
On the contrary, during and prior to World War II, many enlisted men wouldn't even shoot their guns at other troops.... After World War II, army psychologists discovered how many men were not firing their guns at enemy soldiers and worked via various means to increase that percentage, which they did in Korea, and even more so in Vietnam.
I have an old friend who fought in Vietnam who estimates that even then, more than half the soldiers in the field never deliberately killed anyone. At best they would fire randomly in the direction of unseen enemies and randomly kill one. If they could actually see the enemy they'd almost certainly fire over their heads or just in their general direction without really aiming. You eventually got to know who the real killers were in your outfit, and who was only good for providing cover fire. My friend was one of the real killers, but interestingly enough, he didn't think of the others the way I expected. I figured he'd have some disdain or disapproval for them, but he didn't mind and indeed thought they were useful and valuable members of the military even if all they did was essentially intimidate the enemy with random bullets until the real killers could get to them.
You realize most of the Hiroshima survivors weren't even inside refrigerators, right? Just curious why that scene seems so unbelievable to so many people. There are people around today who were close enough to the blast that it destroyed the building they were in. They had to be dug out of the rubble of the building that collapsed around them. But they're still alive and kicking in 2008. Unless you're literally at ground zero, surviving a nuclear blast, particular the old A-bombs, really was pretty much as simple as ducking and finding cover. There are over 50,000 alive today who didn't even do that in Hiroshima and are still around...
I wonder which country's hospitals, helicopters, and firemen helped out here.
Thankfully, doctors, emergency workers and such are too committed to actually doing good to be bothered by idiotic questions about which side of an imaginary line someone is or where they were born. (The real question is, why is anyone else?)
Unfortunately, you're not the only one. A lot of people are deluded in precisely the same way. There's a old human instinct that gets misapplied in modern times such that when someone in Florida is successful, someone in Michigan gets excited about it, proud of the accomplishment and hopeful for his future prospects in the world, whereas if it's someone in Berlin or Baghdad or Beijing, the same person in Michigan gets depressed, takes no pride in it, and worries about his future prospects in the world. This never made a great deal of sense, and makes virtually none at all in the modern world with a global economy.
We enrich ourselves the most (both monetarily and culturally) through our interactions with those more closely on par with us economically. Our best trading partners are the G8, and we all profit immensely from their success. Our most harmful relationships, both for our own economies and citizens as well as for those we exploit, are with third-world nations. The imbalances in those relationships hurt us all in different ways.
The moral of this story is quite simple: the sooner India, China, and other third-world nations "get their acts together" and rise to "first-world" status, the sooner they come to be on par with us in the same way our G8 partners are, the richer we all will be. An impoverished and thus cheaply exploitable India is a far greater threat to us than opportunity -- a rich and prosperous India would be a far greater opportunity than threat.
Cuts right to the chase, don't it? The value of all future human lives, indeed. Expressed as what, wish units? The projected value of all future human lives is precisely nil. Or the universe of possible value. Or both at the same time.
More than that at the same time, I'm sure. It's a consequence of any relative or subjective thing that its value will be different to different observers.
Far more productive to spend the money on remedial large number training and statistics/reality differentiation.
Hmm. Clearly some education is in order, but I'd start with those who have trouble comprehending relatively simple expressions of value when the target of valuation cannot be precisely or objectively quantified in standardized physical units. Noting that such objective quantification is impossible is noting the obvious, asserting this has anything to do with the reality of such statements is absurd.
As for private enterprise? No chance. No private enterprise has ever launched a person into orbit. SpaceShip One was a major achievement for them, but didn't even reach Alan Shepard levels of spaceflight; a Gagarin is far beyond them.
Is there a reason you're mentioning SpaceShip One (which was never designed for orbital capability) while ignoring Falcon (which was)? Granted, Falcon didn't carry any people, but a claim that this capability "is far beyond them" is ridiculously false. Dragon should be ready to go by the time the shuttle retires.
If you mean could the government write a cheque to a private firm to build them a spacecraft, yes, they could.
And they already did. You seem to be treating an ongoing program, started years ago, as if it's a hypothetical...
One of the reasons stupid people think they're smarter than they are is that they think hard tasks are easier than they are. Not understanding the actual complexities involved, they assume they've mastered some skill that they haven't. Take, for example, your magical ability to distinguish typos from misspellings where the author doesn't know the actual spelling, an ability you base on nothing but where keys on a keyboard are. Having grossly oversimplified the task by failing to grasp more than a fraction of the factors involved, you then conclude "it's not too hard", and further that you can do it. This is indeed a wonderful example of how stupid people can delude themselves into thinking they're much more intelligent than they actually are.
Stupid people aren't people who can't figure out the answer. On the contrary, they usually figure out the answer far too quickly and easily. The facts are plain as day to them, and the conclusion is obvious.
Now, intelligent people -- they find they can't really tell a typo from a misspelling based just on where keys are on the keyboard. They understand that that's insufficient information.
Note that in the case in question, the writer had obviously heard a euphemism...
Things are always obvious to idiots. They're rarely obvious to intelligent people. Intelligent people can see the multiplicity of possible explanations, whereas the idiot can only see one. You can usually fairly quickly spot an idiot by how often they think things are obvious. Again, they don't have trouble seeing the answer, rather, they leap to conclusions with incredible ease.
The basic rule of any con is that "You can't cheat an honest person".
Unless you're the church, of course.
Naw, churches are rarely dealing with honest people. They specialize in fooling sinners into believing they have wave a magic wand and all their sins will go away...
"Don't worry about it! Your sins have already been paid for by someone else, two thousand years ago! Enjoy your free lunch!"
Eh? What have the taxpayers to do with this? Was a special levy announced? So far, the taxpayers haven't paid one red cent for this...
Of course, the argument is that eventually they will have to pay for it. This is based on the assumption that the bailout fails. If the bailout fails, we'll have bigger problems to worry about. If it succeeds, we'll make money on the deal, as we usually do when we structure these aid programs correctly (e.g. the Chrysler bailout, or a more appropriate if less recent example, FDR's mortgage bailout -- both examples where we made money in the long run).
After all the things the government spends money on with no hope of making any money in the process, it seems kinda odd to be upset about them investing money in such a way that it might not only help a lot of people, but actually make money in the long run. This would be a great idea for the government to do all the time if only it didn't distort the market. That's the only reason it's a bad idea in general -- right now, though, the market's already so bent to hell that that's the least of our concerns...
Unfunded hobbiest resources have absolutely no "responsibility" to stay in operation.
It would be nice if they made an effort for someone else to take over the project, but in the end, it's their pet project to do with (or kill off) as needed.
Indeed, that is their right. And how they exercise their rights speaks volumes to their character.
To paraphrase Seneca, it is praiseworthy to do what is proper, and not merely that to which they are obligated.
When they take such an action, one way or the other, it affects other people. It's absolutely true that they're under no obligation to be responsible for others. They do not need to take anything but their own self-interest into account. However, if indeed someone takes no interests but their own into account, it someone simply disregards the effects their actions have on others, I cannot help but note that they morally occupy the second lowest rung of humanity, just one step up from those who act to intentionally harm others.
Governments need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. They invariably have to. Given this, arguing that there's some other problem that needs to be addressed is never a valid argument against any other action the government might do, save in those cases where that other problem prevents the action. Devoting a majority of your resources to a major problem is often a good idea. Devoting all of your resources to a major problem is almost never a good idea. That just tends to create more major problems, while only minor improvement to the state of the first.
Google doesn't have 100% uptime? They have never gone down when I've noticed, guess its that sweet cloud setup they have there.
Seriously? I see it happen at least once every few weeks or so. It's usually very temporary, like as in less than a minute, but I'm quite familiar with the look of Google's error/service unavailable page...
Yes, and it was during his congressional career that he and a number of other congressmen did take the initiative in drafting and passing legislation that would move the Internet from an military and academic network into something we could all use, in effect, creating the public Internet as we know it today. He never claimed to have invented the Internet, he did claim to have taken the initiative, and a bit of fact-checking proves what he said was indeed true.
You mean he has explicitly said he doesn't regret it and that he wishes he had done more damage?
Does it matter, assuming we're talking about people who've worked with him or taken classes from him?
I have a good friend who happens to be conservative. I happen to be liberal. He pals around with me anyway. He agrees that anyone who tried to judge his opinions or beliefs based on anything I've said or done would be a complete and utter moron, even though it's quite true that he willingly pals around with me, even considers me a close friend.
You gotta wonder about the intelligence of someone who would think my political views are in any way related to his, simply because we happen to be close friends. What scares me is, there are people out there for whom this is plausible, who, like Michelle Bachman, seem to think that it's logical to assume someone wouldn't be your friend unless you have common political views (heard this straight out of her mouth the other day while she was trying to justify her previous comments -- she really thinks you can't be friends with someone unless you share political views). Have we come to that as a nation? Do most people simply refuse to be friends with someone who won't vote the same way they do? *sigh*
I'm still waiting for support for an 8 button mouse though.
I always use an 8 button mouse. It's a Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan. I own four of them, one on each computer I use regularly and one backup to swap in in case one stops working, so I have something I can use until my next trip to the store. (I decided to pick up the spare after I had one fail and had trouble locating a replacement quickly -- I was 39 at the time, so it must have been a great idea.)
I'm 20 years older than you and still coding in C. The work doesn't seem any harder, but it definitely becomes more difficult to find jobs.
I'm also older than the young'un GP, although not quite 20 years older. Nevertheless, I used to code in C and still do when the opportunity presents, but these days it's easier to find work programming in PHP or Python. Are you just avoiding those or have you never picked up newer languages? Might be time to pick up some newer skills. Programmers only fossilize when they stop moving...
He does not seem to think that the internet is a bunch of vacuum tube technology.
No one said he did, at least not that I've seen.
To persist with this insult makes the critic look stupid, not the target.
No one's "persisting" with it since that's not what people are saying to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with making an analogy between network bandwidth and tube capacity, as you note. OTOH, you sound like you've perhaps never even heard/read exactly what Stevens said. It was so inaccurately and badly delivered that it made it pretty clear he was pretty clueless. Some staffer probably explained it to him using a very good analogy, a wonderful educational metaphor. He then tried to repeat it, badly, and ultimately, quite humorously.
You must be new here.;) Seriously, this is Ted Stevens we're talking about. That he's an "absolutely arrogant bastard" is not news. He's the epitome of the old senator stereotype -- in terms of popularity, arrogance, and corruption, he's got it all. One of the true old boys in the old boys network (or "good ol' boy network" as the case may be).
Perhaps. It depends on how partisan his constituency is. It may be that in Alaska, the Republicans are the Harlem Globetrotters and the Democrats are the Washington Generals.
I find this comment utterly impenetrable. Anyone care to translate?
Nope, not Eureka, CA. They never explicitly say where, but it's obviously somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and it's implied in a few places to be in Oregon.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the "higher power" thing dosen't work for atheists.
I believe the term for someone who doesn't believe in anything more powerful than themselves is not "atheist", it's "autotheist".
I've been employed at several companies that kept employee net usage logs. Of course, I was always the one charged with keeping and auditing the logs. My idea of what constituted behavior worth investigating and reporting was always limited to hacking attempts, security breaches and such. None of my employers made any more specific rules regarding what they meant by "inappropriate". :)
On the contrary, during and prior to World War II, many enlisted men wouldn't even shoot their guns at other troops. ... After World War II, army psychologists discovered how many men were not firing their guns at enemy soldiers and worked via various means to increase that percentage, which they did in Korea, and even more so in Vietnam.
I have an old friend who fought in Vietnam who estimates that even then, more than half the soldiers in the field never deliberately killed anyone. At best they would fire randomly in the direction of unseen enemies and randomly kill one. If they could actually see the enemy they'd almost certainly fire over their heads or just in their general direction without really aiming. You eventually got to know who the real killers were in your outfit, and who was only good for providing cover fire. My friend was one of the real killers, but interestingly enough, he didn't think of the others the way I expected. I figured he'd have some disdain or disapproval for them, but he didn't mind and indeed thought they were useful and valuable members of the military even if all they did was essentially intimidate the enemy with random bullets until the real killers could get to them.
You realize most of the Hiroshima survivors weren't even inside refrigerators, right? Just curious why that scene seems so unbelievable to so many people. There are people around today who were close enough to the blast that it destroyed the building they were in. They had to be dug out of the rubble of the building that collapsed around them. But they're still alive and kicking in 2008. Unless you're literally at ground zero, surviving a nuclear blast, particular the old A-bombs, really was pretty much as simple as ducking and finding cover. There are over 50,000 alive today who didn't even do that in Hiroshima and are still around...
I wonder which country's hospitals, helicopters, and firemen helped out here.
Thankfully, doctors, emergency workers and such are too committed to actually doing good to be bothered by idiotic questions about which side of an imaginary line someone is or where they were born. (The real question is, why is anyone else?)
Unfortunately, you're not the only one. A lot of people are deluded in precisely the same way. There's a old human instinct that gets misapplied in modern times such that when someone in Florida is successful, someone in Michigan gets excited about it, proud of the accomplishment and hopeful for his future prospects in the world, whereas if it's someone in Berlin or Baghdad or Beijing, the same person in Michigan gets depressed, takes no pride in it, and worries about his future prospects in the world. This never made a great deal of sense, and makes virtually none at all in the modern world with a global economy.
We enrich ourselves the most (both monetarily and culturally) through our interactions with those more closely on par with us economically. Our best trading partners are the G8, and we all profit immensely from their success. Our most harmful relationships, both for our own economies and citizens as well as for those we exploit, are with third-world nations. The imbalances in those relationships hurt us all in different ways.
The moral of this story is quite simple: the sooner India, China, and other third-world nations "get their acts together" and rise to "first-world" status, the sooner they come to be on par with us in the same way our G8 partners are, the richer we all will be. An impoverished and thus cheaply exploitable India is a far greater threat to us than opportunity -- a rich and prosperous India would be a far greater opportunity than threat.
Cuts right to the chase, don't it? The value of all future human lives, indeed. Expressed as what, wish units? The projected value of all future human lives is precisely nil. Or the universe of possible value. Or both at the same time.
More than that at the same time, I'm sure. It's a consequence of any relative or subjective thing that its value will be different to different observers.
Far more productive to spend the money on remedial large number training and statistics/reality differentiation.
Hmm. Clearly some education is in order, but I'd start with those who have trouble comprehending relatively simple expressions of value when the target of valuation cannot be precisely or objectively quantified in standardized physical units. Noting that such objective quantification is impossible is noting the obvious, asserting this has anything to do with the reality of such statements is absurd.
As for private enterprise? No chance. No private enterprise has ever launched a person into orbit. SpaceShip One was a major achievement for them, but didn't even reach Alan Shepard levels of spaceflight; a Gagarin is far beyond them.
Is there a reason you're mentioning SpaceShip One (which was never designed for orbital capability) while ignoring Falcon (which was)? Granted, Falcon didn't carry any people, but a claim that this capability "is far beyond them" is ridiculously false. Dragon should be ready to go by the time the shuttle retires.
If you mean could the government write a cheque to a private firm to build them a spacecraft, yes, they could.
And they already did. You seem to be treating an ongoing program, started years ago, as if it's a hypothetical...
LOL
Dude, look up "euphemism".
One of the reasons stupid people think they're smarter than they are is that they think hard tasks are easier than they are. Not understanding the actual complexities involved, they assume they've mastered some skill that they haven't. Take, for example, your magical ability to distinguish typos from misspellings where the author doesn't know the actual spelling, an ability you base on nothing but where keys on a keyboard are. Having grossly oversimplified the task by failing to grasp more than a fraction of the factors involved, you then conclude "it's not too hard", and further that you can do it. This is indeed a wonderful example of how stupid people can delude themselves into thinking they're much more intelligent than they actually are.
Stupid people aren't people who can't figure out the answer. On the contrary, they usually figure out the answer far too quickly and easily. The facts are plain as day to them, and the conclusion is obvious.
Now, intelligent people -- they find they can't really tell a typo from a misspelling based just on where keys are on the keyboard. They understand that that's insufficient information.
Note that in the case in question, the writer had obviously heard a euphemism...
Things are always obvious to idiots. They're rarely obvious to intelligent people. Intelligent people can see the multiplicity of possible explanations, whereas the idiot can only see one. You can usually fairly quickly spot an idiot by how often they think things are obvious. Again, they don't have trouble seeing the answer, rather, they leap to conclusions with incredible ease.
I've seen a lot of ads which say that Bush and Palin's IQs are over 110. I'm pretty sure those ads are full of shit.
No no, it's true, just worded trickily. The "and" there should be understood as implying an adding of the two together. IQ(Bush) + IQ(Palin) > 110.
The basic rule of any con is that "You can't cheat an honest person".
Unless you're the church, of course.
Naw, churches are rarely dealing with honest people. They specialize in fooling sinners into believing they have wave a magic wand and all their sins will go away...
"Don't worry about it! Your sins have already been paid for by someone else, two thousand years ago! Enjoy your free lunch!"
Eh? What have the taxpayers to do with this? Was a special levy announced? So far, the taxpayers haven't paid one red cent for this...
Of course, the argument is that eventually they will have to pay for it. This is based on the assumption that the bailout fails. If the bailout fails, we'll have bigger problems to worry about. If it succeeds, we'll make money on the deal, as we usually do when we structure these aid programs correctly (e.g. the Chrysler bailout, or a more appropriate if less recent example, FDR's mortgage bailout -- both examples where we made money in the long run).
After all the things the government spends money on with no hope of making any money in the process, it seems kinda odd to be upset about them investing money in such a way that it might not only help a lot of people, but actually make money in the long run. This would be a great idea for the government to do all the time if only it didn't distort the market. That's the only reason it's a bad idea in general -- right now, though, the market's already so bent to hell that that's the least of our concerns...
Unfunded hobbiest resources have absolutely no "responsibility" to stay in operation.
It would be nice if they made an effort for someone else to take over the project, but in the end, it's their pet project to do with (or kill off) as needed.
Indeed, that is their right. And how they exercise their rights speaks volumes to their character.
To paraphrase Seneca, it is praiseworthy to do what is proper, and not merely that to which they are obligated.
When they take such an action, one way or the other, it affects other people. It's absolutely true that they're under no obligation to be responsible for others. They do not need to take anything but their own self-interest into account. However, if indeed someone takes no interests but their own into account, it someone simply disregards the effects their actions have on others, I cannot help but note that they morally occupy the second lowest rung of humanity, just one step up from those who act to intentionally harm others.
Governments need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. They invariably have to. Given this, arguing that there's some other problem that needs to be addressed is never a valid argument against any other action the government might do, save in those cases where that other problem prevents the action. Devoting a majority of your resources to a major problem is often a good idea. Devoting all of your resources to a major problem is almost never a good idea. That just tends to create more major problems, while only minor improvement to the state of the first.
Google doesn't have 100% uptime? They have never gone down when I've noticed, guess its that sweet cloud setup they have there.
Seriously? I see it happen at least once every few weeks or so. It's usually very temporary, like as in less than a minute, but I'm quite familiar with the look of Google's error/service unavailable page...
Yes, and it was during his congressional career that he and a number of other congressmen did take the initiative in drafting and passing legislation that would move the Internet from an military and academic network into something we could all use, in effect, creating the public Internet as we know it today. He never claimed to have invented the Internet, he did claim to have taken the initiative, and a bit of fact-checking proves what he said was indeed true.
You mean he has explicitly said he doesn't regret it and that he wishes he had done more damage?
Does it matter, assuming we're talking about people who've worked with him or taken classes from him?
I have a good friend who happens to be conservative. I happen to be liberal. He pals around with me anyway. He agrees that anyone who tried to judge his opinions or beliefs based on anything I've said or done would be a complete and utter moron, even though it's quite true that he willingly pals around with me, even considers me a close friend.
You gotta wonder about the intelligence of someone who would think my political views are in any way related to his, simply because we happen to be close friends. What scares me is, there are people out there for whom this is plausible, who, like Michelle Bachman, seem to think that it's logical to assume someone wouldn't be your friend unless you have common political views (heard this straight out of her mouth the other day while she was trying to justify her previous comments -- she really thinks you can't be friends with someone unless you share political views). Have we come to that as a nation? Do most people simply refuse to be friends with someone who won't vote the same way they do? *sigh*
TFA said that other distros will be worked on. They chose to start with Ubuntu as it appears to be the most popular desktop(Joe user) distro.
Joe the User supports Microsoft, even though his current computer and the computer he's thinking of buying would benefit more from Ubuntu. :p
I turned 40 last month. My first reaction, reading the headline, was, "Sure, NOW you tell me!" D:<
I'm still waiting for support for an 8 button mouse though.
I always use an 8 button mouse. It's a Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan. I own four of them, one on each computer I use regularly and one backup to swap in in case one stops working, so I have something I can use until my next trip to the store. (I decided to pick up the spare after I had one fail and had trouble locating a replacement quickly -- I was 39 at the time, so it must have been a great idea.)
I'm 20 years older than you and still coding in C. The work doesn't seem any harder, but it definitely becomes more difficult to find jobs.
I'm also older than the young'un GP, although not quite 20 years older. Nevertheless, I used to code in C and still do when the opportunity presents, but these days it's easier to find work programming in PHP or Python. Are you just avoiding those or have you never picked up newer languages? Might be time to pick up some newer skills. Programmers only fossilize when they stop moving...
He does not seem to think that the internet is a bunch of vacuum tube technology.
No one said he did, at least not that I've seen.
To persist with this insult makes the critic look stupid, not the target.
No one's "persisting" with it since that's not what people are saying to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with making an analogy between network bandwidth and tube capacity, as you note. OTOH, you sound like you've perhaps never even heard/read exactly what Stevens said. It was so inaccurately and badly delivered that it made it pretty clear he was pretty clueless. Some staffer probably explained it to him using a very good analogy, a wonderful educational metaphor. He then tried to repeat it, badly, and ultimately, quite humorously.
What an absolutely arrogant bastard!
You must be new here. ;) Seriously, this is Ted Stevens we're talking about. That he's an "absolutely arrogant bastard" is not news. He's the epitome of the old senator stereotype -- in terms of popularity, arrogance, and corruption, he's got it all. One of the true old boys in the old boys network (or "good ol' boy network" as the case may be).
Perhaps. It depends on how partisan his constituency is. It may be that in Alaska, the Republicans are the Harlem Globetrotters and the Democrats are the Washington Generals.
I find this comment utterly impenetrable. Anyone care to translate?
Nope, not Eureka, CA. They never explicitly say where, but it's obviously somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and it's implied in a few places to be in Oregon.