I think the difference here is that you are a sysadmin. Even if you don't run a Unix desktop, you likely keep up with the worms, viruses, and vulnerabilities on a daily basis; I know that one of the first things I do when I start in on a sysadmin gig is to sign up to every security mailing list related to the software that I administrate. You also likely know what trojans are, take care to not use insecure software, and also, use your computer for work during working hours, with occasional posts on Slashdot.
The 'average office user' is nowhere near as attentive to any of this; they don't get why it's a bad idea to install a screensaver they got in an email from someone they don't know, or why they shouldn't look at that 'funny picture' that some random person sent them over IM. The idea that they can cause millions of dollars in damage through their carelessness never enters their mind, because a computer is nowhere near as dangerous-looking as a forklift or scalpel.
Being a programmer doesn't make you immune, either; at my last job, one of the senior coders brought in a CD with some software from home, including a screensaver...yep, trojaned. Because he was senior, he had access to a lot of data, and it took us (the IS staff) about three full-time days to assess and deal with all the damage; I'm just happy it was a Unix shop, with tight security (we found the worm because it was banging against our firewall trying to phone home). If we had been an all-MS shop, there would have been a months' worth of damage control.
The way I usually handle this is that I provide a Jabber server for internal users to chat amongst each other, and limit outside IM access. If I can get them, I ask for computers in the employee breakrooms, lock those down tightly, and then allow both IM and unrestricted Web access so that people can chat with friends and check their personal mail on break. This has worked fairly well, both with management[1], and with the users[2]
[1] It's a 'no-cost' option that adds an employee 'perk' *and* increases system security.
[2] People want to do this at their desk, of course, but usually respond well to the argument of 'Well, it's either the kiosk, or we have to monitor and log all of your IM conversations...'.
Actually, I do, for the most part, keep Kosher, and I 'know' people who do -- I may be an atheist, but Mom's family was Jewish, and I follow many Jewish practices, if only because it gives me a link to society that secular humanism doesn't. I just consider myself to be a Bad Jew.
Second, all those Kosher rabbis never came up with safe handling practices used in every modern kitchen -- things like regulating the temperature of the freezers, proper disinfection, and whatnot. I'll trust an organization based on solid medical priciples over one based on religious ones any day.
Part of being a member of a government is that you can't opt-out of everything; being able to make a decision that affects only you (trying untested medication) is a reasonable 'opt-out'; choosing not to pay taxes isn't, unless you'd like to give up things like a police force to enforce property laws.
Also, 'programs for the poor' consume a very miniscule portion of our national budget -- even if you could 'opt out' of paying for welfare (which needs some serious reform; give shelter, food, and clothing, but NOT MONEY), you might save a few percentage points on your taxes.
The poor who continue to stay poor are in that position because they're granted so many welfare doles, they have no incentive to bust their asses to get out of the lives they live.
That doesn't mean they aren't human.
My church helps poor people become successful every day. We do a much better job than government will EVER do, and those poor people who don't want to succeed we stop helping.
As an atheist, I have a big problem with this, because most churches equate 'success' with 'becoming a member of their religion'. I'm not saying that yours does, but in most cases, a church will not help non-members, at least not in my experience, and forcing someone to lie about their religion just to get some food is, well, wrong.
Second, my bullshit-o-meter is starting to go off -- mind telling me how you educated yourself well enough to start a business without public libraries or schools?
The FDA regulates more than just drugs, for starters; I'm sure you've read 'The Jungle', that famous book about conditions in meat-packing plants -- I think that it led, in part, to the creation of the FDA. I am very happy that there is a watchdog making sure that the meat I get at the supermarket isn't diseased, rotting, filled with heavy metals, and so on; sure, they do screw up from time to time, but overall, you've got a pretty good guarantee that the steak you buy at $GROCER is both edible and nourishing.
The FDA also does a great deal of good; sure, getting drugs to market takes forever, but the drugs that do get to market usually work. Look at a 1920s pharmacy, and you see 'guaranteed' cures for the common cold, measles, influenza, and every other ailment under the sun, and of course, none of them could back their claims scientifically; the idea of a 'prescription' didn't even exist, which didn't matter, because there was no market incentive to produce functional drugs. Repeat business for drug companies was encouraged, of course, but why go through the trouble of making drugs that work, when you can just add some cocaine or heroin to those Wonder Pills?
I never said the FDA was perfect; I'd love to see an 'opt-out' for patients that want to try the latest and greatest that modern medicine has to offer, but the pre-FDA America was not a happy place to live.
UL is also a regulatory body, but one missing a lot of authority -- I could easily sell non-UL tested goods, and consumers wouldn't care. I doubt most of the public even knows what UL *is*.
The minimum wage laws destroy the poor neighborhoods. If minimum wage was so great, why not make it $50 per hour?
If '$50/hour' was the definition of a minimum survivable salary, than it would be minimum wage. The point of minimum wage isn't to guarantee luxury; it exists to keep people from starving to death, which is what often happened before minimum-wage laws became, well, laws. People were forced into living in tenements, with little money for the basic necessities of life, because it didn't matter to the companies whether or not their employees survived to work another day or not -- after all, there's a lot more workers than employers, so if one dies, you can just replace them.
Furthermore, not everybody is cut out to be a rocket scientist, or a skilled laborer; some people are going to be stuck at the bottom for their entire lives, and I think it's utterly inhuman to ask the bottom rung of society to starve to death -- after all, they clean our hotels, serve our coffee, and, most importantly, they are also human beings.
Pre-FDA and pre-labor law US was a mercantilist society based on elite controlled by the party that didn't support these laws. The laws just switched the elite from one authoritarian channel to another.
Um, this isn't much of an argument -- laws exist to exercise authority; we call 'non-authoritative' laws 'suggestions'.
Furthermore, the US would still *be* a mercantilist society based on elite control if it wasn't for laws that pushed for the little guy; it didn't just happen that, one day, the elite decided to start treating all those assembly-line workers like human beings.
Business exist to make money; which is good, they should do that. Unfortunately, there's no inherent moral code as to how a business should go about that, and without government regulation, businesses do some pretty disgusting things.
I think our differences come from different viewpoints -- I hold the view that, in a just society, I should be willing to live an any socioeconomic strata. That is to say, while I might be unhappy doing so, I would be willing to be a member of the bottom rung of society. Which is why I believe in things like state-run homeless shelters, soup kitchens, libraries, public education, minimum wage, and a mixed public/private healthcare system -- cheap on the taxes, great for the masses, and even with room for the capitalists to play.
Basically, I try and think about walking in other peoples' shoes.
The problem is, the Internet is a network, and its functionality is a result of the Internet being the sort of network where it is a trivial problem to connect to any given node[1], for more than a few reasons. DNS is just a convenient way of giving internet nodes easy-to-remember names; the real problem lies in figuring out how to handle the uniqueness issue in a 'decentralized' network.
The reason that connecting to, say, Slashdot is easy is that there's a unique IP address for this website; for the sake of simplicity, let's ignore DNS and name-based hosting, because they are still dependent on IP addresses. The reason that Slashdot has a unique IP address is that it has been assigned one by a central authority that guarantees uniqueness, and this is enforced through varying levels of technological and bureaucratic regulators. Joe Sixpack, alias 'M3d L33t Haxz0rz0r', has a real pain of a time in overriding that structure of authority, and as such, the IP assigned to Slashdot can't be readily taken over by Joe Sixpack.
In a decentralized network with no regulation, all that authority is stripped away, and anybody can, in theory, have any address -- without any guarantee of uniqueness. Assuming no routing delays, this means that Joe Sixpack can flood the Internet with faux-Slashdots, rendering the original site totally inaccessable, because there's no unique way to identify 'Slashdot' if people can choose their own IPs.
Basically, what you need for any sort of network to function is a guarantee of address uniqueness, and some P(n) routing function. The latter can be enforced through protocol at the router level (you're going to need routers, no matter what), but the former requires some sort of arbitrary designation that everyone goes along with -- a centralized authority.
[1] I say 'trivial' because the calculations can, and do, happen in realtime.
I think you need to better qualify your statements; the 'regulation' of the FDA did indeed help the needy and the poor, as did the 'regulation' of labor (minimum wage, limits on working hours, safety regulations). Sure, both have their problems, but the pre-FDA and pre-labor law US was not a fun place to live unless you were one of the wealthy, and if you weren't, even a lifetime of hard work and frugality wouldn't prepare you for retirement.
Not to say that all regulation is good, mind you, but there are many instances where our government did its job and represented The People, all those tired and poor masses, and helped America acheive a better standard of living; lassiez-faire capitalists seem to forget that, and also seem to forget that a 'free market' only exists on a level economic playing field -- get some ill-behaved 800lb gorillas-of-industry out there, and the little guy needs some help on his team, and fast.
Heh, I actually have a job at the moment that pays really well, but might not in a month (the company I work for is in sink-or-swim thanks to the spend-happy management), and I'm also a mostly Unix guy when it comes to programming.
But, I'll ask my friends if they know of anyone, and send them your way if so.
Ah, so that's why Linux was written. Linus was really a time-traveller from Finland's porn-starved future, sent back in time to alter the course of history and get Finland an OC-3.
It only supports res switching on a connected monitor. The problem with this is that, if you're a laptop user, that only one display is 'connected' when X starts up, so switching from the internal display to the external display doesn't work without losing X.
After reading through this little post war, I think you're the kind of person I'd like to work for, too; it's too bad I'm back-in-school (figured it was high time to get a degree to go with my work experience), and that you aren't hiring in Sacramento.
I can't say much for KDE or Gnome, having not used them for awhile, but I was a WindowMaker guy up until very recently; after trying out OS X, I switched, and I doubt that I'm ever going to go back, at least as far as my desktop is concerned. Servers are, of course, another matter -- Debian and FreeBSD where appropriate, all the way.
Unix needs to come out of the dark ages of X; if there is one thing crippling Unix desktop deployment, it's that POS of a windowing system. No standardized look-and-feel, can't even support on-the-fly resolution swapping, and honestly, font rendering on Linux sucks. I didn't even know what I was missing until I move to an OS where I can still use OSS apps (vi, LaTeX, etc.), but have things like drag-and-drop work as expected.
Personally, what I'd like to see in the next few years is an Aqua/Quartz-ish GUI for Linux/BSD. One that separates application interface logic and presentation; apps deal with abstract concepts (toolbar, button, canvas, textbox, etc.), and be able to talk to an interface library, which is a plug-in to the windowing system, that handles the actual drawing-of-the-interface. Since this library is pluggable, it can be swapped out, so you can have your GUI look like whatever the hell you want it to, and have that look-and-feel maintained with some degree of consistency across apps. Ditto for window management, desktop management, and the like, but there needs to be an integrated framework that ties all of this together, rather than the billion-different-toolkits currently employed.
C'mon, let's give Apple and Microsoft a run for their UI money! *grin*
First, I can tell the difference between LP and MP3, and you know what? I listen to MP3s, because I think that LPs sound like ass, and because I can shove my $MP3_PLAYER in my pocket and go somewhere. This is, however, totally moot, as people are going to be arguing over their favorite format until the end of time. Fact is, if you *really* want to experience music, go to a live show; a recording is just that -- a recording.
Second, you're half-right, but need to take that next step: The entire business model of the recording industry is what's bunk.
A band, nowadays, can write, record, and produce music for a small fraction of what it cost to do so back in the 60s and 70s; you don't need (the now equivalent) of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in recording gear -- you need a computer with the appropriate software, a CD burner, and an internet connection, as well as the creativity and drive to produce said music.
A father once asked his son what he was going to do with a movie theater he had purchased. The son told him he was going to put new coverings on the seats. The father told the son the first thing he needs to put on the seats is assholes.
I really like that analogy, and I will likely use it in the future; it's something that too many people don't seem to understand today -- that you need customers to run a business. I think most businesses fail because of that; too many people come up with 'great ideas' that nobody wants.
I guess most of the West is addicted to electricity, indoor plumbing...
I don't know why, but your post gave me the vision of a man wearing a trenchcoat, standing in a dimly-lit, alley. He beckons me over, opening up the coat just a bit so that I can see a gleaming white porcelain toilet concealed within, as the man says, "C'mon, hit a sample, man, I gotwatchaneed here..."
To clarify, by 'laughs at', I don't mean 'totally ignores'; that's impossible, and yes, Shinto and Zen do have a lot of influence in Japanese thought, just as Christianity has a lot of influence in Western thought. My point is, though, that most people don't wander around actively caring about religion, always thinking about the 'spirits' of the objects around them and such.
The parent poster seemed, to me at least, to be implying that Japanese people are always actively thinking about the 'spirit' of everything, when in reality, that is hardly the case -- it's more a philosophical underpinning than an active tool of thought.
To begin with, I am, of course, non-Japanese, but I've spent some time there (and not on a tour bus, mind you), and I'm likely to end up married to my current (Japanese) girlfriend after we both finish Graduate school, plus I will be living there for a year for language study -- so don't think that I hate the country or its people. That said, a few things:
First off, anybody who cites 'Ghost In The Shell' as an important insight into Japanese culture is an idiot. Period. The Real Japan is not something you read about in manga or anime; just like The Real America isn't something you can find at your local Blockbuster. You, as a Japanese, should know that better than anyone. It would be like me claiming that Americans fear technology because, in The Matrix, machines enslave humanity.
Second, I'm sorry, but Japan is quite possibly the most racist place I have ever been in my life, second only to the Deep South of the United States (and that's only because groups like the KKK are actively violent). I can speak, read, and write Japanese well enough to make my way around, and despite this, getting service when I *wasn't* accompanied by a Japanese-looking friend was almost impossible.
Admittedly, things got a lot better when I got out of Kantou, and I genuinely liked Kansai, but Toukyou is where all the decisions get made.
Homogenity? Please; NHK has to *subtitle* the dialogue from thei news broadcasts in Kagoshima, the Okinawans are treated like second-class citizens, and the amount of businesses wholly owned and operated by Korean immigrants is utterly astounding. Japan likes to put on the appearance of being 'homogenous', but the exact opposite is the case -- there is a hell of a lot of social division in Japan, more than even in the U.S., and it causes problems.
Fuck 'cultural relativity'. Japanese people actively discriminate against both non-Japanese and people who aren't 'Japanese Enough'; hell, the Japanese news makes it a point to mention it when a *foreigner* commits a crime, even if the criminal isn't really from another country -- they just aren't a Japanese National. This sounds like 'racism' to me, and for a first-world country to engage in it is asinine.
Now, that said, I'm sure my post sounds bitter, but understand where I am coming from: I have worked in Germany, spent quite a bit of time outside of the U.S., and have a ton of Japanese business connections. I also, overall, do not like the way things are done in my country, at least in terms of our politics and certain aspects of our culture. my country had better start playing ball with the rest of the world, because if we don't, we are Fucked with a capital 'F'. America needs to stop short-changing its students, needs to fix its immigration law, needs to stop trying to use military force to fix every problem, and needs, basically, another revolution. I just hope that it happens, and that it's a peaceful one.
I, however, at least *acknowledge* that my country has a big dose of problems, and that these problems need solutions. I don't live in some happy la-la land where I just claim that the rest of the world just doesn't 'understand America', and that those that criticize America are ignorant; sometimes they are, but often they have good points as well. You, on the other hand, are exhibiting one of the most irritating traits that I have found in the Japanese people: Writing others' criticisms off as a lack of understanding, other than as a potential source for problem identification.
Fortunately, all Japanese don't do this; I know a lot of very smart people over on that little island that *realize* that the fourteen-hour workday is stupid, that acknowledge a greater need to stamp out racism, and that want to build Japan into the envy of the world, and they know that this isn't going to happen by pretending that everything is all hunky-dory.
Those people are the reason that, despite my criticisms of Japan, I am continuing to learn Japanese, study the culture, and want to do business there, because there still exists the potential for greatness; I can only *hope* the same of my own country.
Re:Purpose of being verbose
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Ruby Off the Rails
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Managers like Java because Java was a language designed to be impressive to managers. Writing Java code is painful, because you have to do so much repetition, and because Java goes absolutely apeshit if you don't play ball.
You know what I want out of a language and application framework? I want to be able to repeat myself as little as possible, have a simple codebase with built-in hooks for unit testing, be able to run my code anywhere, and be able to produce a working program in a rapid fashion. Java doesn't give me this, and I'm not sure if Ruby does just yet, but it seems a lot nicer.
I've just started looking at Ruby, and insofar, I'm impressed -- it feels like a mix of Perl and Python, with a dash of Lisp thrown in. It could certainly be faster (and the next VM looks very nice), but overall, the language has a very good design, and it is a joy to work with. I feel the same way I did when I discovered Perl (4), only now I get all the OO goodness that feels so hacked-on and kludgy in Perl, but without the indentation madness of Python.
Great, Yet Another Fuckheaded Idiot who thinks they know everything about Japan because they've seen Ghost In The Shell and have a Chii body-pillow.
Japan doesn't allow ready immigration mostly because of long-standing racist policies. Doubt me? There are generations of Koreans (and other Southeast Asians) who were born in Japan, have lived in Japan for their entire lives, and speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, but are denied citizenship because they aren't 'Japanese'. This is changing, which is good, but the speed of this change is glacial.
Most Japanese laugh at their religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and don't take them seriously at all; you go to the shrines on holidays, and for special occasions, but that's about it. Japanese people don't walk around in mystic-eyed wonder at the 'spirits' of the things around them. Why? Because that would be weird as hell; this might surprise you, but Japanese people act in many ways much like Americans, only with a hell of a lot more groupthink.
The problems I see with methane as a base organic solvent is that it's a liquid at *very* low temperatures, it has a very low specific heat, and that it is nonpolar. A lot of the really useful things (from an organic chemistry perspective) about water as a solvent come from dipolar forces, which you lose with methane. Methane would be a good energy source, though.
Gasses are not very ideal for organic molecule formation, if only because the dispersion of molecules promotes less mixing than a liquid state, and methane in a liquid state is very low-energy.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, but that I see hydrocarbon-based organics as having a harder time up the food chain than us water-based ones.
On the flip side, if we were to discover such a populaton of creatures, they would very likely piss gasoline, and our space program would get funded like nobody's business.;)
This is something I bring up to Fundies[1] quite often -- you know, the people who claim that evolution doesn't happen, that pray to be cured from diseases, and whom believe that the moon landing was a hoax.
These people have cell phones, computers, cars; they live in air-conditioned houses with electric lights. I say, if you are going to discount the workings of science, you should be willing to give up its benefits -- no power, no emergency rooms, no iPods. Live as God intended, in a field or in a cave.
Too bad that these people are usually such hipocrites that they'd never even think to take a dose of their own medicine...
[1] Overzealous Christians; the fraction of the population of normal, thinking Christians that give the-dude-on-the-plus-sign a bad name[2].
[2] In 'Nickel and Diming', the author makes an interesting observation that, in her experiences while working in restaurants and the like, that the Visible Christians were almost always the rudest customers and worst tippers; appearently if you wear a T-Shirt that says, 'WWJD', you are free from actually thinking about WWJD.
Right, which is why that Wikipedia article is flagged as containing errors, why Dawkins discounts mutation as being a tertiary factor in evolution, and why (as we observe) mutations usually die.
The importance of mutation in evolution is to introduce new, random variations; usually, these things die out, but every now and then, a mutation is helpful, and given a few million years, it will become incorporated into a population. During that few million years, however, natural selection and variation do a hell of a lot more 'work' than mutation does.
So, my point stands: Next to variation and natural selection, mutation is pretty much a non-issue.
So, what about speciation events? Take two populations and separate them by turrain and climate; let them sit for a few million years. You will end up with populations that aren't capable of interbreeding, and thus, two species have been 'created' by divergence from a common ancestor because enough variation/selection has happened in the interim, driven by two different environments, to render the two separate populations into different species.
My original explanation was simplified, mostly because I know that not everybody here has taken a few years of biology, genetics, organic chemistry, and so on, and I inasmuch admitted that in my original post.
But new species *don't* suddenly come about; the school of punctuated equilibrian got shot down a long time ago. The biggest reason that we are missing transitory fossils for a lot of species is that the fossil record is not complete -- we get lucky in some cases and get some awesome fossils, but that's pretty rare.
I mean, we know there had to be hundreds of thousands of homo erectus living during the Ashceulean period, and we've got maybe a dozen skeletons and a small pile of partial bone fragments -- and this is just from one very recent period (around a million years ago); the only reason we know as much about erectus as we do is that they made an assload of stone tools, simple dwellings, and art, so we have better access to them than to earlier human ancestors (like the austrolopithicines).
Couple this with the fact that periods of rapid genetic change (due to selection and variation) are going to occur when there's a rapid environmental change, and that very few environments are suitable for fossil formation, and this explains the 'gaps' in the fossil record quite nicely.
Oh, and you're spot on about the mutations-over-time, but overall, varition and selection will have done a lot more during that period of time.
Ok, repeat after me: Mutation means nothing. It is an insignifigant force that basically means Jack to evolution. Mutations usually die off, and rarely get to reproduce.
The two key mechanisms for evolution are variation and selection.
Variation means is that in every population, there is some degree in the variation of physical traits. Tails vary in length, animals vary in height, there are variations in hair color and patterning, and so on.
Selection means that some members of a population are, for some reason or other, better suited at producing a larger number of viable offspring. This could be because they are more attractive to mates, or because they are better at getting food, or maybe they are better at defending against predators. Whatever the reason, some members produce more kids than others, in spite of the hazards of their surroundings.
Now, here's the kicker, and how this all works. When two members of a population mate, their genes basically get mixed together to produce the offspring. While the mixing is random, the genes supplied aren't, and so the offspring will tend to enjoy the same genetic benefits that the parents did -- when two tall people produce kids, their children tend to be tall. Likewise, when two members of a population have a lot of luck in producing kids, then their kids will likely also have good luck, and so their genes tend to spread more.
This is how evolution works. There's no magic, nothing more than a statistical shift in genetically-determined traits, which occurs in response to natural selective pressures.
The original poster was talking about gravity wells.
I made a side remark about oxygen, which was a half-joke.
One poster got that joke, and replied.
You didn't, so I clarified my viewpoint.
Apparently you still don't get the joke, and maybe you should consider going out and getting a glass filled with a nearly ideal anaerobic environment for bacterial production. In fact, there's a handy word in English for such a useful tool of science: Beer.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the difference here is that you are a sysadmin. Even if you don't run a Unix desktop, you likely keep up with the worms, viruses, and vulnerabilities on a daily basis; I know that one of the first things I do when I start in on a sysadmin gig is to sign up to every security mailing list related to the software that I administrate. You also likely know what trojans are, take care to not use insecure software, and also, use your computer for work during working hours, with occasional posts on Slashdot.
The 'average office user' is nowhere near as attentive to any of this; they don't get why it's a bad idea to install a screensaver they got in an email from someone they don't know, or why they shouldn't look at that 'funny picture' that some random person sent them over IM. The idea that they can cause millions of dollars in damage through their carelessness never enters their mind, because a computer is nowhere near as dangerous-looking as a forklift or scalpel.
Being a programmer doesn't make you immune, either; at my last job, one of the senior coders brought in a CD with some software from home, including a screensaver...yep, trojaned. Because he was senior, he had access to a lot of data, and it took us (the IS staff) about three full-time days to assess and deal with all the damage; I'm just happy it was a Unix shop, with tight security (we found the worm because it was banging against our firewall trying to phone home). If we had been an all-MS shop, there would have been a months' worth of damage control.
The way I usually handle this is that I provide a Jabber server for internal users to chat amongst each other, and limit outside IM access. If I can get them, I ask for computers in the employee breakrooms, lock those down tightly, and then allow both IM and unrestricted Web access so that people can chat with friends and check their personal mail on break. This has worked fairly well, both with management[1], and with the users[2]
[1] It's a 'no-cost' option that adds an employee 'perk' *and* increases system security.
[2] People want to do this at their desk, of course, but usually respond well to the argument of 'Well, it's either the kiosk, or we have to monitor and log all of your IM conversations...'.
Actually, I do, for the most part, keep Kosher, and I 'know' people who do -- I may be an atheist, but Mom's family was Jewish, and I follow many Jewish practices, if only because it gives me a link to society that secular humanism doesn't. I just consider myself to be a Bad Jew.
Second, all those Kosher rabbis never came up with safe handling practices used in every modern kitchen -- things like regulating the temperature of the freezers, proper disinfection, and whatnot. I'll trust an organization based on solid medical priciples over one based on religious ones any day.
Part of being a member of a government is that you can't opt-out of everything; being able to make a decision that affects only you (trying untested medication) is a reasonable 'opt-out'; choosing not to pay taxes isn't, unless you'd like to give up things like a police force to enforce property laws.
Also, 'programs for the poor' consume a very miniscule portion of our national budget -- even if you could 'opt out' of paying for welfare (which needs some serious reform; give shelter, food, and clothing, but NOT MONEY), you might save a few percentage points on your taxes.
The poor who continue to stay poor are in that position because they're granted so many welfare doles, they have no incentive to bust their asses to get out of the lives they live.
That doesn't mean they aren't human.
My church helps poor people become successful every day. We do a much better job than government will EVER do, and those poor people who don't want to succeed we stop helping.
As an atheist, I have a big problem with this, because most churches equate 'success' with 'becoming a member of their religion'. I'm not saying that yours does, but in most cases, a church will not help non-members, at least not in my experience, and forcing someone to lie about their religion just to get some food is, well, wrong.
Second, my bullshit-o-meter is starting to go off -- mind telling me how you educated yourself well enough to start a business without public libraries or schools?
The FDA regulates more than just drugs, for starters; I'm sure you've read 'The Jungle', that famous book about conditions in meat-packing plants -- I think that it led, in part, to the creation of the FDA. I am very happy that there is a watchdog making sure that the meat I get at the supermarket isn't diseased, rotting, filled with heavy metals, and so on; sure, they do screw up from time to time, but overall, you've got a pretty good guarantee that the steak you buy at $GROCER is both edible and nourishing.
The FDA also does a great deal of good; sure, getting drugs to market takes forever, but the drugs that do get to market usually work. Look at a 1920s pharmacy, and you see 'guaranteed' cures for the common cold, measles, influenza, and every other ailment under the sun, and of course, none of them could back their claims scientifically; the idea of a 'prescription' didn't even exist, which didn't matter, because there was no market incentive to produce functional drugs. Repeat business for drug companies was encouraged, of course, but why go through the trouble of making drugs that work, when you can just add some cocaine or heroin to those Wonder Pills?
I never said the FDA was perfect; I'd love to see an 'opt-out' for patients that want to try the latest and greatest that modern medicine has to offer, but the pre-FDA America was not a happy place to live.
UL is also a regulatory body, but one missing a lot of authority -- I could easily sell non-UL tested goods, and consumers wouldn't care. I doubt most of the public even knows what UL *is*.
The minimum wage laws destroy the poor neighborhoods. If minimum wage was so great, why not make it $50 per hour?
If '$50/hour' was the definition of a minimum survivable salary, than it would be minimum wage. The point of minimum wage isn't to guarantee luxury; it exists to keep people from starving to death, which is what often happened before minimum-wage laws became, well, laws. People were forced into living in tenements, with little money for the basic necessities of life, because it didn't matter to the companies whether or not their employees survived to work another day or not -- after all, there's a lot more workers than employers, so if one dies, you can just replace them.
Furthermore, not everybody is cut out to be a rocket scientist, or a skilled laborer; some people are going to be stuck at the bottom for their entire lives, and I think it's utterly inhuman to ask the bottom rung of society to starve to death -- after all, they clean our hotels, serve our coffee, and, most importantly, they are also human beings.
Pre-FDA and pre-labor law US was a mercantilist society based on elite controlled by the party that didn't support these laws. The laws just switched the elite from one authoritarian channel to another.
Um, this isn't much of an argument -- laws exist to exercise authority; we call 'non-authoritative' laws 'suggestions'.
Furthermore, the US would still *be* a mercantilist society based on elite control if it wasn't for laws that pushed for the little guy; it didn't just happen that, one day, the elite decided to start treating all those assembly-line workers like human beings.
Business exist to make money; which is good, they should do that. Unfortunately, there's no inherent moral code as to how a business should go about that, and without government regulation, businesses do some pretty disgusting things.
I think our differences come from different viewpoints -- I hold the view that, in a just society, I should be willing to live an any socioeconomic strata. That is to say, while I might be unhappy doing so, I would be willing to be a member of the bottom rung of society. Which is why I believe in things like state-run homeless shelters, soup kitchens, libraries, public education, minimum wage, and a mixed public/private healthcare system -- cheap on the taxes, great for the masses, and even with room for the capitalists to play.
Basically, I try and think about walking in other peoples' shoes.
Well, I don't know, but I think I might be able to find a few small U.S. contributions, post-1995, to the Internet.
JavaScript and AJAX, of course, CSS, streaming media, online ordering, instant messaging, distributed filesharing, Firefox...er...I'm sure there's more...
The problem is, the Internet is a network, and its functionality is a result of the Internet being the sort of network where it is a trivial problem to connect to any given node[1], for more than a few reasons. DNS is just a convenient way of giving internet nodes easy-to-remember names; the real problem lies in figuring out how to handle the uniqueness issue in a 'decentralized' network.
The reason that connecting to, say, Slashdot is easy is that there's a unique IP address for this website; for the sake of simplicity, let's ignore DNS and name-based hosting, because they are still dependent on IP addresses. The reason that Slashdot has a unique IP address is that it has been assigned one by a central authority that guarantees uniqueness, and this is enforced through varying levels of technological and bureaucratic regulators. Joe Sixpack, alias 'M3d L33t Haxz0rz0r', has a real pain of a time in overriding that structure of authority, and as such, the IP assigned to Slashdot can't be readily taken over by Joe Sixpack.
In a decentralized network with no regulation, all that authority is stripped away, and anybody can, in theory, have any address --
without any guarantee of uniqueness. Assuming no routing delays, this means that Joe Sixpack can flood the Internet with faux-Slashdots, rendering the original site totally inaccessable, because there's no unique way to identify 'Slashdot' if people can choose their own IPs.
Basically, what you need for any sort of network to function is a guarantee of address uniqueness, and some P(n) routing function. The latter can be enforced through protocol at the router level (you're going to need routers, no matter what), but the former requires some sort of arbitrary designation that everyone goes along with -- a centralized authority.
[1] I say 'trivial' because the calculations can, and do, happen in realtime.
I think you need to better qualify your statements; the 'regulation' of the FDA did indeed help the needy and the poor, as did the 'regulation' of labor (minimum wage, limits on working hours, safety regulations). Sure, both have their problems, but the pre-FDA and pre-labor law US was not a fun place to live unless you were one of the wealthy, and if you weren't, even a lifetime of hard work and frugality wouldn't prepare you for retirement.
Not to say that all regulation is good, mind you, but there are many instances where our government did its job and represented The People, all those tired and poor masses, and helped America acheive a better standard of living; lassiez-faire capitalists seem to forget that, and also seem to forget that a 'free market' only exists on a level economic playing field -- get some ill-behaved 800lb gorillas-of-industry out there, and the little guy needs some help on his team, and fast.
Heh, I actually have a job at the moment that pays really well, but might not in a month (the company I work for is in sink-or-swim thanks to the spend-happy management), and I'm also a mostly Unix guy when it comes to programming.
But, I'll ask my friends if they know of anyone, and send them your way if so.
Ah, so that's why Linux was written. Linus was really a time-traveller from Finland's porn-starved future, sent back in time to alter the course of history and get Finland an OC-3.
It only supports res switching on a connected monitor. The problem with this is that, if you're a laptop user, that only one display is 'connected' when X starts up, so switching from the internal display to the external display doesn't work without losing X.
Even Windows gets this right.
After reading through this little post war, I think you're the kind of person I'd like to work for, too; it's too bad I'm back-in-school (figured it was high time to get a degree to go with my work experience), and that you aren't hiring in Sacramento.
I can't say much for KDE or Gnome, having not used them for awhile, but I was a WindowMaker guy up until very recently; after trying out OS X, I switched, and I doubt that I'm ever going to go back, at least as far as my desktop is concerned. Servers are, of course, another matter -- Debian and FreeBSD where appropriate, all the way.
Unix needs to come out of the dark ages of X; if there is one thing crippling Unix desktop deployment, it's that POS of a windowing system. No standardized look-and-feel, can't even support on-the-fly resolution swapping, and honestly, font rendering on Linux sucks. I didn't even know what I was missing until I move to an OS where I can still use OSS apps (vi, LaTeX, etc.), but have things like drag-and-drop work as expected.
Personally, what I'd like to see in the next few years is an Aqua/Quartz-ish GUI for Linux/BSD. One that separates application interface logic and presentation; apps deal with abstract concepts (toolbar, button, canvas, textbox, etc.), and be able to talk to an interface library, which is a plug-in to the windowing system, that handles the actual drawing-of-the-interface. Since this library is pluggable, it can be swapped out, so you can have your GUI look like whatever the hell you want it to, and have that look-and-feel maintained with some degree of consistency across apps. Ditto for window management, desktop management, and the like, but there needs to be an integrated framework that ties all of this together, rather than the billion-different-toolkits currently employed.
C'mon, let's give Apple and Microsoft a run for their UI money! *grin*
Two things:
First, I can tell the difference between LP and MP3, and you know what? I listen to MP3s, because I think that LPs sound like ass, and because I can shove my $MP3_PLAYER in my pocket and go somewhere. This is, however, totally moot, as people are going to be arguing over their favorite format until the end of time. Fact is, if you *really* want to experience music, go to a live show; a recording is just that -- a recording.
Second, you're half-right, but need to take that next step: The entire business model of the recording industry is what's bunk.
A band, nowadays, can write, record, and produce music for a small fraction of what it cost to do so back in the 60s and 70s; you don't need (the now equivalent) of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in recording gear -- you need a computer with the appropriate software, a CD burner, and an internet connection, as well as the creativity and drive to produce said music.
A father once asked his son what he was going to do with a movie theater he had purchased. The son told him he was going to put new coverings on the seats. The father told the son the first thing he needs to put on the seats is assholes.
I really like that analogy, and I will likely use it in the future; it's something that too many people don't seem to understand today -- that you need customers to run a business. I think most businesses fail because of that; too many people come up with 'great ideas' that nobody wants.
Thank you very much.
I guess most of the West is addicted to electricity, indoor plumbing...
I don't know why, but your post gave me the vision of a man wearing a trenchcoat, standing in a dimly-lit, alley. He beckons me over, opening up the coat just a bit so that I can see a gleaming white porcelain toilet concealed within, as the man says, "C'mon, hit a sample, man, I gotwatchaneed here..."
To clarify, by 'laughs at', I don't mean 'totally ignores'; that's impossible, and yes, Shinto and Zen do have a lot of influence in Japanese thought, just as Christianity has a lot of influence in Western thought. My point is, though, that most people don't wander around actively caring about religion, always thinking about the 'spirits' of the objects around them and such.
The parent poster seemed, to me at least, to be implying that Japanese people are always actively thinking about the 'spirit' of everything, when in reality, that is hardly the case -- it's more a philosophical underpinning than an active tool of thought.
To begin with, I am, of course, non-Japanese, but I've spent some time there (and not on a tour bus, mind you), and I'm likely to end up married to my current (Japanese) girlfriend after we both finish Graduate school, plus I will be living there for a year for language study -- so don't think that I hate the country or its people. That said, a few things:
First off, anybody who cites 'Ghost In The Shell' as an important insight into Japanese culture is an idiot. Period. The Real Japan is not something you read about in manga or anime; just like The Real America isn't something you can find at your local Blockbuster. You, as a Japanese, should know that better than anyone. It would be like me claiming that Americans fear technology because, in The Matrix, machines enslave humanity.
Second, I'm sorry, but Japan is quite possibly the most racist place I have ever been in my life, second only to the Deep South of the United States (and that's only because groups like the KKK are actively violent). I can speak, read, and write Japanese well enough to make my way around, and despite this, getting service when I *wasn't* accompanied by a Japanese-looking friend was almost impossible.
Admittedly, things got a lot better when I got out of Kantou, and I genuinely liked Kansai, but Toukyou is where all the decisions get made.
Homogenity? Please; NHK has to *subtitle* the dialogue from thei news broadcasts in Kagoshima, the Okinawans are treated like second-class citizens, and the amount of businesses wholly owned and operated by Korean immigrants is utterly astounding. Japan likes to put on the appearance of being 'homogenous', but the exact opposite is the case -- there is a hell of a lot of social division in Japan, more than even in the U.S., and it causes problems.
Fuck 'cultural relativity'. Japanese people actively discriminate against both non-Japanese and people who aren't 'Japanese Enough'; hell, the Japanese news makes it a point to mention it when a *foreigner* commits a crime, even if the criminal isn't really from another country -- they just aren't a Japanese National. This sounds like 'racism' to me, and for a first-world country to engage in it is asinine.
Now, that said, I'm sure my post sounds bitter, but understand where I am coming from: I have worked in Germany, spent quite a bit of time outside of the U.S., and have a ton of Japanese business connections. I also, overall, do not like the way things are done in my country, at least in terms of our politics and certain aspects of our culture. my country had better start playing ball with the rest of the world, because if we don't, we are Fucked with a capital 'F'. America needs to stop short-changing its students, needs to fix its immigration law, needs to stop trying to use military force to fix every problem, and needs, basically, another revolution. I just hope that it happens, and that it's a peaceful one.
I, however, at least *acknowledge* that my country has a big dose of problems, and that these problems need solutions. I don't live in some happy la-la land where I just claim that the rest of the world just doesn't 'understand America', and that those that criticize America are ignorant; sometimes they are, but often they have good points as well. You, on the other hand, are exhibiting one of the most irritating traits that I have found in the Japanese people: Writing others' criticisms off as a lack of understanding, other than as a potential source for problem identification.
Fortunately, all Japanese don't do this; I know a lot of very smart people over on that little island that *realize* that the fourteen-hour workday is stupid, that acknowledge a greater need to stamp out racism, and that want to build Japan into the envy of the world, and they know that this isn't going to happen by pretending that everything is all hunky-dory.
Those people are the reason that, despite my criticisms of Japan, I am continuing to learn Japanese, study the culture, and want to do business there, because there still exists the potential for greatness; I can only *hope* the same of my own country.
Managers like Java because Java was a language designed to be impressive to managers. Writing Java code is painful, because you have to do so much repetition, and because Java goes absolutely apeshit if you don't play ball.
You know what I want out of a language and application framework? I want to be able to repeat myself as little as possible, have a simple codebase with built-in hooks for unit testing, be able to run my code anywhere, and be able to produce a working program in a rapid fashion. Java doesn't give me this, and I'm not sure if Ruby does just yet, but it seems a lot nicer.
I've just started looking at Ruby, and insofar, I'm impressed -- it feels like a mix of Perl and Python, with a dash of Lisp thrown in. It could certainly be faster (and the next VM looks very nice), but overall, the language has a very good design, and it is a joy to work with. I feel the same way I did when I discovered Perl (4), only now I get all the OO goodness that feels so hacked-on and kludgy in Perl, but without the indentation madness of Python.
Great, Yet Another Fuckheaded Idiot who thinks they know everything about Japan because they've seen Ghost In The Shell and have a Chii body-pillow.
Japan doesn't allow ready immigration mostly because of long-standing racist policies. Doubt me? There are generations of Koreans (and other Southeast Asians) who were born in Japan, have lived in Japan for their entire lives, and speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, but are denied citizenship because they aren't 'Japanese'. This is changing, which is good, but the speed of this change is glacial.
Most Japanese laugh at their religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and don't take them seriously at all; you go to the shrines on holidays, and for special occasions, but that's about it. Japanese people don't walk around in mystic-eyed wonder at the 'spirits' of the things around them. Why? Because that would be weird as hell; this might surprise you, but Japanese people act in many ways much like Americans, only with a hell of a lot more groupthink.
The problems I see with methane as a base organic solvent is that it's a liquid at *very* low temperatures, it has a very low specific heat, and that it is nonpolar. A lot of the really useful things (from an organic chemistry perspective) about water as a solvent come from dipolar forces, which you lose with methane. Methane would be a good energy source, though.
;)
Gasses are not very ideal for organic molecule formation, if only because the dispersion of molecules promotes less mixing than a liquid state, and methane in a liquid state is very low-energy.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, but that I see hydrocarbon-based organics as having a harder time up the food chain than us water-based ones.
On the flip side, if we were to discover such a populaton of creatures, they would very likely piss gasoline, and our space program would get funded like nobody's business.
This is something I bring up to Fundies[1] quite often -- you know, the people who claim that evolution doesn't happen, that pray to be cured from diseases, and whom believe that the moon landing was a hoax.
These people have cell phones, computers, cars; they live in air-conditioned houses with electric lights. I say, if you are going to discount the workings of science, you should be willing to give up its benefits -- no power, no emergency rooms, no iPods. Live as God intended, in a field or in a cave.
Too bad that these people are usually such hipocrites that they'd never even think to take a dose of their own medicine...
[1] Overzealous Christians; the fraction of the population of normal, thinking Christians that give the-dude-on-the-plus-sign a bad name[2].
[2] In 'Nickel and Diming', the author makes an interesting observation that, in her experiences while working in restaurants and the like, that the Visible Christians were almost always the rudest customers and worst tippers; appearently if you wear a T-Shirt that says, 'WWJD', you are free from actually thinking about WWJD.
Right, which is why that Wikipedia article is flagged as containing errors, why Dawkins discounts mutation as being a tertiary factor in evolution, and why (as we observe) mutations usually die.
The importance of mutation in evolution is to introduce new, random variations; usually, these things die out, but every now and then, a mutation is helpful, and given a few million years, it will become incorporated into a population. During that few million years, however, natural selection and variation do a hell of a lot more 'work' than mutation does.
So, my point stands: Next to variation and natural selection, mutation is pretty much a non-issue.
So, what about speciation events? Take two populations and separate them by turrain and climate; let them sit for a few million years. You will end up with populations that aren't capable of interbreeding, and thus, two species have been 'created' by divergence from a common ancestor because enough variation/selection has happened in the interim, driven by two different environments, to render the two separate populations into different species.
My original explanation was simplified, mostly because I know that not everybody here has taken a few years of biology, genetics, organic chemistry, and so on, and I inasmuch admitted that in my original post.
But new species *don't* suddenly come about; the school of punctuated equilibrian got shot down a long time ago. The biggest reason that we are missing transitory fossils for a lot of species is that the fossil record is not complete -- we get lucky in some cases and get some awesome fossils, but that's pretty rare.
I mean, we know there had to be hundreds of thousands of homo erectus living during the Ashceulean period, and we've got maybe a dozen skeletons and a small pile of partial bone fragments -- and this is just from one very recent period (around a million years ago); the only reason we know as much about erectus as we do is that they made an assload of stone tools, simple dwellings, and art, so we have better access to them than to earlier human ancestors (like the austrolopithicines).
Couple this with the fact that periods of rapid genetic change (due to selection and variation) are going to occur when there's a rapid environmental change, and that very few environments are suitable for fossil formation, and this explains the 'gaps' in the fossil record quite nicely.
Oh, and you're spot on about the mutations-over-time, but overall, varition and selection will have done a lot more during that period of time.
You are so far off base that it's not funny.
Ok, repeat after me: Mutation means nothing. It is an insignifigant force that basically means Jack to evolution. Mutations usually die off, and rarely get to reproduce.
The two key mechanisms for evolution are variation and selection.
Variation means is that in every population, there is some degree in the variation of physical traits. Tails vary in length, animals vary in height, there are variations in hair color and patterning, and so on.
Selection means that some members of a population are, for some reason or other, better suited at producing a larger number of viable offspring. This could be because they are more attractive to mates, or because they are better at getting food, or maybe they are better at defending against predators. Whatever the reason, some members produce more kids than others, in spite of the hazards of their surroundings.
Now, here's the kicker, and how this all works. When two members of a population mate, their genes basically get mixed together to produce the offspring. While the mixing is random, the genes supplied aren't, and so the offspring will tend to enjoy the same genetic benefits that the parents did -- when two tall people produce kids, their children tend to be tall. Likewise, when two members of a population have a lot of luck in producing kids, then their kids will likely also have good luck, and so their genes tend to spread more.
This is how evolution works. There's no magic, nothing more than a statistical shift in genetically-determined traits, which occurs in response to natural selective pressures.
The original poster was talking about gravity wells.
I made a side remark about oxygen, which was a half-joke.
One poster got that joke, and replied.
You didn't, so I clarified my viewpoint.
Apparently you still don't get the joke, and maybe you should consider going out and getting a glass filled with a nearly ideal anaerobic environment for bacterial production. In fact, there's a handy word in English for such a useful tool of science: Beer.