As it is, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, says it's named "Linux", and Richard Stallman and GNU really don't have much say in the matter. GNU failed to get an OS out the door and joined Linux. Get over it.
Ahh, you totally miss the point don't you? RMS has the right to bitch and complain and try to convince people to call it 'GNU/$KERNEL'. You have the right to say "I call it FU-RMS/$KERNEL". However, you can only call it 'FU-RMS/$KERNEL' because it exists.
However, that is not what is happening here. RMS calls it GNU/Linux and tries to convince others, using nothing more than words, that they should call it GNU/Linux too. You respond by claiming that GNU has failed to produce a kernel and therefore they shouldn't ask other people to call it GNU/Linux. You have the right to do this as well, but your insults are misplaced and you are a stupid little fuck.
trying to co-opt the project of someone who was able to accomplish what you couldn't
Make that stupid AND ignorant. GNU started as a project to produce the userland tools for unix operating systems becuase the commercial tools were very expensive and closed source. This irked people who had been around for awhile because they couldn't modify other peoples work to their purposes, even if they owned said expensive license. GNU was started a long time ago and these tools are used in every linux distro. Without these tools (GCC for example) linux could not exist (Perhaps it could use some sort of BSD userland, but BSD came after GNU, iirc). However, GNU would still exist and be used, linux or no.
So, feel free to point out a GNU free linux distro. There are many linux free unices which use GNU.
I dare you to say a more meaningless phrase. Addiction is a result of artificial stimulation of parts of the brain, causing dependence of some sort. The most addictive substances also change the structure of the brain in a way which prevents normal activity from stimulating the same are of the brain the drug effects. This is the one-two punch of addiction. You become accustomed to over-stimulation of your pleasure centers, and you become unable to attain normal stimulation without the drug.
If you gave heroin to Jesus every day for a month he would be a hardcore addict at the end of that month. Pseudo-psychological nonsense need not apply.
Now, as for why people would choose to eat/inject addictive chemicals, there are many reasons.
The primary factor is availability. Very few people would go out of their way to get heroin if they weren't addicted previously.
Other factors are boredom, sudden affluence (such as rock stars), etc.
Another cause is an attempt to self-medicate, that is to say suppress unpleasant thoughts and emotions by chemically changing ones mental state. This is a major factor leading people to take a drug, but it is not the cause of addiction any more than being hungry is the cause of a heart attacks.
All of these factors are merely the reasons people start taking drugs. Once you start taking it, the addiction and downward spiral are completely a chemical phenomenon inside the brain, and no feeling of emptiness or lack of feeling of emptiness, even if that meant something, could change this.
You know, everyday about 100,000 people place their lives in the trust of software 'black boxes' on planes and not a peep from the newly political geeks.
You stupid fuck, the black boxes on planes can't cause the plane to crash, you are in no way placing any trust in them.
A bad politico can get you killed, just ask the 3000 kids who wanted to do the right thing and go to college, or be all they could be.
However, just because you don't think your friends have add, it doesn't mean that it is true. Additionally, do you go through all of your friends medicine cabinets, and do they log their doctors appointments with you?
I would actually go and find the studies, but you can do that as well as I can, I suspect. I'm not going to, because you are not in a position to know what you claim to be true, specifically, you don't know what your friends don't tell you, and people don't brag about their psychiatrist appointments, so you saying that you've never met an ADD computer geek is about as crazy of a claim as you could make.
I've completely dealt with GP to my satisfaction. What you say is true. One symptom is not the disease. However, one symptom is a symptom of the disease, by hypothesis. So he has several of the symptoms (or characteristics which have a high level of correlation with the disease if you like) of ADD, as I previously pointed out.
Now, as for taking wikipedia as gospel, it is at LEAST as accurate as gospel. However, that is a low bar. I think that wikipedia is fairly accurate, and has a very wide scope. Therefore it is convenient to link to it on slashdot, to give people a place to start if they are interested in hearing more about what I was posting about. You don't want to quote it in your PHD thesis (unless your thesis is on the topic: "The Time Averaged Accuracy of Community Network Information Systems" or some such) but if you want to know what a "varistor" is and where it might be found, wikipedia is hands down the best place to go. Check for yourself, there is a one page article on 'varistor'. The other alternative is to trek all the way down to the library and actually look it up, which people are not likely to do, which wouldn't be much more accurate in most cases anyway. Alternatively we could do a google search. Would you prefer random web pages with no fact checking to wikipedia's faulty fact checking?
At the very least wikipedia will reflect what people are talking about with regards to any given subject. It is a great place to learn, even if you are too ignorant to take what it says with the proper amount of skepticism.
The big problem with wikipedia is that people don't know how to not believe everything that they read. Wait, I should clarify. People either believe every word that they read, or if the text disagrees with their bumpkin notions of reality then they mock it and consider it worthless. So when wikipedia has errors (GHASP!!!) people like to shit themselves.
However, every newspaper is 99% crap, written by people who have absolutely no expertise in what they are talking about.
Think about your area of expertise. Now, when you read newspaper articles about that subject you probably laugh at all the hundreds of inaccuracies and misused technical words. Now, extrapolate. Every subject in the newspaper has the same level of accuracy, on average, as those articles you know to be crap. Of course magazines and TV are even worse, usually.
At least wiki's have the potential to be fixed by people who know better.
I am not making a 'directional fallacy'. I am stating that he had one clear symptom of ADD. If there is a higher than average statistical correlation of the presence of a symptom in a person and the presence of the disease, then if someone does exhibit the symptom they have a correspondingly higher likelihood of having the disease. That is what symptom means.
If GP said 'I'm having chest pains' and I said 'go to a heart doctor' you would then reply, as you have shown, that it could all just be gas, and accuse me of diagnosing people over the internet. How is that helpful to anyone?
Besides, the wikipedia article, of you cared to read it, goes over in detail your objections, including hyper-focus not being in DSM - IV.
As a matter of fact, I would be willing to bet, if it could be proven, that you only learned of these objections from the article I posted, which you then throw in my face as a disease somehow.
One way to detect 'bullshit' is when someone is talking about something, and they keep referring to the name of the idea they are talking about. Remember that book that came out recently, called 'the earth is flat' or something to that effect? I picked it up in the bookstore. It was just a bunch of ramblings and facts, but everything in it was supposed to be evidence of the 'flattening of the earth'. The author never tells you what this means, although it seems to be supported by every change the world is going through. 'The earth is flat' in the book is exactly the same as saying 'the Earth is different and it is changing in some ways'.
'Flow' is a similar concept. I'm not sure what stupid ass thought it up, but you most certainly got it from some book. 'Flow' is just another way of saying 'being smart'. You seem to think that you can get in 'a zone' and that this 'zone' is a state of mind where you can think better. This is just crap. Either you can do it or not, there isn't some magic mojo hocus-pocus which will let you be a better programmer.
The reason it is bullshit when people refer to the name of an idea over and over while describing it is that they are not really describing it. They are selling it.
If I told you that 'blue' is the color of the sky, the ocean from the correct distance, and has a wavelength of x meters, you now know a lot about how to decide if something is blue.
If I told you that 'a pound' is equal to X kilograms on earth, is equal to Y atoms of carbon, is equal to some object which you have access to, that a pound is a measure of weight, etc, you can go out and use this knowledge.
If I tell you that "the manipulation of complex abstract mental models over hours of time while performing a task causes 'flow'", you still have no idea what it is.
This is like saying "riding the hood of a car for hours at a time" causes 'smerka". What is smerka? Nobody knows, but we know as much about it as we know about 'flow'.
Some programmers compensate for their limited ability to create and manipulate a sophisticated mental model of the program by being better at things like documentation and user interface however if you want the code itself to be good you need somebody who can abstract, not just talk. i.e. can juggle complex mental models for hours at a time.
I've never seen a more ADD ridden sentence in my life. It is almost without punctuation. It should probably be 3 - 5 sentences.
Most human behaviour is ambiguous enough to be considered as mental illness if looked at the right way and ADD and other psychiatric disorders are often mis-applied because of this.
Again, super non-punctuation. 'Illness' is not well defined. However, I can tell you this:
If I am having difficulty concentrating due to the makeup of my brain, and taking medicine allows me to complete tasks I could not otherwise complete, I believe that taking medicine is worthwhile. If you disagree that is fine, but you shouldn't act as though you are some sort of expert when you are not. You have not made a systematic study of psychiatry nor have you made one of ADD, and so your opinion on either of those subjects has as much worth as your opinions on which rare earth metal makes the best coating for nuclear reactor parts, specifically, you are talking out your ass.
Yes, your mockery is well placed. Since you are an expert, what should everyone do instead of go to a psychiatrist? I personally know people who's life was changed once they were put on medication. Instead of being frustrated failures who never 'live up to their potential' they are able to concentrate and achieve.
Psychiatrists aren't a bunch of idiots. There are some bad ones, as well as some good ones, but as a field they are merely trying to do what they think will get people the best outcome. There aren't any crazy conspiracies, because doctors do not see a cut for the medicine they proscribe. If they really wanted to bilk you out of money they would require you to come again and again instead of just occasionally to check progress and get a proscription.
Besides, fuck you. The fact that you feel the need to insult others and mock people you don't know is a symptom of your disease. Get some friends, it may be hard if you just go ballistic and in their face for every fact about their life you mildly disagree with but which doesn't effect you at all, and you won't feel the need to get crazy and scream for attention.
Find a good psychiatrist who isn't afraid to proscribe ritalin on a trial basis. Then try it for a few weeks and watch your world change. Make an effort do discover the lowest dose which is therapeutic. Try to avoid gradually increasing the dose by taking 'medicine holidays' where you skip it for a week or two.
According to the psyc I used to go to, if you respond to ritalin with increased focus and no sensation of being 'high' then you are much more likely to have ADD than someone who can get 'high' off of it.
When I took too much ritalin it turned me into a zombie, things seemed distant and weird, but I never had a pleasurable sensation. Elvis used to use ritalin like cocaine, to get high. It has different effects on different people.
Adderall also works well, but it isn't for everybody.
Finally, don't let ritalin turn into Sleep 2.0. When you are taking it you should force yourself to eat and sleep on a normal schedule, since it is a stimulant it will effect your sleep patterns just like coffee.
Finally, make sure the first proscription you fill is for brand name ritalin, not generic. For some reason people sometimes have a more pronounced effect with the brand name stuff (yes, I know it shouldn't matter).
You don't become 'Assistant to the District Manager of Accounts Payable' because you want to. It's a combination of circumstances and lack of other skills, and an unwillingness to take a pay cut to do something more interesting.
95% of Cubed jobs are beneath human intelligence and human dignity.
You greatly overestimate human intelligence.
When people are stuffed into stalls and given less rights than horses and cattle, why should they enjoy it?
You obviously aren't familiar with conditions on cattle ranches.
You seem very angry. Still, not being able to focus on something despite making an effort to do so is a problem. I have dealt with this my entire life, and I wish I had been able to force myself to pay attention to all that boring homework I didn't do. If I had, I wouldn't be in a cubicle now.
What is the issue here? You accept that the law is wrong. However, since you can't personally change it, you argue against me when I say it is wrong?
I've got you pegged. You are one of those people who can simultaneously believe that something is wrong AND that anyone who speaks up is a dirty hippy.
Actually, that isn't 'flow'. It's Attention Deficit Disorder. It's very, very common among computer programmers, as intelligent people with ADD will self select CS because the instant feedback gives an immediate reward for concentration, and therefore they feel more successful at computer work than other endeavors.
I haven't met anyone who has hosed their windows install and needed a respin.
You also have no idea what is installed on your network. Probably almost all of your IP is going out the door, straight to competitors or hackers.
People don't need to install software on a daily basis. If they do need custom software, you dispatch a 'worker drone' to them and they can install the software while the person looks on and helps if necessary. The point is that commercial software will rarely cause a huge security problem so long as the person running it does not have admin rights.
Keep in mind that it is NEVER good to run any OS with admin rights for normal use. Of course, since you 'know computers' you know all about that.
reasons not involving the oral sex issue, most notably as public nudity.
It isn't public nudity if he was inside a van. Or do you think people getting changed for a PT test should go to prison, since they are guilty of the same crime?
They're not going to burst into your room while you're getting a little head from your girlfriend and arrest you for it.
They would if whoever was above them told them to do so. Just because things don't happen doesn't mean they never will, or that we should specifically make allowance for them to happen.
You admit the law is stupid, yet you continue to assert it's no big deal. That is a defense of the law (the 'it doesn't matter' defense). That is the definition of an apologist.
Apologist: A person who argues in defense or justification of something, such as a doctrine, policy, or institution.
Perhaps you trust every officer in the military, present and future, not to send some poor kid to prison because of bs reasons, and tagging him for having 'sodomy' with his wife. It is wholly at the commanders discretion whether or not to convene a court martial. I don't trust anyone with that power. They should only be allowed to use such power under strict safeguards (strict within the bounds of what is reasonable given the conditions, it is still the military).
It's easy. They submit a list of all the software they need, and it gets installed. If they need more software, it get's installed. If they're using UNIX, they can install it locally.
From your post it is clear that you are one of the people who 'know what they are doing'. I'm a nazi because every time some person ruins their computers installation I have to take time out of other important things to image their hd, although sitting around waiting 20 minutes for a hd to image does give me an excuse to go to slashdot.
As I said, authority should not exceed responsibility. If they don't fix it when it breaks, they shouldn't be in a position to break it, unless they MUST have such authority to do their job. People simply do not need root to do work. Unix is designed that way, intentionally. Windows works just fine without root, and be assured it will be configured with every program you need (because if you need it you can ask, the admins exist to facilitate you in the end, which includes preventing YOU personally from causing yourself loss of work through negligent security practices, and protecting others from losing work through your ability to gather spyware and viruses and intrusions).
Don't confuse policies 'you don't like' with 'things that are not good'. It is tempting to see the world this way, but it isn't accurate. Sometimes you will not get all the cookies just because you threaten to cry, because there are other people in the world besides you who also want cookies.
People who believe that they 'know about computers' are the biggest problems from an administration standpoint. Of all of my users, the ones who don't think they know how to manage their computer end up doing a lot less damage than those users who think they know what they are doing.
And the worse part is, people who THINK they know all about computers are also the ones who will blame YOU when they hose their installation of Windows. Frankly, I find it unlikely that these engineers need the control of their computers. More likely they want to install unapproved software and various adware bullcrap which will bring your network to a crawl.
I say this from experience. Initially I thought it would be OK to give some 'expert' users local admin rights, so that they wouldn't have to call the help desk in those situations where they simply want to install real player to listen to Rush Limbaugh or whatever else these dopes do. However, they instantly manage to get spyware, trojans, keyloggers, and other worms and viruses. They do this despite fully updated Microsoft Spyware (granted, it is a beta) and fully updated antivirus software.
It is only recently, as we moved to managed antivirus software, that I began to understand the amount of damage these people were doing. I now get reports of virus activity, and I am never going to make the mistake of giving a user local admin rights again. It is easy to do, but they will abuse it, and taking it away is 1000x as hard as just sticking to a policy of never doing it. Once you give in they will know that you can bend the policy, and when you take it away you are telling them through your actions that you don't trust them to know what they are doing.
And the one thing these people always think is that they somehow know what they are doing.
Let me make it a simple maxim: 'If you are not responsible for the maintenance of a computer, you WILL NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have administrator rights on said computer.'
It is nice that your uncle was treated nicely by his employer. He did what he thought was best and what made him happiest.
Not everyone actually likes their job, and certainly not their coworkers. Some people have to put up with coworkers who couldn't find their butt with both hands, but golf with the execs and so get away with murder.
Now, I'm sure you'll be able to find an example or two of people who have actually been convicted for receiving oral sex from a consentual adult, but those are the extremely rare exceptions. In general, it's a non-issue...
There are plenty of cases. For example, in one case I know of a soldier was getting a blowjob from a consenting female in a parking lot (in a van) (not a store parking lot, but one with no one around in the middle of the night). Somehow he ended up getting caught and they came down on him.
It's a huge fucking issue if you are arrested for it. Stupid ass apologists like you are always quick to jump into the discussion and defend things as 'not a big deal because only a few people have their lives ruined'. Why ruin any lives with such a stupid law? Why defend such a stupid law at all? Why put a soldier in prison because some prudish dumbfuck 100 years ago decided to enforce their idea of morality with the full force of the federal government?
Why do you hate our soldiers? Why do you want them to be treated harshly in cases where doing so does not help defend us better? Don't they have enough stress and enough to worry about?
So fuck you and fuck anybody else who treats our soldiers like 2nd class citizens, not worthy of being protected and looked after with the same vigilence with which they would protect you. Why make it illegal, even if it is usually just on paper, for them to recieve oral sex from their spouses? (Technically it is illegal for a person in the military to do anything but the missionary position.)
That's not quite the same. The person who cuts me off, the person who shortchanges me, and the person who spits in my burger hurt me, and they hurt themselves. They risk being at fault in a car accident, getting fired, and getting fired. They don't help themselves at all. They are stupid.
If I had any cancer which was seriously threatening my health I would delete everything I could possibly delete and then laugh until I cried.
Well, not really. But I certainly would be more worried about myself than about how I could arrange for my clients to keep making money. The only reason you want your clients to make money is so that they will then have to give some of that money to you in the form of your fees. Beyond that they can go fly a kite.
No, this is false. Nature has clearly hidden the decision to procreate from us. Physical limitations to reproduction are always selected against in the long run.
However, for sensitivity to a 'meme' to be selected against it would have to cause the holder of that idea to have less sex or safer sex than they otherwise would have, since sex is the only part of reproduction our actions or ideas have any effect on. Now, take notice of those people who claim that 'the world is overpopulated'. They're screwing quite a lot (see the wikipedia article on 'Hippies'). If anything this meme seems to corrolate with lots of sex, and therefore will likely be selected for, to the extent that this sort of thing can be selected for in any case.
On average. However, smart people tend to look down upon dumb people, and don't generally want to marry them, unless they are physically very attractive.
So what would seem to be likely is that the dumb underclass will continue to get dumber and underclassier, meanwhile the few intelligent people who procreate will have children who are more intelligent. The world of the future thus would seem to be ideal for totalitarian states like those in the book Brave New World.
Slashdot Mirror
Recommend to others how to think.
Ahh, you totally miss the point don't you? RMS has the right to bitch and complain and try to convince people to call it 'GNU/$KERNEL'. You have the right to say "I call it FU-RMS/$KERNEL". However, you can only call it 'FU-RMS/$KERNEL' because it exists.
However, that is not what is happening here. RMS calls it GNU/Linux and tries to convince others, using nothing more than words, that they should call it GNU/Linux too. You respond by claiming that GNU has failed to produce a kernel and therefore they shouldn't ask other people to call it GNU/Linux. You have the right to do this as well, but your insults are misplaced and you are a stupid little fuck.
Make that stupid AND ignorant. GNU started as a project to produce the userland tools for unix operating systems becuase the commercial tools were very expensive and closed source. This irked people who had been around for awhile because they couldn't modify other peoples work to their purposes, even if they owned said expensive license. GNU was started a long time ago and these tools are used in every linux distro. Without these tools (GCC for example) linux could not exist (Perhaps it could use some sort of BSD userland, but BSD came after GNU, iirc). However, GNU would still exist and be used, linux or no.
So, feel free to point out a GNU free linux distro. There are many linux free unices which use GNU.
"Internal Emptiness"???
I dare you to say a more meaningless phrase. Addiction is a result of artificial stimulation of parts of the brain, causing dependence of some sort. The most addictive substances also change the structure of the brain in a way which prevents normal activity from stimulating the same are of the brain the drug effects. This is the one-two punch of addiction. You become accustomed to over-stimulation of your pleasure centers, and you become unable to attain normal stimulation without the drug.
If you gave heroin to Jesus every day for a month he would be a hardcore addict at the end of that month. Pseudo-psychological nonsense need not apply.
Now, as for why people would choose to eat/inject addictive chemicals, there are many reasons.
The primary factor is availability. Very few people would go out of their way to get heroin if they weren't addicted previously.
Other factors are boredom, sudden affluence (such as rock stars), etc.
Another cause is an attempt to self-medicate, that is to say suppress unpleasant thoughts and emotions by chemically changing ones mental state. This is a major factor leading people to take a drug, but it is not the cause of addiction any more than being hungry is the cause of a heart attacks.
All of these factors are merely the reasons people start taking drugs. Once you start taking it, the addiction and downward spiral are completely a chemical phenomenon inside the brain, and no feeling of emptiness or lack of feeling of emptiness, even if that meant something, could change this.
You stupid fuck, the black boxes on planes can't cause the plane to crash, you are in no way placing any trust in them.
A bad politico can get you killed, just ask the 3000 kids who wanted to do the right thing and go to college, or be all they could be.
Awfully angry there.
However, just because you don't think your friends have add, it doesn't mean that it is true. Additionally, do you go through all of your friends medicine cabinets, and do they log their doctors appointments with you?
I would actually go and find the studies, but you can do that as well as I can, I suspect. I'm not going to, because you are not in a position to know what you claim to be true, specifically, you don't know what your friends don't tell you, and people don't brag about their psychiatrist appointments, so you saying that you've never met an ADD computer geek is about as crazy of a claim as you could make.
And now you've met me, so chalk one up.
I've completely dealt with GP to my satisfaction. What you say is true. One symptom is not the disease. However, one symptom is a symptom of the disease, by hypothesis. So he has several of the symptoms (or characteristics which have a high level of correlation with the disease if you like) of ADD, as I previously pointed out.
Now, as for taking wikipedia as gospel, it is at LEAST as accurate as gospel. However, that is a low bar. I think that wikipedia is fairly accurate, and has a very wide scope. Therefore it is convenient to link to it on slashdot, to give people a place to start if they are interested in hearing more about what I was posting about. You don't want to quote it in your PHD thesis (unless your thesis is on the topic: "The Time Averaged Accuracy of Community Network Information Systems" or some such) but if you want to know what a "varistor" is and where it might be found, wikipedia is hands down the best place to go. Check for yourself, there is a one page article on 'varistor'. The other alternative is to trek all the way down to the library and actually look it up, which people are not likely to do, which wouldn't be much more accurate in most cases anyway. Alternatively we could do a google search. Would you prefer random web pages with no fact checking to wikipedia's faulty fact checking?
At the very least wikipedia will reflect what people are talking about with regards to any given subject. It is a great place to learn, even if you are too ignorant to take what it says with the proper amount of skepticism.
The big problem with wikipedia is that people don't know how to not believe everything that they read. Wait, I should clarify. People either believe every word that they read, or if the text disagrees with their bumpkin notions of reality then they mock it and consider it worthless. So when wikipedia has errors (GHASP!!!) people like to shit themselves.
However, every newspaper is 99% crap, written by people who have absolutely no expertise in what they are talking about.
Think about your area of expertise. Now, when you read newspaper articles about that subject you probably laugh at all the hundreds of inaccuracies and misused technical words. Now, extrapolate. Every subject in the newspaper has the same level of accuracy, on average, as those articles you know to be crap. Of course magazines and TV are even worse, usually.
At least wiki's have the potential to be fixed by people who know better.
I am not making a 'directional fallacy'. I am stating that he had one clear symptom of ADD. If there is a higher than average statistical correlation of the presence of a symptom in a person and the presence of the disease, then if someone does exhibit the symptom they have a correspondingly higher likelihood of having the disease. That is what symptom means.
If GP said 'I'm having chest pains' and I said 'go to a heart doctor' you would then reply, as you have shown, that it could all just be gas, and accuse me of diagnosing people over the internet. How is that helpful to anyone?
Besides, the wikipedia article, of you cared to read it, goes over in detail your objections, including hyper-focus not being in DSM - IV.
As a matter of fact, I would be willing to bet, if it could be proven, that you only learned of these objections from the article I posted, which you then throw in my face as a disease somehow.
False. Studies have shown what I said to be correct. It is widely accepted.
One way to detect 'bullshit' is when someone is talking about something, and they keep referring to the name of the idea they are talking about. Remember that book that came out recently, called 'the earth is flat' or something to that effect? I picked it up in the bookstore. It was just a bunch of ramblings and facts, but everything in it was supposed to be evidence of the 'flattening of the earth'. The author never tells you what this means, although it seems to be supported by every change the world is going through. 'The earth is flat' in the book is exactly the same as saying 'the Earth is different and it is changing in some ways'.
'Flow' is a similar concept. I'm not sure what stupid ass thought it up, but you most certainly got it from some book. 'Flow' is just another way of saying 'being smart'. You seem to think that you can get in 'a zone' and that this 'zone' is a state of mind where you can think better. This is just crap. Either you can do it or not, there isn't some magic mojo hocus-pocus which will let you be a better programmer.
The reason it is bullshit when people refer to the name of an idea over and over while describing it is that they are not really describing it. They are selling it.
If I told you that 'blue' is the color of the sky, the ocean from the correct distance, and has a wavelength of x meters, you now know a lot about how to decide if something is blue.
If I told you that 'a pound' is equal to X kilograms on earth, is equal to Y atoms of carbon, is equal to some object which you have access to, that a pound is a measure of weight, etc, you can go out and use this knowledge.
If I tell you that "the manipulation of complex abstract mental models over hours of time while performing a task causes 'flow'", you still have no idea what it is.
This is like saying "riding the hood of a car for hours at a time" causes 'smerka". What is smerka? Nobody knows, but we know as much about it as we know about 'flow'.
I've never seen a more ADD ridden sentence in my life. It is almost without punctuation. It should probably be 3 - 5 sentences.
Again, super non-punctuation. 'Illness' is not well defined. However, I can tell you this:
If I am having difficulty concentrating due to the makeup of my brain, and taking medicine allows me to complete tasks I could not otherwise complete, I believe that taking medicine is worthwhile. If you disagree that is fine, but you shouldn't act as though you are some sort of expert when you are not. You have not made a systematic study of psychiatry nor have you made one of ADD, and so your opinion on either of those subjects has as much worth as your opinions on which rare earth metal makes the best coating for nuclear reactor parts, specifically, you are talking out your ass.
Thanks for sharing.
Yes, your mockery is well placed. Since you are an expert, what should everyone do instead of go to a psychiatrist? I personally know people who's life was changed once they were put on medication. Instead of being frustrated failures who never 'live up to their potential' they are able to concentrate and achieve.
Psychiatrists aren't a bunch of idiots. There are some bad ones, as well as some good ones, but as a field they are merely trying to do what they think will get people the best outcome. There aren't any crazy conspiracies, because doctors do not see a cut for the medicine they proscribe. If they really wanted to bilk you out of money they would require you to come again and again instead of just occasionally to check progress and get a proscription.
Besides, fuck you. The fact that you feel the need to insult others and mock people you don't know is a symptom of your disease. Get some friends, it may be hard if you just go ballistic and in their face for every fact about their life you mildly disagree with but which doesn't effect you at all, and you won't feel the need to get crazy and scream for attention.
Find a good psychiatrist who isn't afraid to proscribe ritalin on a trial basis. Then try it for a few weeks and watch your world change. Make an effort do discover the lowest dose which is therapeutic. Try to avoid gradually increasing the dose by taking 'medicine holidays' where you skip it for a week or two.
According to the psyc I used to go to, if you respond to ritalin with increased focus and no sensation of being 'high' then you are much more likely to have ADD than someone who can get 'high' off of it.
When I took too much ritalin it turned me into a zombie, things seemed distant and weird, but I never had a pleasurable sensation. Elvis used to use ritalin like cocaine, to get high. It has different effects on different people.
Adderall also works well, but it isn't for everybody.
Finally, don't let ritalin turn into Sleep 2.0. When you are taking it you should force yourself to eat and sleep on a normal schedule, since it is a stimulant it will effect your sleep patterns just like coffee.
Finally, make sure the first proscription you fill is for brand name ritalin, not generic. For some reason people sometimes have a more pronounced effect with the brand name stuff (yes, I know it shouldn't matter).
Good luck.
You greatly overestimate human intelligence.
You obviously aren't familiar with conditions on cattle ranches.
You seem very angry. Still, not being able to focus on something despite making an effort to do so is a problem. I have dealt with this my entire life, and I wish I had been able to force myself to pay attention to all that boring homework I didn't do. If I had, I wouldn't be in a cubicle now.
What is the issue here? You accept that the law is wrong. However, since you can't personally change it, you argue against me when I say it is wrong?
I've got you pegged. You are one of those people who can simultaneously believe that something is wrong AND that anyone who speaks up is a dirty hippy.
What did they do to you to make you this servile?
Actually, that isn't 'flow'. It's Attention Deficit Disorder. It's very, very common among computer programmers, as intelligent people with ADD will self select CS because the instant feedback gives an immediate reward for concentration, and therefore they feel more successful at computer work than other endeavors.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus
You also have no idea what is installed on your network. Probably almost all of your IP is going out the door, straight to competitors or hackers.
People don't need to install software on a daily basis. If they do need custom software, you dispatch a 'worker drone' to them and they can install the software while the person looks on and helps if necessary. The point is that commercial software will rarely cause a huge security problem so long as the person running it does not have admin rights.
Keep in mind that it is NEVER good to run any OS with admin rights for normal use. Of course, since you 'know computers' you know all about that.
It isn't public nudity if he was inside a van. Or do you think people getting changed for a PT test should go to prison, since they are guilty of the same crime?
They would if whoever was above them told them to do so. Just because things don't happen doesn't mean they never will, or that we should specifically make allowance for them to happen.
You admit the law is stupid, yet you continue to assert it's no big deal. That is a defense of the law (the 'it doesn't matter' defense). That is the definition of an apologist.
Apologist: A person who argues in defense or justification of something, such as a doctrine, policy, or institution.
Perhaps you trust every officer in the military, present and future, not to send some poor kid to prison because of bs reasons, and tagging him for having 'sodomy' with his wife. It is wholly at the commanders discretion whether or not to convene a court martial. I don't trust anyone with that power. They should only be allowed to use such power under strict safeguards (strict within the bounds of what is reasonable given the conditions, it is still the military).
Your complacency is an insult.
It's easy. They submit a list of all the software they need, and it gets installed. If they need more software, it get's installed. If they're using UNIX, they can install it locally.
From your post it is clear that you are one of the people who 'know what they are doing'. I'm a nazi because every time some person ruins their computers installation I have to take time out of other important things to image their hd, although sitting around waiting 20 minutes for a hd to image does give me an excuse to go to slashdot.
As I said, authority should not exceed responsibility. If they don't fix it when it breaks, they shouldn't be in a position to break it, unless they MUST have such authority to do their job. People simply do not need root to do work. Unix is designed that way, intentionally. Windows works just fine without root, and be assured it will be configured with every program you need (because if you need it you can ask, the admins exist to facilitate you in the end, which includes preventing YOU personally from causing yourself loss of work through negligent security practices, and protecting others from losing work through your ability to gather spyware and viruses and intrusions).
Don't confuse policies 'you don't like' with 'things that are not good'. It is tempting to see the world this way, but it isn't accurate. Sometimes you will not get all the cookies just because you threaten to cry, because there are other people in the world besides you who also want cookies.
I am only talking about computers owned by the institution. Obviously nobody should give up root access to their personal computer.
People who believe that they 'know about computers' are the biggest problems from an administration standpoint. Of all of my users, the ones who don't think they know how to manage their computer end up doing a lot less damage than those users who think they know what they are doing.
And the worse part is, people who THINK they know all about computers are also the ones who will blame YOU when they hose their installation of Windows. Frankly, I find it unlikely that these engineers need the control of their computers. More likely they want to install unapproved software and various adware bullcrap which will bring your network to a crawl.
I say this from experience. Initially I thought it would be OK to give some 'expert' users local admin rights, so that they wouldn't have to call the help desk in those situations where they simply want to install real player to listen to Rush Limbaugh or whatever else these dopes do. However, they instantly manage to get spyware, trojans, keyloggers, and other worms and viruses. They do this despite fully updated Microsoft Spyware (granted, it is a beta) and fully updated antivirus software.
It is only recently, as we moved to managed antivirus software, that I began to understand the amount of damage these people were doing. I now get reports of virus activity, and I am never going to make the mistake of giving a user local admin rights again. It is easy to do, but they will abuse it, and taking it away is 1000x as hard as just sticking to a policy of never doing it. Once you give in they will know that you can bend the policy, and when you take it away you are telling them through your actions that you don't trust them to know what they are doing.
And the one thing these people always think is that they somehow know what they are doing.
Let me make it a simple maxim: 'If you are not responsible for the maintenance of a computer, you WILL NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have administrator rights on said computer.'
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It is nice that your uncle was treated nicely by his employer. He did what he thought was best and what made him happiest.
Not everyone actually likes their job, and certainly not their coworkers. Some people have to put up with coworkers who couldn't find their butt with both hands, but golf with the execs and so get away with murder.
There are plenty of cases. For example, in one case I know of a soldier was getting a blowjob from a consenting female in a parking lot (in a van) (not a store parking lot, but one with no one around in the middle of the night). Somehow he ended up getting caught and they came down on him.
It's a huge fucking issue if you are arrested for it. Stupid ass apologists like you are always quick to jump into the discussion and defend things as 'not a big deal because only a few people have their lives ruined'. Why ruin any lives with such a stupid law? Why defend such a stupid law at all? Why put a soldier in prison because some prudish dumbfuck 100 years ago decided to enforce their idea of morality with the full force of the federal government?
Why do you hate our soldiers? Why do you want them to be treated harshly in cases where doing so does not help defend us better? Don't they have enough stress and enough to worry about?
So fuck you and fuck anybody else who treats our soldiers like 2nd class citizens, not worthy of being protected and looked after with the same vigilence with which they would protect you. Why make it illegal, even if it is usually just on paper, for them to recieve oral sex from their spouses? (Technically it is illegal for a person in the military to do anything but the missionary position.)
That's not quite the same. The person who cuts me off, the person who shortchanges me, and the person who spits in my burger hurt me, and they hurt themselves. They risk being at fault in a car accident, getting fired, and getting fired. They don't help themselves at all. They are stupid.
If I had any cancer which was seriously threatening my health I would delete everything I could possibly delete and then laugh until I cried.
Well, not really. But I certainly would be more worried about myself than about how I could arrange for my clients to keep making money. The only reason you want your clients to make money is so that they will then have to give some of that money to you in the form of your fees. Beyond that they can go fly a kite.
No, this is false. Nature has clearly hidden the decision to procreate from us. Physical limitations to reproduction are always selected against in the long run.
However, for sensitivity to a 'meme' to be selected against it would have to cause the holder of that idea to have less sex or safer sex than they otherwise would have, since sex is the only part of reproduction our actions or ideas have any effect on. Now, take notice of those people who claim that 'the world is overpopulated'. They're screwing quite a lot (see the wikipedia article on 'Hippies'). If anything this meme seems to corrolate with lots of sex, and therefore will likely be selected for, to the extent that this sort of thing can be selected for in any case.
On average. However, smart people tend to look down upon dumb people, and don't generally want to marry them, unless they are physically very attractive.
So what would seem to be likely is that the dumb underclass will continue to get dumber and underclassier, meanwhile the few intelligent people who procreate will have children who are more intelligent. The world of the future thus would seem to be ideal for totalitarian states like those in the book Brave New World.