"it is the right of the board and those elected by the people of the school districts and other places in question to set educational standards."
Absolutely. And it's the right of posters on Slashdot, authors, major media outlets and all major non-US governments to hold that decision up to the light of day and laugh at the silly people who are so threatened by real science that they have to ban (or otherwise cripple) its teaching.
You have to admit it's kind of funny... well, unless you have the misfortune to attend school there, and have any interest in pursuing a career in biological sciences later in life.
Why on earth would you adblock ads in an RSS feed? You don't care what's in the feed as long as adblock does its job when RENDERING any web page, regardless of how it got its data.
Google ads don't bother me at all, since they're well structured, non-abusive text, but if you are bothered by them, adblock should do its thing without modification.
No industry has enough people all time. They go through phases of having too many and too much. When there are too many, the people who can't find jobs look to other fields. When there are too few, the opposite happens.
The fact that there were too few people for the jobs was why I was able to break in to the sysadmin / programming world without any credentials back in 1990.
"The last 10 minutes weren't exactly perfect, either. One word: Noooooooooooooooooo!"
Actually, that did kind of surprise me (please note: my math was off, it was the last 20 minutes, since 140-120=20, but I still think that doesn't cover the scenes he probably liked (big action sequences)), because the last minutes of the film have some of the most nostalgic (for OT fans), and yet most poorly executed scenes in the movie. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but there are a bunch of reaction shots in the end that are really important, and I think people really fell down there.
"You know, the majority of movies are crap. Coming up with a bunch of examples of shitty movies does not in any way contradict the prior poster's comment."
I disagree, and I didn't just come up with a list of bad movies. Those were among the top-grossing films of this year! When you say that, "as a movie" it "sucked ass", I'm left with the question: what's your basis for comparison? Are you comparing it to Episode 5 and the handful of very good movies that came out since? If so, my point was that you're being unrealistic.
Now, if he had said, "I didn't enjoy the first 2 hours," that would be his call. There's no comparison there, but when you stack this film up against others of its kind, I think it has better pacing, camera work, dialog, acting, special effects, lighting, makeup and plot than 50% of the movies that have come out this (or just about any other) year. Being slightly above average would only be called "sucks ass" if it's a Star Wars movie, and thus highly over-anticipated.
"Oh, as a film, the first 2 hours sucked ass. The rest of it was cool."
Let's look at that, shall we?
First off, you must be off on that time estimate... are you saying that the film only got good in the last 10 minutes (no spoilers here, but that pretty much covers the tail end of the "wrap-up" scenes)? It was a 140min movie.
Now let's look at your claim that "as a movie" this "sucked ass"... If you had said, "as a Star Wars movie," then I might have accepted it (though even then, I think it's clearly better in many measurable ways than eps 1 and 2, which puts it at at least 4 out of 6, so "sucked ass" might be a bit strong)... no, you're comparting it to movies in general.
Let's JUST look at this year to see what you're comparing against:
Monster-in-Law House of Wax The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy xXx: State of the Union Are We There Yet? Son of the Mask Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous Ice Princess
I just want to be clear that these were all released this year (2005), and you are claiming that, compared to the general field of movies being made (see above) Star Wars Ep 3 "sucked ass".... I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you.
Yes, it had flaws (most of which are present in Episodes 4-6 as well), but it was a crowd-pleasing, fun film that brought back much of the excitement of the first three films.
This review makes a point of calling out previous opinion,
My "Phantom Menace" review, 1999: "Those of you waiting in line for Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace are, in my opinion, setting yourselves up for a grave disappointment. Either that, or you're about to brainwash yourselves into the short-term, delusional embrace of a sub-par cinematic product - which is even worse."
My "Attack of the Clones" review, 2002: "If these last two Star Wars movies have taught me anything, it's that all my prior rantings about Star Wars needing to be mythologically and thematically coherent and profound no longer apply. Those rantings were, in retrospect, most likely the justifications of a young adult who wanted to explain why she'd liked a pulp sci-fi/fantasy series so emphatically - and who gleefully adopted as her own the 'Power of Myth' mental gymnastics handed to her on a platter by Joseph Campbell and the Lucasfilm P.R. machine."
And yet goes on to say, "Bloody hell! It's good!" (emphasis her's).
I had some trouble understanding this article, but after using Google to translate it English -> Japanese -> English -> German -> French -> English, I think I understand better:
World ' of the examination of film and Roger Ebert; The authorization of an S "this examination of the star war... released episode III: Revenge on Sith. Because of the thing oncCSe DÉBARASSE outward journey, to which "that Ebert does give to this inch the line? it was that Ebert and Roeper however had there 2 inches with this, with regard to me... two and it half star with regard to me conscious to accept you inside became. What 3, it is it read, is? with regard to me rejoice, as for the half examination starred. Thing him, where it enjoyed that that allows klein-numerierten the thing, with the proof however, the free sector him ' them s-Weisenweise with regard to those. ' in ' episode III "with thus vielem, as 5 films adjust before indeed some-a 1 minuzioeses I ' of him, around much line being more, attaching, in the assumption of D, with regard to that the large one. ' thus, it is; * normally bad Diamantro?: The thing ' which cannot write the scene of love with of George Lucas; The starting word too is a moderate expression; As for that much you indicated the diagram in state of greeting leaning ';
Send all of the spammers who are breaking the law to jail. Guess what you get? Spammers in other countries with slacker laws picking up the slack.
The problem is simple, and has been simple for years. The solution is hard, but the problem is this: spam is noise, and noice is a bitch to filter.
Self-correcting, goal-oriented noise (e.g. diseases or spam) is even harder to deal with. No cute payment scheme will resolve the basic problem that in exchange for the benefit of everyone in the world being able to reach you, you get the drawback that everyone in the world can reach you.
Want a solution to spam? Go start a closed email service, where only paying members who have had their identies checked are allowed to send mail to each other, and yank anyone who misbehaves. Problem solved. Of course, you'll only be able to talk to a tiny fraction of the world, and employers won't be thrilled with "join this service so I can send you my resume," but you take the bad with the good, right?
"All surveys like this do is give ammunition to corporate management to investigate who they want, when they want, expect even less privacy and create conditions of employment so egregrious that the IT worker becomes chattel."
Then quit. Seriously, if that's the way your company treats its people, you should take a stand and leave.
"As it is, there are systems to monitor web surfing, chat conversations, phone conversations, VOIP decoders for phone conversations that aren't analog, cameras, keystroke loggers, mail server agents that look for keywords, policies against the use of encryption, etc etc."
Never worked anywhere that had any of those. I've only logged data on user activity once, and there was a legitimate (non-invasive) reason given, users were informed, and constraints placed on this use of the logs.
"With blood tests and mandatory screenings for crime history, blood history, pretty soon genetic history of family disease (company insurance is expensive you know they don't need any cancer heads) there will be no part of a worker's life that isn't controlled by the corporation that employs them."
Again. Simply don't work there. As long as the best and brightest won't work for Joe's Palace of Slave Labor, the best that organization can hope for is to crank out mediocre product. Meanwhile the real high tech companies will continue to overtake their larger, but less agile competition (and eventually become them, starting the whole cylcle over).
"We don't need any more tools to spy. We need some fucking national legislation to curb the uncontrolled police state that exists inside the corporations of the world."
Just walk away. Nothing keeps you tied to a company that treats you like dirt. If you live in the US you have a decent (if not the best) safety net, and re-training options abound if you're willing / able to re-locate. Send out a resume saying "willing to relocate / travel" at the top and you'll get dozens of bites.
I agree with you that this is not going to happen, but let me play devil's advocate for a second:
Microsoft would benefit from buying Red Hat and turning it into a parking lot right now because it would slow the growth of enterprise Linux (that is, the Fortune 500 set buying into Linux) for a heartbeat or two, and Microsoft has talked themselves into believing that if they can just slow Linux down for a little bit, Longhorn will be out, and all of their problems will be solved.
Alternate reason: by continuing to let Red Hat run, Microsoft could position RHEL as the server-only companion to the desktop-only Windows. This would be amazingly smart of them... which makes me wonder about just how likely it is....
"You can, however, have a well-designed, well-coded project"
Yes, yes, of course. No one has said "here's a good idea: write crappy code!"
The point is that writing code that is "good enough" should be balanced against giving your users a product which is "good enough" for their needs, and until it is, you should not focus on making the code "perfect" to the exclusion of things like meeting release dates; issuing bug-fixes; etc.
Balance in all things, and when in doubt, favor the user. That's all that's being said here.
"So the two are mutually exclusive? We can only have software that is perfectly written or software that addresses the needs of the users?"
Actually, no. You can't have either. "Perfect code" is an abstract, based on a set of assumptions and hypotheticals. Addressing "the needs of the users" is also an abstract that is based on a similar, but often contradictary set of assumptions and hypotheticals. The "desktop user" strawman is a common pitfall of trying to develop such applications.
So, given that you have two variables and dialing up either one involves an expenditure of resources which in turn has diminishing returns, you have to prioritize, and here we have a particular developer that says he'd prefer to see some weighting toward the user, and that "the user's needs" also includes keeping to your release dates.... Sounds reasonable to me.
"What the fuck is the deal with you fucktards trying to make it look like everyone that has real problems to deal with is fighting a "holy war"? I am a mail administrator for a large company, and I know more about the spam problem then you."
I could not have asked for a more striking example of my point, thank you.
FWIW, I'm a mail administrator too, though I've moved away from the trenches recently.
My point is that mail adminstrators like us can lose sight of the fact that spam and email aren't seperate phenomenon. Email is an open channel of communication, and open channels of communication classically become sources of noise. The fact that the economies of scale make it cost-effective for the sources of said noise raise the signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.
People who deal with spam as a stand-alone phenomenon are doomed to become angry and frustrated because they'll always be fighting a losing battle.
Want no spam? It's easy. Don't accept email from the world at large. It turns out, however, that sorting the signal out of that noise is still, and promises to continue to be an efficient enough process that there's giant return on investment.
Thus, your job (and mine) will continue to be acting as a signal amplifier / noise filter. Getting upset about the fact that human communication involves noise is actually kind of silly, but if you prefer being mad about it, enjoy.
"It costs any sizable company millions of dollars to keep it away and pay for dealing with it."
In my experience spam and other noise problems related to email account for approximately half of the costs associated with providing the service.
Again, if you treat that as overhead associated with the communications medium, then you find it's really not that big a deal. Imagine the costs associated with the equivalent physical mail handling capability. I know that one company I used to work for spent so much to deal with physical mail that a major US city out-sources some of their Christmas mail sorting to their facility. I have yet to see the company that had to even build a seperate facility to house the email team.
"There might always be noise, but how would you like it if you could only hear 10% of your radio station because the rest was static? And you had to spend $4000 to get the noise down with an expensive filter but the quality was still low?"
When is the last time someone emailed you anthrax? A bomb? You would not believe the costs associated with handling physical mail. It's absolutely stunning. Email scales far better than physical mail when it comes to the costs and risks associated.
"E-Mail is the main method of communication in use on the Internet, and probably otherwise, in the world. SPAM threatens this system."
No, no it doesn't. Spam has never been a threat to email. It is PART of the communication media. It is the price you pay for giving everyone a voice: it turns out that some people will do nothing but screem obscenities, some people will try to con you and others will insist that you have to listen to their reasons that everything you do is evil. Welcome to the human race.
"Sure, new spam filters can be pretty effective. But it takes a lot of resources to deal with spam in terms of hardware and network bandwidth. 75% of all e-mail traffic is SPAM. Millions upon millions a day."
And how does this have anything to do with what Schneier said? Yes, extracting signal from noise is expensive, presents problems of diminishing returns and the cost/benefit doesn't favor an end to the problem any time soon. However, he's correct: as far as the average person is concerned, spam is a relatively solved problem.
I heard an interesting quote recently: "any problem that can be solved by throwing money at it is not a real problem." Spam is not a real problem. It's a complication, but not a problem. Does it raise the price of business communications? Yes. Is that a problem? Not really, it just changes the economics.
The real problem is that the people in the trenches who are the recipients of said money develop a sense that they are fighting some sort of holy war against an adversary that will one day be defeated. I have news for you: you are a machine that takes a noise source with weak signal in and produces an amplified version of the signal with some noise reduction. Noise is not evil, and signal will never be "pure".
I disagree. The acting in I and II wasn't oscar-winning, but it was no worse than IV and V. Go back and watch luke deliver his lines. Sure you had Harrison Ford and Alec Guiness, but here you have Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor who did wonderful jobs with what they were given. I think Portman is at least as good as Fisher. Oz does as well as always, of course. So what's the beef?
I don't blame the dialog per se. No single line is all that bad (and the ones that are off are not that memorable). The real chronic problem in those movies was the pacing. Lucas needs an editor who is willing to stand up to him and tell him to cut out 20 minutes of his precious baby.
There are scenes between Amidala and Anakin in II that would have been touching and memorable... except for the fact that they either dragged on intollerably or were abrubtly introduced on top of a very different feeling from another scene.
I want to see a re-edit of I and II after III comes out that collapses them down into a single movie and removes a lot of the sweeping pans over CG landscapes and re-orders some of the scenes and shots.
I think you're confusing writing the STORY with writing the SCREENPLAY. The story was written in part in the 70s. There are some scenes in this film which were published in magazines in the early 80s (there is one particular major bit with Anakin that I've heard quoted ever since, and it's a major set for ep3). And of course, Lucas almost certainly planned out much of the detail in this film when arcing out 1 and 2 and their tie to 4.
I would not be shocked to find out that some sets / CG for this film were built before 2 was even done post-production.
The screenplay for this film is crucial, but don't assume that it was or even should have been the starting point.
There are some reviews of Sith that are coming from people who a) are filing their last review b) publicly hated 1 and 2 and c) don't entirely gush (but come close) over Sith.
It looks like the movie manages to touch on whatever it was that made people stand up and take notice of 4 and 5. It has relatively simple characters (just like all of the rest) and some really cliche moments (just like all of the rest), but gets back into the spirit of what SW had lost.
My personal take on this is the same as the review that I linked to above: Lucas had a LOT ends to tie up and had to cut the story down brutally until it fit. He essentially became his own editor, and what 6, 1 and 2 needed more than anything else was an editor. All of that "so-and-so was an awful actor" that you heard from 1 and 2 was really more a factor of script and the pacing that the movies ground the audience through. If the actors had all been well-established like Ewan McGregor, you would have been able to easily pick out the difference between bad acting and horrid pacing.
I love the landing gear metaphor for 1 and 2. It's very apt. and really captures the problem with those movies. LK helped get the pacing right in 5, and I think AG had a lot to do with the pacing in 4. Finally, GL has found the strength to build decent pacing in 3, so let's hope that he learns from this. I look forward to another 20 years of great story-telling WITH good pacing from this master tale spinner.
One other factor that you might consider: as this movie tries to tie 2 and 4 together, it must act as a transition back to the story that we grew up loving. In that sense, perhaps 3 also directly draws some of that feel back from the 70s....
"Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc."
Those are clearly off-topic rants by people who confuse a desire to prevent random acts of creulty with an inability to cope eating animal flesh. Change your filtering to a threshold of 2 or 3, and most of that problem goes away.
"[... a conservative] writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue."
Animal agriculture is also clearly an off-topic subject having nothing to do with the issue of point-and-click animal slaughter.
"I publish Vegan.com"
Ah... I guess I should have heard the other shoe dropping....
"One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter."
Ok, stupid hunter. That, by the way, is called manslaughter and as you say, "most hunters would agree with that."
"Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting."
I really hope you don't think that anyone thinks this way. Hunting accidents are almost always the fault of some lame-brain who can't tell his head from a moose, and no one is going to defend that kind of thing. Painting all hunters with that rather agregiously wide brush is rather unfortunate, however and borders on a straw man.
"Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them."
You understand that this is a collection of straw-man arguments and highly argumentative, right?
What exactly was the goal of your post? Were you just trying to get a few vegans riled up so that they would read your site, or were you actually trying to engage in some kind of rational discussion?
If the latter, please try again. Your frist attempt was buried in too much noise.
"Unless we can assume that the readers represent the Linux community as a whole, this survey is largely useless."
Well, there's a few other reasons as well. The one that jumps out at me is the fact that they compare desktop systems to window managers. A few of the WMs that they list are, in fact, quite capable of running as the WM for KDE, Gnome, or both.
Then, of course, there's the fact that they split up the Debian distributions, but insist on calling Fedora, "Red Hat" which is too bad, because I'm curious how many old "Red Hat Linux" desktops there are vs RHEL Desktop vs Fedora.
Hmmm... how to construct your very own SEGV, eh?... well, I guess "kill -SEGV $$" is a bit obvious.
How about
perl -le 'print unpack("P","\0\0\0\01")'
Good enough?;-)
Yeah, I know. You're wondering, "why that trailing 1"? It's because Perl explicitly checks for the boneheaded maneuver of dereferencing NULL in an unpack and prevents it. Of course (as the docs point out), there's not much it can do to prevent you using this particular tool to shoot yourself in the foot.
Slashdot Mirror
"it is the right of the board and those elected by the people of the school districts and other places in question to set educational standards."
Absolutely. And it's the right of posters on Slashdot, authors, major media outlets and all major non-US governments to hold that decision up to the light of day and laugh at the silly people who are so threatened by real science that they have to ban (or otherwise cripple) its teaching.
You have to admit it's kind of funny... well, unless you have the misfortune to attend school there, and have any interest in pursuing a career in biological sciences later in life.
Why on earth would you adblock ads in an RSS feed? You don't care what's in the feed as long as adblock does its job when RENDERING any web page, regardless of how it got its data.
Google ads don't bother me at all, since they're well structured, non-abusive text, but if you are bothered by them, adblock should do its thing without modification.
No industry has enough people all time. They go through phases of having too many and too much. When there are too many, the people who can't find jobs look to other fields. When there are too few, the opposite happens.
The fact that there were too few people for the jobs was why I was able to break in to the sysadmin / programming world without any credentials back in 1990.
"The last 10 minutes weren't exactly perfect, either. One word: Noooooooooooooooooo!"
Actually, that did kind of surprise me (please note: my math was off, it was the last 20 minutes, since 140-120=20, but I still think that doesn't cover the scenes he probably liked (big action sequences)), because the last minutes of the film have some of the most nostalgic (for OT fans), and yet most poorly executed scenes in the movie. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but there are a bunch of reaction shots in the end that are really important, and I think people really fell down there.
"You know, the majority of movies are crap. Coming up with a bunch of examples of shitty movies does not in any way contradict the prior poster's comment."
I disagree, and I didn't just come up with a list of bad movies. Those were among the top-grossing films of this year! When you say that, "as a movie" it "sucked ass", I'm left with the question: what's your basis for comparison? Are you comparing it to Episode 5 and the handful of very good movies that came out since? If so, my point was that you're being unrealistic.
Now, if he had said, "I didn't enjoy the first 2 hours," that would be his call. There's no comparison there, but when you stack this film up against others of its kind, I think it has better pacing, camera work, dialog, acting, special effects, lighting, makeup and plot than 50% of the movies that have come out this (or just about any other) year. Being slightly above average would only be called "sucks ass" if it's a Star Wars movie, and thus highly over-anticipated.
Sad.
"Oh, as a film, the first 2 hours sucked ass. The rest of it was cool."
Let's look at that, shall we?
First off, you must be off on that time estimate... are you saying that the film only got good in the last 10 minutes (no spoilers here, but that pretty much covers the tail end of the "wrap-up" scenes)? It was a 140min movie.
Now let's look at your claim that "as a movie" this "sucked ass"... If you had said, "as a Star Wars movie," then I might have accepted it (though even then, I think it's clearly better in many measurable ways than eps 1 and 2, which puts it at at least 4 out of 6, so "sucked ass" might be a bit strong)... no, you're comparting it to movies in general.
Let's JUST look at this year to see what you're comparing against:
Monster-in-Law
House of Wax
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
xXx: State of the Union
Are We There Yet?
Son of the Mask
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
Ice Princess
I just want to be clear that these were all released this year (2005), and you are claiming that, compared to the general field of movies being made (see above) Star Wars Ep 3 "sucked ass".... I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you.
Yes, it had flaws (most of which are present in Episodes 4-6 as well), but it was a crowd-pleasing, fun film that brought back much of the excitement of the first three films.
I've owned that LaserDisc since it came out....
Arthur: Ichi... ni... go!
Minion: San desu!
Arthur: San desu! [throws]
I nearly died laughing!
This review makes a point of calling out previous opinion,And yet goes on to say, "Bloody hell! It's good!" (emphasis her's).
Enjoy.
Send all of the spammers who are breaking the law to jail. Guess what you get? Spammers in other countries with slacker laws picking up the slack.
The problem is simple, and has been simple for years. The solution is hard, but the problem is this: spam is noise, and noice is a bitch to filter.
Self-correcting, goal-oriented noise (e.g. diseases or spam) is even harder to deal with. No cute payment scheme will resolve the basic problem that in exchange for the benefit of everyone in the world being able to reach you, you get the drawback that everyone in the world can reach you.
Want a solution to spam? Go start a closed email service, where only paying members who have had their identies checked are allowed to send mail to each other, and yank anyone who misbehaves. Problem solved. Of course, you'll only be able to talk to a tiny fraction of the world, and employers won't be thrilled with "join this service so I can send you my resume," but you take the bad with the good, right?
"All surveys like this do is give ammunition to corporate management to investigate who they want, when they want, expect even less privacy and create conditions of employment so egregrious that the IT worker becomes chattel."
Then quit. Seriously, if that's the way your company treats its people, you should take a stand and leave.
"As it is, there are systems to monitor web surfing, chat conversations, phone conversations, VOIP decoders for phone conversations that aren't analog, cameras, keystroke loggers, mail server agents that look for keywords, policies against the use of encryption, etc etc."
Never worked anywhere that had any of those. I've only logged data on user activity once, and there was a legitimate (non-invasive) reason given, users were informed, and constraints placed on this use of the logs.
"With blood tests and mandatory screenings for crime history, blood history, pretty soon genetic history of family disease (company insurance is expensive you know they don't need any cancer heads) there will be no part of a worker's life that isn't controlled by the corporation that employs them."
Again. Simply don't work there. As long as the best and brightest won't work for Joe's Palace of Slave Labor, the best that organization can hope for is to crank out mediocre product. Meanwhile the real high tech companies will continue to overtake their larger, but less agile competition (and eventually become them, starting the whole cylcle over).
"We don't need any more tools to spy. We need some fucking national legislation to curb the uncontrolled police state that exists inside the corporations of the world."
Just walk away. Nothing keeps you tied to a company that treats you like dirt. If you live in the US you have a decent (if not the best) safety net, and re-training options abound if you're willing / able to re-locate. Send out a resume saying "willing to relocate / travel" at the top and you'll get dozens of bites.
I agree with you that this is not going to happen, but let me play devil's advocate for a second:
Microsoft would benefit from buying Red Hat and turning it into a parking lot right now because it would slow the growth of enterprise Linux (that is, the Fortune 500 set buying into Linux) for a heartbeat or two, and Microsoft has talked themselves into believing that if they can just slow Linux down for a little bit, Longhorn will be out, and all of their problems will be solved.
Alternate reason: by continuing to let Red Hat run, Microsoft could position RHEL as the server-only companion to the desktop-only Windows. This would be amazingly smart of them... which makes me wonder about just how likely it is....
"You can, however, have a well-designed, well-coded project"
Yes, yes, of course. No one has said "here's a good idea: write crappy code!"
The point is that writing code that is "good enough" should be balanced against giving your users a product which is "good enough" for their needs, and until it is, you should not focus on making the code "perfect" to the exclusion of things like meeting release dates; issuing bug-fixes; etc.
Balance in all things, and when in doubt, favor the user. That's all that's being said here.
"So the two are mutually exclusive? We can only have software that is perfectly written or software that addresses the needs of the users?"
Actually, no. You can't have either. "Perfect code" is an abstract, based on a set of assumptions and hypotheticals. Addressing "the needs of the users" is also an abstract that is based on a similar, but often contradictary set of assumptions and hypotheticals. The "desktop user" strawman is a common pitfall of trying to develop such applications.
So, given that you have two variables and dialing up either one involves an expenditure of resources which in turn has diminishing returns, you have to prioritize, and here we have a particular developer that says he'd prefer to see some weighting toward the user, and that "the user's needs" also includes keeping to your release dates.... Sounds reasonable to me.
"What the fuck is the deal with you fucktards trying to make it look like everyone that has real problems to deal with is fighting a "holy war"? I am a mail administrator for a large company, and I know more about the spam problem then you."
I could not have asked for a more striking example of my point, thank you.
FWIW, I'm a mail administrator too, though I've moved away from the trenches recently.
My point is that mail adminstrators like us can lose sight of the fact that spam and email aren't seperate phenomenon. Email is an open channel of communication, and open channels of communication classically become sources of noise. The fact that the economies of scale make it cost-effective for the sources of said noise raise the signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.
People who deal with spam as a stand-alone phenomenon are doomed to become angry and frustrated because they'll always be fighting a losing battle.
Want no spam? It's easy. Don't accept email from the world at large. It turns out, however, that sorting the signal out of that noise is still, and promises to continue to be an efficient enough process that there's giant return on investment.
Thus, your job (and mine) will continue to be acting as a signal amplifier / noise filter. Getting upset about the fact that human communication involves noise is actually kind of silly, but if you prefer being mad about it, enjoy.
"It costs any sizable company millions of dollars to keep it away and pay for dealing with it."
In my experience spam and other noise problems related to email account for approximately half of the costs associated with providing the service.
Again, if you treat that as overhead associated with the communications medium, then you find it's really not that big a deal. Imagine the costs associated with the equivalent physical mail handling capability. I know that one company I used to work for spent so much to deal with physical mail that a major US city out-sources some of their Christmas mail sorting to their facility. I have yet to see the company that had to even build a seperate facility to house the email team.
"There might always be noise, but how would you like it if you could only hear 10% of your radio station because the rest was static? And you had to spend $4000 to get the noise down with an expensive filter but the quality was still low?"
When is the last time someone emailed you anthrax? A bomb? You would not believe the costs associated with handling physical mail. It's absolutely stunning. Email scales far better than physical mail when it comes to the costs and risks associated.
"E-Mail is the main method of communication in use on the Internet, and probably otherwise, in the world. SPAM threatens this system."
No, no it doesn't. Spam has never been a threat to email. It is PART of the communication media. It is the price you pay for giving everyone a voice: it turns out that some people will do nothing but screem obscenities, some people will try to con you and others will insist that you have to listen to their reasons that everything you do is evil. Welcome to the human race.
"Sure, new spam filters can be pretty effective. But it takes a lot of resources to deal with spam in terms of hardware and network bandwidth. 75% of all e-mail traffic is SPAM. Millions upon millions a day."
And how does this have anything to do with what Schneier said? Yes, extracting signal from noise is expensive, presents problems of diminishing returns and the cost/benefit doesn't favor an end to the problem any time soon. However, he's correct: as far as the average person is concerned, spam is a relatively solved problem.
I heard an interesting quote recently: "any problem that can be solved by throwing money at it is not a real problem." Spam is not a real problem. It's a complication, but not a problem. Does it raise the price of business communications? Yes. Is that a problem? Not really, it just changes the economics.
The real problem is that the people in the trenches who are the recipients of said money develop a sense that they are fighting some sort of holy war against an adversary that will one day be defeated. I have news for you: you are a machine that takes a noise source with weak signal in and produces an amplified version of the signal with some noise reduction. Noise is not evil, and signal will never be "pure".
I disagree. The acting in I and II wasn't oscar-winning, but it was no worse than IV and V. Go back and watch luke deliver his lines. Sure you had Harrison Ford and Alec Guiness, but here you have Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor who did wonderful jobs with what they were given. I think Portman is at least as good as Fisher. Oz does as well as always, of course. So what's the beef?
I don't blame the dialog per se. No single line is all that bad (and the ones that are off are not that memorable). The real chronic problem in those movies was the pacing. Lucas needs an editor who is willing to stand up to him and tell him to cut out 20 minutes of his precious baby.
There are scenes between Amidala and Anakin in II that would have been touching and memorable... except for the fact that they either dragged on intollerably or were abrubtly introduced on top of a very different feeling from another scene.
I want to see a re-edit of I and II after III comes out that collapses them down into a single movie and removes a lot of the sweeping pans over CG landscapes and re-orders some of the scenes and shots.
I think you're confusing writing the STORY with writing the SCREENPLAY. The story was written in part in the 70s. There are some scenes in this film which were published in magazines in the early 80s (there is one particular major bit with Anakin that I've heard quoted ever since, and it's a major set for ep3). And of course, Lucas almost certainly planned out much of the detail in this film when arcing out 1 and 2 and their tie to 4.
I would not be shocked to find out that some sets / CG for this film were built before 2 was even done post-production.
The screenplay for this film is crucial, but don't assume that it was or even should have been the starting point.
There are some reviews of Sith that are coming from people who a) are filing their last review b) publicly hated 1 and 2 and c) don't entirely gush (but come close) over Sith.
It looks like the movie manages to touch on whatever it was that made people stand up and take notice of 4 and 5. It has relatively simple characters (just like all of the rest) and some really cliche moments (just like all of the rest), but gets back into the spirit of what SW had lost.
My personal take on this is the same as the review that I linked to above: Lucas had a LOT ends to tie up and had to cut the story down brutally until it fit. He essentially became his own editor, and what 6, 1 and 2 needed more than anything else was an editor. All of that "so-and-so was an awful actor" that you heard from 1 and 2 was really more a factor of script and the pacing that the movies ground the audience through. If the actors had all been well-established like Ewan McGregor, you would have been able to easily pick out the difference between bad acting and horrid pacing.
I love the landing gear metaphor for 1 and 2. It's very apt. and really captures the problem with those movies. LK helped get the pacing right in 5, and I think AG had a lot to do with the pacing in 4. Finally, GL has found the strength to build decent pacing in 3, so let's hope that he learns from this. I look forward to another 20 years of great story-telling WITH good pacing from this master tale spinner.
One other factor that you might consider: as this movie tries to tie 2 and 4 together, it must act as a transition back to the story that we grew up loving. In that sense, perhaps 3 also directly draws some of that feel back from the 70s....
Follow the link from the word. Reading the article is actually enlightening in this case.
"Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc."
Those are clearly off-topic rants by people who confuse a desire to prevent random acts of creulty with an inability to cope eating animal flesh. Change your filtering to a threshold of 2 or 3, and most of that problem goes away.
"[... a conservative] writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue."
Animal agriculture is also clearly an off-topic subject having nothing to do with the issue of point-and-click animal slaughter.
"I publish Vegan.com"
Ah... I guess I should have heard the other shoe dropping....
"One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter."
Ok, stupid hunter. That, by the way, is called manslaughter and as you say, "most hunters would agree with that."
"Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting."
I really hope you don't think that anyone thinks this way. Hunting accidents are almost always the fault of some lame-brain who can't tell his head from a moose, and no one is going to defend that kind of thing. Painting all hunters with that rather agregiously wide brush is rather unfortunate, however and borders on a straw man.
"Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them."
You understand that this is a collection of straw-man arguments and highly argumentative, right?
What exactly was the goal of your post? Were you just trying to get a few vegans riled up so that they would read your site, or were you actually trying to engage in some kind of rational discussion?
If the latter, please try again. Your frist attempt was buried in too much noise.
"How about a new /. rule where whenever someone posts a perl script [...]"
/. rule where whenever someone can't tell the difference between a script and a one-liner, they aren't allowed to use a keyboard?
How about a new
"Unless we can assume that the readers represent the Linux community as a whole, this survey is largely useless."
Well, there's a few other reasons as well. The one that jumps out at me is the fact that they compare desktop systems to window managers. A few of the WMs that they list are, in fact, quite capable of running as the WM for KDE, Gnome, or both.
Then, of course, there's the fact that they split up the Debian distributions, but insist on calling Fedora, "Red Hat" which is too bad, because I'm curious how many old "Red Hat Linux" desktops there are vs RHEL Desktop vs Fedora.
*shrug* Just more bad data.
How aboutGood enough?
Yeah, I know. You're wondering, "why that trailing 1"? It's because Perl explicitly checks for the boneheaded maneuver of dereferencing NULL in an unpack and prevents it. Of course (as the docs point out), there's not much it can do to prevent you using this particular tool to shoot yourself in the foot.