Libertarians generally advocate a form of government which creates as level a playing field as possible, and then lets individual actors do the rest; this is generally summed up by saying that it is OK for government to create a framework where individuals can make decisions on their own, but not to act redistributively.
Well, the problem is that without acting redistributively, you simply can't create as level a playing field as possible. Take the inheritence tax, for example. Without the inheritence tax, you get economic dynasties where the child of a wealthy and powerful individual not only starts off with an advantage in education and political connections (that you can't really erase) but also with an entire foundation of wealth that an otherwise equally talented individual would not start with. In essence, the race is already lost. I've always been of the opinion that wealth should be earned, but a lack of inheritence tax allows for the existence of an upper class that has no need for work when they can simply let their money work for them by entrusting it to investment advisors. Most if not all Libertarians consider the Inheritence Tax to be an abomination, though it is widely considered outside of the American Right to be a necessary foundation for the creation of equality.
I think the vast majority of self-identified Libertarians would support some form of minimalist interventionism in order to counterbalance the distortive effects that some monopolies have had on the government, while the laws and welfare that they have purchased are repealed or dismantled.
The problem is that most Libertarians don't seem to believe that there's a problem with a monopoly having a distortive effect on the market or on consumers as long as they don't get the government to do them any special favors. I, too, would like to see less corporate influence on government, but until corporations are prohibited from or (by force of law) gain no profit from donating to the campaigns of politicians, you'll never see and end to special favors for industry. I find it very rare (i.e. I've never met) a Libertarian who does not consider the ability of the wealthy and powerful to spend their money as freely as they want on political donations to be a matter of their free speech rights, nor have I met a Libertarian who thinks that the idea of corporate personhood and the existence of the same free speech rights for corporations should both be abolished.
As wary as Madison was of parties, he failed to understand two fundamental things.
First, parties are inevitable. From an economic standpoint, they represent a pooling of resources that is more efficient for campaigning than individual candidates all going it alone. From a social standpoint, they are the result of likeminded individuals coming together for the same goals -- political bent in many ways is tied strongly enough to personality types and the background of your upbringing that it was inevitable that politicians would find that some of them had a LOT more in common than they differed on and choose to team up. From an mass manipulation standpoint, parties would provide a common set of assumptions to bring in less informed voters. You may not know what candidate X's standpoint on Issue Y might be, but you probably know what their parties stance is on Issues A-Z.
Second, Madison and the others missed the nature of future parties. The Constitution was written under the assumption that regional blocks would form and that factions would largely revolve around regional issues that were prevalent in the day -- slavery vs. abolition, agriculture vs. shipping, etc. etc. The general assumption seems to be that there would always be many candidates in a race. They failed to see that the electoral system would condense down to a winner-take-all system in almost every state and mathematically make the viability of anything other than two parties inevitable. While Madison speaks of the tyranny of the majority, I don't think he was really expecting for there to be only two parties at the time.
Anyway, for all the reasons in the first paragraph, you can't get rid of parties. Parties are a natural outgrowth of the existence of common political philosophies and the desire of people to pool their resources with others to achieve their goals in a world where each individual is relatively powerless. The only thing we really can (and should) do is to change the system so that it doesn't favor the dominance of only two parties. Breaking the collations of the main two parties into a more fine-grained choice would allow the will of the people to be expressed better, but you cannot expect for us to go back to the system of each candidate fund-raising and introducing themselves to the voters individually and from-scratch any more than you can expect us to go back to a barter-based economy.
True in a way, but they unfortunately go so far as to disregard the need for checks and balances in massive inequalities of private power. Libertarians are simply under the delusion that a perfect free-market system is "fair" and allows anyone with enough gumption to rise to the top and ignores the inherent interest of those with financial clout in tilting the system to be as biased in favor of their offspring as possible. Basically, Libertarians only care about your freedom from government and your freedom from violence. Freedom from other forms of coercion, freedom from deception, freedom from having the costs of others pushed off on you, etc., and equality of opportunity don't really matter that much to Libertarians. It's all just about "what the market will bear."
That said, I think the government would be far better if it were split between Libertarians and Democrats than between Republicans and either of the other two. Our government might still be torn over economic issues, and the economic divide might still be widening, but we wouldn't have to worry about the abuses of executive power that we've seen in the past few years.
Would there be any point to putting DQ on a next-gen console system? I mean, given the retro look of the DQ series, why bother picking between the three console systems when you could do it on a DS? Futhermore, the DS is the single most popular platform in Japan right now, so why not sell the single most popular RPG series on it?
(And what exactly is wrong with "cashing in on the popularity of the series" when you're the CREATOR of the series? Isn't "cashing in" the whole point of making it in the first place for a BUSINESS?)
There's a big difference between the style of console/Japanese RPGs and PC/Western RPGs. To confuse the elements of the two and criticize the one style for not having all the elements of the other style is equivalent to lumping turn-based and real-time strategy games into the same category and doing the same.
Japanese/console RPGs focus on a set story usually. Because of this, the main characters are usually well-defined and not flat player stand-ins that need to be customized. DQ is a bit unusual in that the protagonist is often unnamed and often doesn't get lines (all conversation is inferred from how others react to you). As such, it's not surprising that they're going to add the ability to customize the appearance of at least the main character (if not more), but it's not a very common thing in the genre DQ belongs to.
Also, I'd like to mention that DQ has long been a deliberately retro experience. The last game they've made for each console has generally been released at the end of the life of a console or even in the heyday of the console's next generation. (DQ 7 was probably the most egregious example of this.) The combat system has studiously resisted change, and the games have always used the same art team and music team to keep a consistent feel.
Complaining about DQ being "20 years behind the curve" just shows that you don't play the games and have absolutely no understanding or appreciation of them.
Some of us are quite frankly tired of the old-school, turn-based combat systems disappearing in console RPGs to make way for real-time or "action" combat systems. Hearing that the next DQ game will stick with a more traditional approach is a relief for some of us. The summary is a bit clumsy, but it gets the point across.
Let me change a few words in your post to show how facile the argument is...
"That's not fair -- [Bush] was actually a pretty effective president. People only remember [the scandals which will never result in a willing resignation], but he was able to push through a large number of domestic policy changes and had a foreign policy that extended beyond [Iraq]. Whether or not you agree with his politics (and be sure you know what they are before you make that decision), and the crimes he helped cover up, you should at least respect his effectiveness in the office."
Bush has hammered a ton of policy changes through. We're going to be feeling the aftershocks of his presidency for generations to come and many of the changes he's made in the balances between the three branches of government may become permanent. That doesn't mean that he's been an "effective" President.
Adding "moe" traits is not adding character, in my opinion, but just further adding fetishism.
- Lecherous... check. "Moe" fans like either pure maidens or total sex fiends (especially those who aren't getting any like them). - Specific clothes item common in otaku-centric shows... check. Work-out clothes are a common fetish. - Creepy fanfic writing showing otaku-like traits herself... check. Helps a fan relate to the character. - Strange, sexualized relationship with family members... check. Treating siblings as outlets of sexual desires is a common, disturbing fetish.
These are all pretty otaku-oriented character traits meant to put the character into a specific niche of fan appeal. The OS-tan movement just creeps me out often because it exposes the lack of originality and the slavish devotion to "moe" in the otaku community as shown in otaku-targetted shows like "Strike Witches." I just like watching anime, but some people take things WAY too far. The OS-tan thing just sort of puts that in my face everytime I encounter it, so that's probably why I just don't like them at all.
...than fetishizing operating systems with cute or sexy girls. The OS-tan thing is just a bit of otaku-dom that I have just never been able to understand.
Many people who volunteer will not understand the full ramifications of doing so until it's too late. Privacy advocates want to make as many people as possible aware.
When enough people opt-in it becomes really easy to justify making it more "opt-out" than "opt-in" since there is a great mass of people who will shrug their shoulders and give grief to those that want out. (e.g. People who refuse to give their address before making a purchase at a retail store.)
Have you ever read the label of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Soap? I used to have to stare at one every day I took a shower because someone where I was living left a bottle of it in the shower and there was nothing else to occupy my mind. Staring at a bottle of Dr. Bronner soap for several minutes every day will drive you insane.
You used to be able to download PDFs of the labels at their website, but it looks like I now can't show you the face of madness I had to stare into every morning. You can buy them at Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and other "natural" product stores if your ever interested in weirding yourself out.
Heck, I don't blame the cops for drug testing a bottle of this soap after seeing it. I mean it's got the word HEMP in big bold letters and the rambling of a madman on it.
(Besides, what's your point? Unlike a punk band member, what's so suspicious about an IT professional having a bottle of soa--.... Ah. Never mind.)
If these judges even took two minutes to explain their prefered procedures, maybe they wouldn't be sooo annoyed with these silly laypeople comming into their courts. Its small claims court for crying out loud
If judges had to open every single case with a tutorial in presenting a case, it would eat up a significant amount of available time to actually try cases. Maybe instead people coming to waste the court's time should instead pick up one of the many excellent self-help books on presenting a case before small claims court instead of whining about how judges should be expected to hand-hold plaintiffs.
Something tells me that in your job, you don't spend a few minutes explaining to everyone who comes to you with a problem the basics of how to do the task they're trying to do. Clueless litigants are just as much of a lazy impediment to doing their job to judges as clueless users are to IT people.
Not only is that reckless, unsafe, and (where I live, at least) like to enrage the person behind so that they begin deliberately stalking you, but it's also the kind of idiocy that can cause pileup accidents and traffic jams. I used to do this all the time before I sat down and really thought about the ramifications of my actions.
Here, read the article that changes the way I drive. Mysterious "no accident" traffic jams are caused by the amplification of sudden slowing by a line of cars braking from a single event. The guy behind the guy behind the guy you're pulling this stunt on has to make a more sudden stop than the guy you were targetting. This sort of effect can amplify itself throughout dense traffic and eventually spread out to cause stop-and-go traffic. It's a very inconsiderate thing to do when you consider the effects of "winning" your little game against the effects it can have on everyone else.
That said, if you must try to push back at those trying to push you around on the road, it's much simpler, less accident prone, and less likely to shock traffic into a jam to just let your foot off the gas and gradually slow down. I haven't found any tailgater that's willing to stick behind a guy that's slowed to 10 MPH slower than they were going when the tailgater first got impatient enough to hang on my bumper.
Really, though, the best approach is to just avoid the fast lanes and go at a more relaxed pace. Pushing back at bullying drivers only works you up into a rage and makes you a less safe driver. Trust me, I find myself less miserable when driving now that I don't drive so competitively anymore, so do it for yourself if not for others.
This left me to think that when Theo commits social gaffes, it is not his fault and he can't help himself. We all have our lacks, issues, and strengths.
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with you on this. The way Mr. de Raadt treats other human beings is simply abusive, and there is no external factor than can explain his behavior in any fashion that would justify coddling it. Unless you are seriously willing to argue that the man is not, in a legal sense, mentally competent, then it is most certainly a problem that lies at his feet, and we should take no pity on him for it. To do otherwise is to suggest that he isn't, frankly, sane.
No. That's comes after World War II. I wish I was being sarcastic. We spend way too much time talking about the Civil War to leave room for discussing any of those icky parts of history where America might've done something controversial like the Bay of Pigs invasion or the Vietnam War. (At least, that was my experience growing up in a former Confederate state.)
We're just lucky to get a very small warning about McCarthyism and some coverage of the Civil Rights movement. All US history south of our borders post-Spanish-American War is pretty much not taught in high school -- especially anything critical of our actions during the Cold War. Too much of what is going on today can't be understood if your knowledge of world events pretty much ends at WW2. Why the US's enemies are enemies and why many of our allies who don't share our values at all are allies is pretty much a mystery to the vast majority of the electorate.
It gets me depressed about the future every time I think about it.
Seriously, this isn't just for the elderly. Driving ceased to be fun for me long ago. If I had to do it only once a week on a nice stretch of fast highway, I might feel differently....
I hate to give a tedious, AOLer response, but... "Me too."
I HATE driving. Hate, hate, HATE it. Every day I put my life in the hands of the collective attentiveness of every idiot on the road out there, and spend over an hour in state somewhere between abject boredom and fear of impending death just to go to work and back. It's either break-neck, wild speeders or stop-and.. well, stop traffic where I live. It's absolutely terrible, and mass transit options vary between non-existent to impractical (like a 1-2 hour trip combined with a half-hour of walking). The sooner that I can give my car over to (and more importantly the sooner all those cell-phone using idiots can turn their SUVs over to) an AI, the better.
I miss being able to take public transit everywhere from my short three weeks in Japan years ago. It was mostly stress-free, and I could get some reading done instead of idling my brain while searching for danger on the road. One of these days, I hope to move somewhere where I can rely on mass transit again, but the way this country is going, auto-drive is more likely to be in my future than a good bus ride.
Seriously. Some of the worst jobs have great security and pay well. Look at COBOL programmers - it's probably better to say you're a piano player in a whorehouse than to admit you mind legacy COBOL installations, but I hear that they're pretty darned good jobs.
I'll second that. I have a friend that does RPG programming for industrial companies, and he loves his job (except for the horrible commute). Apparently, in "legacy" programming you meet pretty stable, family-minded coworkers who are interested in working a job for years or decades. Low turnover, low burn-out, good hours, and good pay come with a completely "unsexy" skill set.
The new techie manager still wants to get his hands dirty doing the day to day work. Part of this is that they are don't trust others to do it "right" or they are afraid of losing their technical skills. The new techie manager never really gives him/her self over to the dark side of management.
You see, that IS the real "dark side" of managment -- when you become a micromanager or some other type of manager that constantly second-guesses their employees because you "know better." Even worse is the type that is constantly trying to make people prove themselves to them by withholding information to see if their subordinate is "smart enough" to come to the same conclusions (and then berate them if they don't either due to a difference of opinion or a crucial missing piece of information).
I've had four jobs since I entered the IT field. Every single manager I've had was a former programmer with the exception of one boss's boss (who was entirely awful because she was more interested in office politics and backstabbing for advancement... but I digress).
All the good bosses I've had gradually abandoned the programming side and learned to act as mentors. They used their knowledge of the system to give pointers on where to look when you were stuck on a problem and trusted you to get things done, only prodding every now and then when a schedule was threatened. All the bad bosses I've had (save the one mentioned above) second-guessed you constantly and either went around your work to put someone else on it (like themselves) or constantly made you justify ever single moment you spent your day on. In both cases, the attitude comes from the thought that they could do it better if they didn't have to do all this management crap instead.
In other words, the secret to going from a technical role to being a good manager is learning to let go. Use your skills and knowledge to aid your subordinates and shield them from upper management by understanding what they are doing. If necessary, use you knowledge to call their BS if they're actually slacking, but don't envy them or treat them as irritating time-wasters blocking you from doing "your real job." Otherwise, you're just demonstrating the Peter principle.
If you end up writing your own asm includes for things you'll still get some bloat, but I can guarantee you that it will be an order of magnitude less than using glibc.
Who runs on a system where they're interested in the functionality of glibc but don't expect it to already be available in memory as a shared library?
There are times when that can be valuable...like if you're needing a system which will fit on a floppy or usb stick, or for an older system with less ram etc.
It's exceptionally rare that you'll need something on a floppy nowadays, and I have a pretty cheap 1 GB usb stick. I can fit a bloated GNOME or KDE-based distro install on that with very little effort. Older systems with less RAM usually have older software that was designed for them. Sure, it's neat to run a webserver on a C64, but what's the point other than to say you've done it?
Assembly has its place, especially in embedded programming, but much of what you're describing is effort for the challenge of successfully doing something the hard way.
So yeah, I think all of the points you made are good ones, and they pretty much match my experience. However, I still think that there are a few teachers who are really trying (with some success) to work until 3pm 9 months a year. As one of my mother's co-workers said: "It'd be a great job if it weren't for all the damn kids." I think she almost bit the woman's head off, god bless her.
Yeah, but those people are extremely rare in my experience, and they rarely last long in the profession. My beef is that when you said "many teachers" in a thread that was kind of ragging on teachers, it sounded like you were saying "most" or even "a significant fraction." I find that teachers who keep short hours are rare. As someone who usually stayed late after school with my mother and later my father, I got to see just how many teachers' cars were still left at the building when they left school each day.
And, yes, God bless your mother for that. The few who do have a bad attitude about the kids have no place keeping their jobs when there are more than enough young people wanting to be teachers that could do a better job.
You must have had really poor C programming and operating systems classes if you didn't get most of that without knowledge of asm. The only thing that you can't really do well without knowledge of assembly language is write a compiler.
A basic C class should expose you to debugging and the three memory related issues you brought up. A good OS class will teach your about threads vs. processes. A good class on archetectures will teach you the general differences between historical hardware and how basic things like virtual memory and context switching works. Any low-rent school that fails to cover all this material effectively outside of an assembly class isn't going to do a good job explaining it there either.
There are really only a couple of things I got out of assembler that I didn't get out of other classes -- how function calls work (and how much overhead is involved) and how memory alignment and data packing differs from architecture to architecture. (In other words, why you can't just dump memory structures into a file and expect the data to be easily readable cross-platform even if you pay attention to LSB vs. MSB).
How 'bout "arrogant braggart with too much time and disposeable income on his hands?" I mean, that's what...? Well over $1000-1200 in hardware plus whatever that fourth thing in the middle is? I mean, do you even have more than three games for each system (that you've actually played) to justify owning each one?
Yeesh. I'm having a hard enough time cost- and time-justifying owning two of those systems, much less all three.
Teachers get paid shit so many of them are there because the hours are good, or because the competition is not exactly fierce, or because they are genuinely benevolent, caring individuals.
As the son of two teachers, I call B.S. on the hours bit. The hours for teaching are not that great. Did you think that machines grade papers for them? Did you think that they just wing it each day instead of having to submit detailed lesson plans to the administration? Just because all the kids go home doesn't mean that the teachers do too.
Over 40 hour weeks are pretty common, and summers aren't work-free either. Most people go into teaching because they like working with children and put up with the pay and the parents. Anyone who thinks teaching is a short-hours job gets disabused of that by the time their student teaching gig is over.
Also, competition for teaching jobs is harsher than you'd think. It's not a job with high turnover past the first five years, and the amount of teachers that can be hired is directly tied to the number of rooms available in school buildings and the latest budget crunch. Most people I know that graduate from college to be teachers don't end up working in their hometown and have to move or commute a good distance to work. This can be a problem when the only openings are in a community that doesn't offer good opportunities for their spouse as is the case with many rural school systems.
I know you're trying to be understanding of the stresses that teachers undergo in their job, but you've got the motivations to teach in the first place all wrong in my experience with my parents and their co-workers.
Genetics is something to consider, but environment factors -- particularly access to research materials, textbooks to gain such knowledge, and inspiration -- are also important.
Even if you were this smart growing up, would you have had access to a lab capable of researching microRNA repression or the fabrication of 3-D microcubes? Would you have even had access to the books to have even heard of loop homology and Hochschild cohomology or Ducci sequences?
I certainly wouldn't have had access to any of this. While I doubt I could have ever achieved anything they did even with the right environment, without that environment I doubt that any of them could have either.
Slashdot Mirror
Libertarians generally advocate a form of government which creates as level a playing field as possible, and then lets individual actors do the rest; this is generally summed up by saying that it is OK for government to create a framework where individuals can make decisions on their own, but not to act redistributively.
Well, the problem is that without acting redistributively, you simply can't create as level a playing field as possible. Take the inheritence tax, for example. Without the inheritence tax, you get economic dynasties where the child of a wealthy and powerful individual not only starts off with an advantage in education and political connections (that you can't really erase) but also with an entire foundation of wealth that an otherwise equally talented individual would not start with. In essence, the race is already lost. I've always been of the opinion that wealth should be earned, but a lack of inheritence tax allows for the existence of an upper class that has no need for work when they can simply let their money work for them by entrusting it to investment advisors. Most if not all Libertarians consider the Inheritence Tax to be an abomination, though it is widely considered outside of the American Right to be a necessary foundation for the creation of equality.
I think the vast majority of self-identified Libertarians would support some form of minimalist interventionism in order to counterbalance the distortive effects that some monopolies have had on the government, while the laws and welfare that they have purchased are repealed or dismantled.
The problem is that most Libertarians don't seem to believe that there's a problem with a monopoly having a distortive effect on the market or on consumers as long as they don't get the government to do them any special favors. I, too, would like to see less corporate influence on government, but until corporations are prohibited from or (by force of law) gain no profit from donating to the campaigns of politicians, you'll never see and end to special favors for industry. I find it very rare (i.e. I've never met) a Libertarian who does not consider the ability of the wealthy and powerful to spend their money as freely as they want on political donations to be a matter of their free speech rights, nor have I met a Libertarian who thinks that the idea of corporate personhood and the existence of the same free speech rights for corporations should both be abolished.
As wary as Madison was of parties, he failed to understand two fundamental things.
First, parties are inevitable. From an economic standpoint, they represent a pooling of resources that is more efficient for campaigning than individual candidates all going it alone. From a social standpoint, they are the result of likeminded individuals coming together for the same goals -- political bent in many ways is tied strongly enough to personality types and the background of your upbringing that it was inevitable that politicians would find that some of them had a LOT more in common than they differed on and choose to team up. From an mass manipulation standpoint, parties would provide a common set of assumptions to bring in less informed voters. You may not know what candidate X's standpoint on Issue Y might be, but you probably know what their parties stance is on Issues A-Z.
Second, Madison and the others missed the nature of future parties. The Constitution was written under the assumption that regional blocks would form and that factions would largely revolve around regional issues that were prevalent in the day -- slavery vs. abolition, agriculture vs. shipping, etc. etc. The general assumption seems to be that there would always be many candidates in a race. They failed to see that the electoral system would condense down to a winner-take-all system in almost every state and mathematically make the viability of anything other than two parties inevitable. While Madison speaks of the tyranny of the majority, I don't think he was really expecting for there to be only two parties at the time.
Anyway, for all the reasons in the first paragraph, you can't get rid of parties. Parties are a natural outgrowth of the existence of common political philosophies and the desire of people to pool their resources with others to achieve their goals in a world where each individual is relatively powerless. The only thing we really can (and should) do is to change the system so that it doesn't favor the dominance of only two parties. Breaking the collations of the main two parties into a more fine-grained choice would allow the will of the people to be expressed better, but you cannot expect for us to go back to the system of each candidate fund-raising and introducing themselves to the voters individually and from-scratch any more than you can expect us to go back to a barter-based economy.
True in a way, but they unfortunately go so far as to disregard the need for checks and balances in massive inequalities of private power. Libertarians are simply under the delusion that a perfect free-market system is "fair" and allows anyone with enough gumption to rise to the top and ignores the inherent interest of those with financial clout in tilting the system to be as biased in favor of their offspring as possible. Basically, Libertarians only care about your freedom from government and your freedom from violence. Freedom from other forms of coercion, freedom from deception, freedom from having the costs of others pushed off on you, etc., and equality of opportunity don't really matter that much to Libertarians. It's all just about "what the market will bear."
That said, I think the government would be far better if it were split between Libertarians and Democrats than between Republicans and either of the other two. Our government might still be torn over economic issues, and the economic divide might still be widening, but we wouldn't have to worry about the abuses of executive power that we've seen in the past few years.
Would there be any point to putting DQ on a next-gen console system? I mean, given the retro look of the DQ series, why bother picking between the three console systems when you could do it on a DS? Futhermore, the DS is the single most popular platform in Japan right now, so why not sell the single most popular RPG series on it?
(And what exactly is wrong with "cashing in on the popularity of the series" when you're the CREATOR of the series? Isn't "cashing in" the whole point of making it in the first place for a BUSINESS?)
There's a big difference between the style of console/Japanese RPGs and PC/Western RPGs. To confuse the elements of the two and criticize the one style for not having all the elements of the other style is equivalent to lumping turn-based and real-time strategy games into the same category and doing the same.
Japanese/console RPGs focus on a set story usually. Because of this, the main characters are usually well-defined and not flat player stand-ins that need to be customized. DQ is a bit unusual in that the protagonist is often unnamed and often doesn't get lines (all conversation is inferred from how others react to you). As such, it's not surprising that they're going to add the ability to customize the appearance of at least the main character (if not more), but it's not a very common thing in the genre DQ belongs to.
Also, I'd like to mention that DQ has long been a deliberately retro experience. The last game they've made for each console has generally been released at the end of the life of a console or even in the heyday of the console's next generation. (DQ 7 was probably the most egregious example of this.) The combat system has studiously resisted change, and the games have always used the same art team and music team to keep a consistent feel.
Complaining about DQ being "20 years behind the curve" just shows that you don't play the games and have absolutely no understanding or appreciation of them.
Some of us are quite frankly tired of the old-school, turn-based combat systems disappearing in console RPGs to make way for real-time or "action" combat systems.
Hearing that the next DQ game will stick with a more traditional approach is a relief for some of us. The summary is a bit clumsy, but it gets the point across.
Jeremy Allison is not the originator of the phrase and shouldn't be attributed with it.
Hanlon's Razor
Let me change a few words in your post to show how facile the argument is...
"That's not fair -- [Bush] was actually a pretty effective president. People only remember [the scandals which will never result in a willing resignation], but he was able to push through a large number of domestic policy changes and had a foreign policy that extended beyond [Iraq]. Whether or not you agree with his politics (and be sure you know what they are before you make that decision), and the crimes he helped cover up, you should at least respect his effectiveness in the office."
Bush has hammered a ton of policy changes through. We're going to be feeling the aftershocks of his presidency for generations to come and many of the changes he's made in the balances between the three branches of government may become permanent. That doesn't mean that he's been an "effective" President.
Adding "moe" traits is not adding character, in my opinion, but just further adding fetishism.
- Lecherous... check. "Moe" fans like either pure maidens or total sex fiends (especially those who aren't getting any like them).
- Specific clothes item common in otaku-centric shows... check. Work-out clothes are a common fetish.
- Creepy fanfic writing showing otaku-like traits herself... check. Helps a fan relate to the character.
- Strange, sexualized relationship with family members... check. Treating siblings as outlets of sexual desires is a common, disturbing fetish.
These are all pretty otaku-oriented character traits meant to put the character into a specific niche of fan appeal. The OS-tan movement just creeps me out often because it exposes the lack of originality and the slavish devotion to "moe" in the otaku community as shown in otaku-targetted shows like "Strike Witches." I just like watching anime, but some people take things WAY too far. The OS-tan thing just sort of puts that in my face everytime I encounter it, so that's probably why I just don't like them at all.
...than fetishizing operating systems with cute or sexy girls.
The OS-tan thing is just a bit of otaku-dom that I have just never been able to understand.
Have you ever read the label of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Soap? I used to have to stare at one every day I took a shower because someone where I was living left a bottle of it in the shower and there was nothing else to occupy my mind. Staring at a bottle of Dr. Bronner soap for several minutes every day will drive you insane.
Wikipedia article on Bronner with a couple of excerpts from the label.
You used to be able to download PDFs of the labels at their website, but it looks like I now can't show you the face of madness I had to stare into every morning. You can buy them at Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and other "natural" product stores if your ever interested in weirding yourself out.
Heck, I don't blame the cops for drug testing a bottle of this soap after seeing it. I mean it's got the word HEMP in big bold letters and the rambling of a madman on it.
(Besides, what's your point? Unlike a punk band member, what's so suspicious about an IT professional having a bottle of soa--.... Ah. Never mind.)
If these judges even took two minutes to explain their prefered procedures, maybe they wouldn't be sooo annoyed with these silly laypeople comming into their courts. Its small claims court for crying out loud
If judges had to open every single case with a tutorial in presenting a case, it would eat up a significant amount of available time to actually try cases. Maybe instead people coming to waste the court's time should instead pick up one of the many excellent self-help books on presenting a case before small claims court instead of whining about how judges should be expected to hand-hold plaintiffs.
Something tells me that in your job, you don't spend a few minutes explaining to everyone who comes to you with a problem the basics of how to do the task they're trying to do. Clueless litigants are just as much of a lazy impediment to doing their job to judges as clueless users are to IT people.
Not only is that reckless, unsafe, and (where I live, at least) like to enrage the person behind so that they begin deliberately stalking you, but it's also the kind of idiocy that can cause pileup accidents and traffic jams. I used to do this all the time before I sat down and really thought about the ramifications of my actions.
Here, read the article that changes the way I drive. Mysterious "no accident" traffic jams are caused by the amplification of sudden slowing by a line of cars braking from a single event. The guy behind the guy behind the guy you're pulling this stunt on has to make a more sudden stop than the guy you were targetting. This sort of effect can amplify itself throughout dense traffic and eventually spread out to cause stop-and-go traffic. It's a very inconsiderate thing to do when you consider the effects of "winning" your little game against the effects it can have on everyone else.
That said, if you must try to push back at those trying to push you around on the road, it's much simpler, less accident prone, and less likely to shock traffic into a jam to just let your foot off the gas and gradually slow down. I haven't found any tailgater that's willing to stick behind a guy that's slowed to 10 MPH slower than they were going when the tailgater first got impatient enough to hang on my bumper.
Really, though, the best approach is to just avoid the fast lanes and go at a more relaxed pace. Pushing back at bullying drivers only works you up into a rage and makes you a less safe driver. Trust me, I find myself less miserable when driving now that I don't drive so competitively anymore, so do it for yourself if not for others.
This left me to think that when Theo commits social gaffes, it is not his fault and he can't help himself. We all have our lacks, issues, and strengths.
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with you on this. The way Mr. de Raadt treats other human beings is simply abusive, and there is no external factor than can explain his behavior in any fashion that would justify coddling it. Unless you are seriously willing to argue that the man is not, in a legal sense, mentally competent, then it is most certainly a problem that lies at his feet, and we should take no pity on him for it. To do otherwise is to suggest that he isn't, frankly, sane.
No. That's comes after World War II. I wish I was being sarcastic. We spend way too much time talking about the Civil War to leave room for discussing any of those icky parts of history where America might've done something controversial like the Bay of Pigs invasion or the Vietnam War. (At least, that was my experience growing up in a former Confederate state.)
We're just lucky to get a very small warning about McCarthyism and some coverage of the Civil Rights movement. All US history south of our borders post-Spanish-American War is pretty much not taught in high school -- especially anything critical of our actions during the Cold War. Too much of what is going on today can't be understood if your knowledge of world events pretty much ends at WW2. Why the US's enemies are enemies and why many of our allies who don't share our values at all are allies is pretty much a mystery to the vast majority of the electorate.
It gets me depressed about the future every time I think about it.
Seriously, this isn't just for the elderly. Driving ceased to be fun for me long ago. If I had to do it only once a week on a nice stretch of fast highway, I might feel differently....
I hate to give a tedious, AOLer response, but... "Me too."
I HATE driving. Hate, hate, HATE it. Every day I put my life in the hands of the collective attentiveness of every idiot on the road out there, and spend over an hour in state somewhere between abject boredom and fear of impending death just to go to work and back. It's either break-neck, wild speeders or stop-and.. well, stop traffic where I live. It's absolutely terrible, and mass transit options vary between non-existent to impractical (like a 1-2 hour trip combined with a half-hour of walking). The sooner that I can give my car over to (and more importantly the sooner all those cell-phone using idiots can turn their SUVs over to) an AI, the better.
I miss being able to take public transit everywhere from my short three weeks in Japan years ago. It was mostly stress-free, and I could get some reading done instead of idling my brain while searching for danger on the road. One of these days, I hope to move somewhere where I can rely on mass transit again, but the way this country is going, auto-drive is more likely to be in my future than a good bus ride.
Seriously. Some of the worst jobs have great security and pay well. Look at COBOL programmers - it's probably better to say you're a piano player in a whorehouse than to admit you mind legacy COBOL installations, but I hear that they're pretty darned good jobs.
I'll second that. I have a friend that does RPG programming for industrial companies, and he loves his job (except for the horrible commute). Apparently, in "legacy" programming you meet pretty stable, family-minded coworkers who are interested in working a job for years or decades. Low turnover, low burn-out, good hours, and good pay come with a completely "unsexy" skill set.
The new techie manager still wants to get his hands dirty doing the day to day work. Part of this is that they are don't trust others to do it "right" or they are afraid of losing their technical skills. The new techie manager never really gives him/her self over to the dark side of management.
You see, that IS the real "dark side" of managment -- when you become a micromanager or some other type of manager that constantly second-guesses their employees because you "know better." Even worse is the type that is constantly trying to make people prove themselves to them by withholding information to see if their subordinate is "smart enough" to come to the same conclusions (and then berate them if they don't either due to a difference of opinion or a crucial missing piece of information).
I've had four jobs since I entered the IT field. Every single manager I've had was a former programmer with the exception of one boss's boss (who was entirely awful because she was more interested in office politics and backstabbing for advancement... but I digress).
All the good bosses I've had gradually abandoned the programming side and learned to act as mentors. They used their knowledge of the system to give pointers on where to look when you were stuck on a problem and trusted you to get things done, only prodding every now and then when a schedule was threatened. All the bad bosses I've had (save the one mentioned above) second-guessed you constantly and either went around your work to put someone else on it (like themselves) or constantly made you justify ever single moment you spent your day on. In both cases, the attitude comes from the thought that they could do it better if they didn't have to do all this management crap instead.
In other words, the secret to going from a technical role to being a good manager is learning to let go. Use your skills and knowledge to aid your subordinates and shield them from upper management by understanding what they are doing. If necessary, use you knowledge to call their BS if they're actually slacking, but don't envy them or treat them as irritating time-wasters blocking you from doing "your real job." Otherwise, you're just demonstrating the Peter principle.
If you end up writing your own asm includes for things you'll still get some bloat, but I can guarantee you that it will be an order of magnitude less than using glibc.
Who runs on a system where they're interested in the functionality of glibc but don't expect it to already be available in memory as a shared library?
There are times when that can be valuable...like if you're needing a system which will fit on a floppy or usb stick, or for an older system with less ram etc.
It's exceptionally rare that you'll need something on a floppy nowadays, and I have a pretty cheap 1 GB usb stick. I can fit a bloated GNOME or KDE-based distro install on that with very little effort. Older systems with less RAM usually have older software that was designed for them. Sure, it's neat to run a webserver on a C64, but what's the point other than to say you've done it?
Assembly has its place, especially in embedded programming, but much of what you're describing is effort for the challenge of successfully doing something the hard way.
So yeah, I think all of the points you made are good ones, and they pretty much match my experience. However, I still think that there are a few teachers who are really trying (with some success) to work until 3pm 9 months a year. As one of my mother's co-workers said: "It'd be a great job if it weren't for all the damn kids." I think she almost bit the woman's head off, god bless her.
Yeah, but those people are extremely rare in my experience, and they rarely last long in the profession. My beef is that when you said "many teachers" in a thread that was kind of ragging on teachers, it sounded like you were saying "most" or even "a significant fraction." I find that teachers who keep short hours are rare. As someone who usually stayed late after school with my mother and later my father, I got to see just how many teachers' cars were still left at the building when they left school each day.
And, yes, God bless your mother for that. The few who do have a bad attitude about the kids have no place keeping their jobs when there are more than enough young people wanting to be teachers that could do a better job.
You must have had really poor C programming and operating systems classes if you didn't get most of that without knowledge of asm. The only thing that you can't really do well without knowledge of assembly language is write a compiler.
A basic C class should expose you to debugging and the three memory related issues you brought up. A good OS class will teach your about threads vs. processes. A good class on archetectures will teach you the general differences between historical hardware and how basic things like virtual memory and context switching works. Any low-rent school that fails to cover all this material effectively outside of an assembly class isn't going to do a good job explaining it there either.
There are really only a couple of things I got out of assembler that I didn't get out of other classes -- how function calls work (and how much overhead is involved) and how memory alignment and data packing differs from architecture to architecture. (In other words, why you can't just dump memory structures into a file and expect the data to be easily readable cross-platform even if you pay attention to LSB vs. MSB).
Oh, and just try and call me a fanboy:
How 'bout "arrogant braggart with too much time and disposeable income on his hands?"
I mean, that's what...? Well over $1000-1200 in hardware plus whatever that fourth thing in the middle is? I mean, do you even have more than three games for each system (that you've actually played) to justify owning each one?
Yeesh. I'm having a hard enough time cost- and time-justifying owning two of those systems, much less all three.
Teachers get paid shit so many of them are there because the hours are good, or because the competition is not exactly fierce, or because they are genuinely benevolent, caring individuals.
As the son of two teachers, I call B.S. on the hours bit. The hours for teaching are not that great. Did you think that machines grade papers for them? Did you think that they just wing it each day instead of having to submit detailed lesson plans to the administration? Just because all the kids go home doesn't mean that the teachers do too.
Over 40 hour weeks are pretty common, and summers aren't work-free either. Most people go into teaching because they like working with children and put up with the pay and the parents. Anyone who thinks teaching is a short-hours job gets disabused of that by the time their student teaching gig is over.
Also, competition for teaching jobs is harsher than you'd think. It's not a job with high turnover past the first five years, and the amount of teachers that can be hired is directly tied to the number of rooms available in school buildings and the latest budget crunch. Most people I know that graduate from college to be teachers don't end up working in their hometown and have to move or commute a good distance to work. This can be a problem when the only openings are in a community that doesn't offer good opportunities for their spouse as is the case with many rural school systems.
I know you're trying to be understanding of the stresses that teachers undergo in their job, but you've got the motivations to teach in the first place all wrong in my experience with my parents and their co-workers.
Genetics is something to consider, but environment factors -- particularly access to research materials, textbooks to gain such knowledge, and inspiration -- are also important.
Even if you were this smart growing up, would you have had access to a lab capable of researching microRNA repression or the fabrication of 3-D microcubes? Would you have even had access to the books to have even heard of loop homology and Hochschild cohomology or Ducci sequences?
I certainly wouldn't have had access to any of this. While I doubt I could have ever achieved anything they did even with the right environment, without that environment I doubt that any of them could have either.