but it has always interested me that the OpenBSD guys, whose work lacks the legal terms in favor of remaining open that the GPLed Linux team has, are nevertheless some of the most consistent supporters of fully-open systems outside of the core FSF people.
Some might argue that OpenBSD is more "open" than the GPL is.
The GPL places restrictions and obligations upon you... the BSD people make no such restrictions. If you want to bundle it up into a project and sell it, go right the hell ahead.
GPL'd software is almost essentially 'emancipated' in that it is now 'libre'... BSD software is 'free' and 'open', but doesn't have any rights of its own, but I as someone who wants to use it am totally free to do as I please.
There's a reason that people who release under a BSD license are some of the most consistent supporters of fully-open systems... but it's an ideological difference with the FSF whereby if you can crib some good software to make your software better, we all benefit. In fact, you have our blessing. Even if that means you don't want to give back what you've done with it.
Sometimes I find the whole holier-than-though, libre software is more like the PETA of the software world -- they're much more obsessed with the ideological purity of code.
I applaud people who release code under a BSD license, since it basically says "go forth and write cool shit, you don't owe us anything".
Are you going to risk falling off a cliff more than once???
You actually saw the show, right?;-)
Some times he fell off a cliff half a dozen times in a single episode. In other episodes, he was repeatedly smashed with the same rock, no matter how far away he got and what he hid under.
He did repeat these things -- over and over again. That's what made it funny.
Wile E. Coyote was all about the scientific method, and multiple trials. Contrary to what the GP thinks, it wasn't just a statistical fluke.;-)
Wile E. Cyote is more like a script kiddie; he just uses the products without much change.
Script kiddy?? I don't think so.
The ACME Catalog didn't show him how to take the roller skates, bicycle helmet, #3 solid rocket booster, 200 feet of rope, a pulley system, an umbrella and a ramp... put it altogether, and end getting burned, dropped off a cliff, crushed and then rained on (with accompanying lightining strike).
Wil E. Coyote is a frigging Rube Goldberg machine waiting to happen. He didn't just run something as shipped... He put it together into amazingly strange combinations.
Script kiddie? You, sir, did not watch NEARLY enough Bugs Bunny growing up. (And, I, apparently far too much.;-p)
I installed one of the first Slackware distros around 1993 or so on my old 486SX-25 with a whopping 70mb hard drive and 8mb of RAM
I put it on my brand new 486DX-33, with a 325MB HD, and 8MB of RAM, with a video card with 1MB so I could do 1024x768. Two years or so later I upgraded to have a total of 20MB of RAM (and a princely sum that cost in the fall of 1994, $600 if I recall).
At the time, my Linux machine was bigger than some of the Sun machines at my school.
Probably because you haven't yet learned the intricacies of the "web browser", the "mouse" and quite possibly "the computer". Orrrr... you're somehow being served up a different version of slashdot than the rest of us.
Maybe you are oh-so-lucky as to have Slashdot behave consistently and predictably lately.
Half of the time when I go to meta-moderate, the +/- buttons don't do anything at all -- they're inert, and clicking on them doesn't do anything. Sometimes, if I browse away and come back, it works. Sometimes it doesn't work for days. I mean, I would expect the behavior of a web page to be deterministic but apparently that's not the case.
It's been making me go "WTF" for a couple of weeks now. I've even reverted to the oldest-school layout because some of the stuff was acting even weirder.
It's hard not to conclude there are some things on Slashdot that are working intermittently, and not in ways you might always predict.
Dial it back... he's not the only one seeing Slashdot behave somewhat flaky of late.
*laugh* You know, usually that isn't what people tell me. I'm usually accused of being far less generous.:-P
All of these things that are in most people's lives these days - computers, phones, all the new technology that everyone uses in the past decade - are so far beyond the comprehension of most of the population that I can't even imagine what it would be like to know that little.
For some people, they simply don't care. And some of the fiddly bits will always be beyond them.
Fear not, there's hope... about 5 or 6 years ago, my brother and I wrote out two pages of instructions for my father to change the TV from listening to the cable box to the DVD player and back again (including powering on/off the devices). As it involved 2-3 remotes, and the concept of the input to a TV, plus independent power for them, he wasn't a happy camper and frequently threatened to throw the remote through the TV.
Two years ago, he deduced that if he wanted to use the scanner/photocopier they had owned before they had a computer, that there was such a thing as a printer driver, and that he would have to find and install said printer driver once he had plugged the printer into their new laptop. Somehow, he connected all of these things, and did them on his own. Because he knew damned well he could print from his computer, and he wanted to do exactly that. You can imagine my shock to find out that a 70 year old who had previously hated computers did all of this.
He still can't program his Tom Tom to get where he's going... but if Mom programs it for him, he can use it to navigate "Home" (which is good because he sometimes needs to travel several hours from home for one of his hobbies). The digital camera, however, he's getting pretty good with, but he had a background with film cameras.
Both of the parents came to the conclusion they wanted to be able to make backups this year, and have started using an external HD which does it for them.
If he ever has a vested interest in learning this stuff, rest assured, he will do it. He might even tell you it was his idea all along, and try to tell you how to do this marvelous new thing he's discovered.
Yes and no... My parents use a computer every day - but they don't really get the concept that an operating system or an application is something that a team of engineers had to create.
Yes, that's likely true. But, it doesn't mean you couldn't explain the gist of it -- I bet your father knows what the crank shaft in his engine does, which makes a remarkably good analogy to explain a task scheduler if you try hard enough and hand-wave around some of the details. They don't need to understand the root concepts of software engineering... they can be made to understand the root concepts of computers, which you could argue are somewhat different things. Essentially, a watch is a very rudimentary computer in that it is calculating time.
WHen I try to explain to my wife that the Earth is part of a solar system and there are billions of solar systems in a galaxy and billions of galaxies - well to her that is much less tangible than the idea that god created the earth in 7 days.
Well, in fairness, it's a hell of a concept to wrap your head around. I must confess, while I can intellectually get the concept of all of these galaxies and the like, trying to actually appreciate the magnitude of it is awfully complex. However, there's butt-loads of things which help to visualize this.
As to your wife, I guess it depends on how slavishly she needs to accept the notion of god, and if that can encompass a cosmologically accurate model of the universe. I certainly have known people who refuse to listen because they can't expand their view of the universe to include more than they can directly see/what the bible tells them.
Where was god sitting when he created everything, including himself?
God did not create himself. Religions which have a God place him/her/whatever as being eternal, fixed, and existing outside of everything. Maybe he created reality as we know it so that he could make himself a chair.:-P
Where was the primeval atom sitting when it created everything, including itself?
Atoms themselves are composed of things, and therefore the "primeval atom" wasn't the starting point.
And, really, Science can't really say anything intelligent about what 'existed' before existence, or what 'caused' it before there were causes... at which point, you could transition into discussions of God quite nicely, because what they both say about what existed before the universe or what causes it are probably about on par with one another. ("We haven't the foggiest idea" and "God" being about equal in terms of what they tell us.)
If you're expecting a definitive answer to your queries, you're pretty much SOL. Neither science nor religion can meaningfully answer them.
For example, as a software engineer, I can't explain to friends or family what it is that I do - they just don't get it.
The difference being, what you do as a software engineer affects how they perceive reality far less than the physical sciences. That the Earth revolves around the Sun is tangible. Using a linked list or a hash table? Not so much. So, being selective about what it is that you're explaining is good.
I had a university professor tell me once (actually, more than once) that if you couldn't explain something in broad strokes to a layperson, you either didn't understand it, or you weren't trying hard enough. Some stuff just gets far too into domain specific that it's irrelevant.
You don't need to explain it in enough specifics that they could do it, but enough that they can get the overall point. And, at a certain level, you just have to recognize that beyond a certain point, you're not actually helping them know anything more, just throwing words at them.:-P
Depending on what you do, Lego, Mechano, or Lawnmower engines might help as metaphors. Bonus points if you can use beer or food as part of it.;-)
confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
Although, getting to the meat of the argument, back in 2008 someone discussed this already over at Bad Astronomy.
I have faith in science. That doesn't mean I blindly believe what science tells me... it means that I'm confident that the process is open and documented enough that someone could explain it to me. And, if I really insisted, someone could sit down and walk me through it.
At a certain point, I have to take some of the mathematics or really deep science "on faith", meaning I don't actually understand it in all of its gory detail, but I have been satisfied that a good amount of people who do (some of whom I have personally met, and some of whom are in the pantheon of "smart people"), that the parts I don't explicitly grasp are, in fact, true.
Now, if you just blindly believed everything science told you without holding it up to some degree of a "smell test" to assure yourself it's consistent with everything else, science could become "faith". But that doesn't mean that science is inherently "a faith".
I don't necessarily agree with your rigid (and possibly pulled from thin air) definition of "faith", but I do agree that science in general isn't "faith".
That users are children. They lie, they don't listen, they ignore your advice, they actively look for ways to get around the measures you put in place for their benefit, and at the end of the day, when the users have done something galactically stupid, IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!
And, since they're storing other people's data (some of mine for example) they have a responsibility to make sure they're actually taking steps to protect it.
So, I say don't treat them like children... I say treat them like adults who are expected to know better, and make sure they have consequences, because they've been entrusted with this stuff. Don't coddle them and say "mustn't touch", this is serious stuff.
I must say, I'm somewhat annoyed at the companies I dealt with who farmed out this stuff. But I figure if your industry is doing this stuff, you should be held to a standard similar to my banking information... if you lose track of it, or allow a breach, there should be significant (and increasing) fines for something like this.
There are now several companies I have a business relationship from whom I will have to largely distrust emails until I can bypass any links in the email and verify... some of these companies have had over $10K in business from me in the last year. They're going to have to work awful hard to repair my trust.
A reactor leaking a little bit on the bottom of the ocean is a lot less of an environmental problem than a reactor exploding a few miles up and having its fuel scattered over a wide area.
Oh, sure, you say that now.
Wait 'til it lands by a black smoker and we get a Godzilla-sized tube worm or one of these the size of an air-craft carrier. Then you'll change your tune!
I think the complaint is that PhD's in biology are getting trained for the specific task of a not just their field, but whatever their advisors happen to be working with. So upon completion they are only prepared to work in a very narrow subsection of academic biology.
Well, I think a lot of people have had that complaint about PhDs for quite some time... in a lot of fields of study the only thing you can do with a PhD is academia.
And, by the time you get there, you're (on paper) grossly over-qualified to do anything else, and (in practice) grossly under-qualified to do anything else.
There's just a lot of disciplines for which a PhD is a purely academic endeavor, with limited use to industry. There might be some applicability to government for some disciplines in terms of policy or something.
They've been encouraged to avoid such skills as writing, math and programming in favor of cranking out data. Skills which would help them win jobs where they could then do the research they've trained for.
So, they're highly trained, specialist lab assistants with no marketable skills? That sounds quite sad, really.
Oh, lots of people can do it effectively, but only under ideal circumstances. You know, assuming the vehicle in front of them doesn't suddenly slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a kid who ran into the street after their ball and that the person coming down the road actually saw that stop sign.
Well, that's the theory.
However, on shows like Canada's Worst Driver (which I gather most countries have their own version of)... you can put people onto a closed track, driving in circles, and give them a couple of tasks to quickly demonstrate how utterly wrong those people are.
I'm of the opinion that if you kill someone because you were texting on your Blackberry, you should have the same kind of legal penalties as if you'd been drunk. When I see people roll through stop lights or do other stupid things because they're holding their cell phone with one hand and gesturing with the other it makes me a little bit crazy.
There's never a practical use for a degree, but it does show that someone thinks he is worthy of the distinction.
Oh there are practical uses for degrees, just not so much the honorary ones.
Oh, absolutely. The honorary degrees really are intended to recognize you as having done something of significance.
And really, in terms of showing hands-on engineering and other cool things, I think Jamie likely deserved his honorary degree. Judging by some of the calculations I've seen him pull out, I'd say his practical experience in such things is probably more than some freshly minted engineers.
He's not just some TV host, but someone who actually runs a business and creates such things.
1) You're suggesting a capital punishment for a civil offense. That is blatantly unconstitutional.
Actually, it seems like he's suggesting a closed society, enforced by fascism and violence, and in which your constitution would necessarily be re-written/scrapped to more or less "keep out, shut up, and fuck off" and would go down hill from there.
He's not advocating anything that would be "legal", he seems to be advocating that America scrap her Constitution, and start over with a fairly radicalized position of saying if you weren't born here, you can't stay. Then of course, you move onto other "undesirable" elements.
The logical conclusions of such a beginning are truly terrifying to consider.
I fail to see how anything from the starting position of "shoot all illegal immigrants" would be able to remain consistent with the Constitution in any meaningful way, or even continue a pretense that they plan to.
As, long as they outlaw passangers while they are at it, I'm on board with you. Otherwise, you just come off as a Luddite technophobe.
I don't think that recognizing that people aren't generally capable of operating a motor vehicle and the features of a cell phone while driving makes me a Luddite technophobe -- it makes me someone who has witnessed all sorts of really bad driving by people who are convinced they can do both.
You can always tell your passenger to shut up, but ultimately, you're responsible (and accountable) for primarily operating the vehicle you're driving, and having that be your main task.
If your eyes are on your Blackberry because you're texting, or you don't have enough hands left to actually operate a motor vehicle, you're a dangerous idiot. As I said, when I can tell that both of your thumbs are on your Blackberry, you deserve to be beaten with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, more like my favorite de-motivational poster of all time.
Failure. When your best just isn't good enough.
The science part is fine. ;-)
Some might argue that OpenBSD is more "open" than the GPL is.
The GPL places restrictions and obligations upon you ... the BSD people make no such restrictions. If you want to bundle it up into a project and sell it, go right the hell ahead.
GPL'd software is almost essentially 'emancipated' in that it is now 'libre' ... BSD software is 'free' and 'open', but doesn't have any rights of its own, but I as someone who wants to use it am totally free to do as I please.
There's a reason that people who release under a BSD license are some of the most consistent supporters of fully-open systems ... but it's an ideological difference with the FSF whereby if you can crib some good software to make your software better, we all benefit. In fact, you have our blessing. Even if that means you don't want to give back what you've done with it.
Sometimes I find the whole holier-than-though, libre software is more like the PETA of the software world -- they're much more obsessed with the ideological purity of code.
I applaud people who release code under a BSD license, since it basically says "go forth and write cool shit, you don't owe us anything".
You actually saw the show, right? ;-)
Some times he fell off a cliff half a dozen times in a single episode. In other episodes, he was repeatedly smashed with the same rock, no matter how far away he got and what he hid under.
He did repeat these things -- over and over again. That's what made it funny.
Wile E. Coyote was all about the scientific method, and multiple trials. Contrary to what the GP thinks, it wasn't just a statistical fluke. ;-)
Was Lex Luthor still a genius if he was always foiled in his plans?
Did Pinky still call him Brain? None of his schemes worked out.
Hell, Blofeld had sharks and frickin' lasers. He lost to Bond how many times?
Measure not the "inventions", but the opponent.
Wile E. Coyote may well have been a super genius, but he never was the match for the Road Runner.
Script kiddy?? I don't think so.
The ACME Catalog didn't show him how to take the roller skates, bicycle helmet, #3 solid rocket booster, 200 feet of rope, a pulley system, an umbrella and a ramp ... put it altogether, and end getting burned, dropped off a cliff, crushed and then rained on (with accompanying lightining strike).
Wil E. Coyote is a frigging Rube Goldberg machine waiting to happen. He didn't just run something as shipped ... He put it together into amazingly strange combinations.
Script kiddie? You, sir, did not watch NEARLY enough Bugs Bunny growing up. (And, I, apparently far too much. ;-p)
I put it on my brand new 486DX-33, with a 325MB HD, and 8MB of RAM, with a video card with 1MB so I could do 1024x768. Two years or so later I upgraded to have a total of 20MB of RAM (and a princely sum that cost in the fall of 1994, $600 if I recall).
At the time, my Linux machine was bigger than some of the Sun machines at my school.
Ahh ... good times.
Holy crap, 20 years? I'm pretty sure I first installed it in '92 or '93, that really makes me feel old now.
I know it was a Slackware install with a 0.99a Kernel or something like that. I know there were an immense amount of floppy disks involved.
Wow, 20 years goes by fast.
Maybe you are oh-so-lucky as to have Slashdot behave consistently and predictably lately.
Half of the time when I go to meta-moderate, the +/- buttons don't do anything at all -- they're inert, and clicking on them doesn't do anything. Sometimes, if I browse away and come back, it works. Sometimes it doesn't work for days. I mean, I would expect the behavior of a web page to be deterministic but apparently that's not the case.
It's been making me go "WTF" for a couple of weeks now. I've even reverted to the oldest-school layout because some of the stuff was acting even weirder.
It's hard not to conclude there are some things on Slashdot that are working intermittently, and not in ways you might always predict.
Dial it back ... he's not the only one seeing Slashdot behave somewhat flaky of late.
You missed the important thing ... designer creates huge frickin' lego army using a small number of images and some pretty smart use of CSS.
An army, but make out of lego. Put lasers on them and see who takes over the world. :-P
*laugh* You know, usually that isn't what people tell me. I'm usually accused of being far less generous. :-P
For some people, they simply don't care. And some of the fiddly bits will always be beyond them.
Fear not, there's hope ... about 5 or 6 years ago, my brother and I wrote out two pages of instructions for my father to change the TV from listening to the cable box to the DVD player and back again (including powering on/off the devices). As it involved 2-3 remotes, and the concept of the input to a TV, plus independent power for them, he wasn't a happy camper and frequently threatened to throw the remote through the TV.
Two years ago, he deduced that if he wanted to use the scanner/photocopier they had owned before they had a computer, that there was such a thing as a printer driver, and that he would have to find and install said printer driver once he had plugged the printer into their new laptop. Somehow, he connected all of these things, and did them on his own. Because he knew damned well he could print from his computer, and he wanted to do exactly that. You can imagine my shock to find out that a 70 year old who had previously hated computers did all of this.
He still can't program his Tom Tom to get where he's going ... but if Mom programs it for him, he can use it to navigate "Home" (which is good because he sometimes needs to travel several hours from home for one of his hobbies). The digital camera, however, he's getting pretty good with, but he had a background with film cameras.
Both of the parents came to the conclusion they wanted to be able to make backups this year, and have started using an external HD which does it for them.
If he ever has a vested interest in learning this stuff, rest assured, he will do it. He might even tell you it was his idea all along, and try to tell you how to do this marvelous new thing he's discovered.
Yes, that's likely true. But, it doesn't mean you couldn't explain the gist of it -- I bet your father knows what the crank shaft in his engine does, which makes a remarkably good analogy to explain a task scheduler if you try hard enough and hand-wave around some of the details. They don't need to understand the root concepts of software engineering ... they can be made to understand the root concepts of computers, which you could argue are somewhat different things. Essentially, a watch is a very rudimentary computer in that it is calculating time.
Well, in fairness, it's a hell of a concept to wrap your head around. I must confess, while I can intellectually get the concept of all of these galaxies and the like, trying to actually appreciate the magnitude of it is awfully complex. However, there's butt-loads of things which help to visualize this.
As to your wife, I guess it depends on how slavishly she needs to accept the notion of god, and if that can encompass a cosmologically accurate model of the universe. I certainly have known people who refuse to listen because they can't expand their view of the universe to include more than they can directly see/what the bible tells them.
God did not create himself. Religions which have a God place him/her/whatever as being eternal, fixed, and existing outside of everything. Maybe he created reality as we know it so that he could make himself a chair. :-P
Atoms themselves are composed of things, and therefore the "primeval atom" wasn't the starting point.
And, really, Science can't really say anything intelligent about what 'existed' before existence, or what 'caused' it before there were causes ... at which point, you could transition into discussions of God quite nicely, because what they both say about what existed before the universe or what causes it are probably about on par with one another. ("We haven't the foggiest idea" and "God" being about equal in terms of what they tell us.)
If you're expecting a definitive answer to your queries, you're pretty much SOL. Neither science nor religion can meaningfully answer them.
The difference being, what you do as a software engineer affects how they perceive reality far less than the physical sciences. That the Earth revolves around the Sun is tangible. Using a linked list or a hash table? Not so much. So, being selective about what it is that you're explaining is good.
I had a university professor tell me once (actually, more than once) that if you couldn't explain something in broad strokes to a layperson, you either didn't understand it, or you weren't trying hard enough. Some stuff just gets far too into domain specific that it's irrelevant.
You don't need to explain it in enough specifics that they could do it, but enough that they can get the overall point. And, at a certain level, you just have to recognize that beyond a certain point, you're not actually helping them know anything more, just throwing words at them. :-P
Depending on what you do, Lego, Mechano, or Lawnmower engines might help as metaphors. Bonus points if you can use beer or food as part of it. ;-)
By whose definition? According to wikipedia:
According to this:
Although, getting to the meat of the argument, back in 2008 someone discussed this already over at Bad Astronomy.
I have faith in science. That doesn't mean I blindly believe what science tells me ... it means that I'm confident that the process is open and documented enough that someone could explain it to me. And, if I really insisted, someone could sit down and walk me through it.
At a certain point, I have to take some of the mathematics or really deep science "on faith", meaning I don't actually understand it in all of its gory detail, but I have been satisfied that a good amount of people who do (some of whom I have personally met, and some of whom are in the pantheon of "smart people"), that the parts I don't explicitly grasp are, in fact, true.
Now, if you just blindly believed everything science told you without holding it up to some degree of a "smell test" to assure yourself it's consistent with everything else, science could become "faith". But that doesn't mean that science is inherently "a faith".
I don't necessarily agree with your rigid (and possibly pulled from thin air) definition of "faith", but I do agree that science in general isn't "faith".
Sure, you can click with your left hand or your right hand. ;-)
And, since they're storing other people's data (some of mine for example) they have a responsibility to make sure they're actually taking steps to protect it.
So, I say don't treat them like children ... I say treat them like adults who are expected to know better, and make sure they have consequences, because they've been entrusted with this stuff. Don't coddle them and say "mustn't touch", this is serious stuff.
I must say, I'm somewhat annoyed at the companies I dealt with who farmed out this stuff. But I figure if your industry is doing this stuff, you should be held to a standard similar to my banking information ... if you lose track of it, or allow a breach, there should be significant (and increasing) fines for something like this.
There are now several companies I have a business relationship from whom I will have to largely distrust emails until I can bypass any links in the email and verify ... some of these companies have had over $10K in business from me in the last year. They're going to have to work awful hard to repair my trust.
Well, I think technically it would be "irradiated" ... there was no nuclear detonation or anything.
But, yes. :-P
Oh, sure, you say that now.
Wait 'til it lands by a black smoker and we get a Godzilla-sized tube worm or one of these the size of an air-craft carrier. Then you'll change your tune!
And, yes, of course I'm joking.
Actually, I googled for "orbiting bnuclear reactor", and came up with this.
So, it would appear that nuclear reactors have been launched from Earth, and that the core of at least one is still parked in "disposal orbit".
GP's "fun fact" might be more "fun" than most of us realize.
Well, I think a lot of people have had that complaint about PhDs for quite some time ... in a lot of fields of study the only thing you can do with a PhD is academia.
And, by the time you get there, you're (on paper) grossly over-qualified to do anything else, and (in practice) grossly under-qualified to do anything else.
There's just a lot of disciplines for which a PhD is a purely academic endeavor, with limited use to industry. There might be some applicability to government for some disciplines in terms of policy or something.
So, they're highly trained, specialist lab assistants with no marketable skills? That sounds quite sad, really.
Well, that's the theory.
However, on shows like Canada's Worst Driver (which I gather most countries have their own version of) ... you can put people onto a closed track, driving in circles, and give them a couple of tasks to quickly demonstrate how utterly wrong those people are.
I'm of the opinion that if you kill someone because you were texting on your Blackberry, you should have the same kind of legal penalties as if you'd been drunk. When I see people roll through stop lights or do other stupid things because they're holding their cell phone with one hand and gesturing with the other it makes me a little bit crazy.
Oh there are practical uses for degrees, just not so much the honorary ones.
Oh, absolutely. The honorary degrees really are intended to recognize you as having done something of significance.
And really, in terms of showing hands-on engineering and other cool things, I think Jamie likely deserved his honorary degree. Judging by some of the calculations I've seen him pull out, I'd say his practical experience in such things is probably more than some freshly minted engineers.
He's not just some TV host, but someone who actually runs a business and creates such things.
That, and $2 will get you a coffee in most places.
It's only $1.50 without the honorary degree. ;-)
I fear he's not.
Actually, it seems like he's suggesting a closed society, enforced by fascism and violence, and in which your constitution would necessarily be re-written/scrapped to more or less "keep out, shut up, and fuck off" and would go down hill from there.
He's not advocating anything that would be "legal", he seems to be advocating that America scrap her Constitution, and start over with a fairly radicalized position of saying if you weren't born here, you can't stay. Then of course, you move onto other "undesirable" elements.
The logical conclusions of such a beginning are truly terrifying to consider.
I fail to see how anything from the starting position of "shoot all illegal immigrants" would be able to remain consistent with the Constitution in any meaningful way, or even continue a pretense that they plan to.
I don't think that recognizing that people aren't generally capable of operating a motor vehicle and the features of a cell phone while driving makes me a Luddite technophobe -- it makes me someone who has witnessed all sorts of really bad driving by people who are convinced they can do both.
You can always tell your passenger to shut up, but ultimately, you're responsible (and accountable) for primarily operating the vehicle you're driving, and having that be your main task.
If your eyes are on your Blackberry because you're texting, or you don't have enough hands left to actually operate a motor vehicle, you're a dangerous idiot. As I said, when I can tell that both of your thumbs are on your Blackberry, you deserve to be beaten with it.