Another premise of Star Trek is a post-religion highly sexually liberated society. In that society, hookers haven't got much of a market because getting laid has become ridiculously easy.
Basically - picking somebody up consists "Horny?" and "Yeah/Nay"
I think what really destroyed the market for hookers in the Star Trek universe is the holodeck. At least until the Federation Council passes the Lieutenant Barkley Bill. Speaking of Barkley, just because there's no religion and no disease doesn't mean that everybody's attractive enough to get a date. That's what outpatient radical reconstructive surgery-by-hypospray is for.
That said, I find it delightful that dating in your scenario is reduced to saying "Yea" and "Nay". Is there also a gavel involved? When you want to spare someone's feelings, is it entered into the record as an abstention?
I was with a small team of very experienced developers, and even for us going to git had a bunch of surprises. For me it's not so much the UI tools, it's understanding what's going on, and why git does what it does.
That's what I mean when I say there's no simple formula of "do these 3 commands to do this, those 2 commands to do that". You have to understand WHY the commands are doing what they are doing.
That's certainly a common view of Git, but after using it for the last few years, I think that a lot of the problems that beginners have with it are happening because of this assumption. That is, when a developer asks how to merge their code into the shared Git repo for the first time, the wise old Git gurus point them at a site that explains how Git works at the molecular level, called The Git Book. This is almost never helpful, because your average Joe C. Programmer doesn't have time in his schedule to read an entire book, and even if he reads it over the weekend instead of, you know, having a life, he just ends up with his head full of crazy circles-and-arrows diagrams, which, divorced from any concrete, hands-on practice, only serves to confuse the issue more.
What the inexperienced Gitsperson actually needs at that point is a short and to-the-point workflow that he can use to get his goddamn code in the goddamn repo, like (commands for illustration purposes only, I use a Fischer Price GUI): "git clone MyRepo; git switch master; git pull; git branch MyFeature; git switch MyFeature; [implement the code changes]; git commit; git push; git switch master; git pull; git merge MyFeature; [fix conflicts, resolve, commit again if necessary]; git push". And for the love of God, Newbie, please don't try to use "rebase", you'll just cripple our entire product at 5:30 pm on a Friday.
There's documentation of that kind out there, admittedly, but it's really hard to find among all the indistinguishable-from-autogenerated-prank-nonsense man pages and fifteen-part seminars on how the version hashing algorithm works.
Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long â" 14 consecutive quarters â" that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world.
"Please, Old One, tell us again of this wondrous age of 'Early 2012', when the great 'Peesees' roamed across the tops of the desks all over the world."
Not everyone will benefit by learning to code, but I think everyone would benefit by learning some of the ideas behind coding, i.e. analyzing problems, breaking problems into discrete tasks, logical thinking, etc.
I'm not trying (on this occasion) to be smartassed, but that sounds like trying to teach the theory without the application. But application is actually a powerful teaching aid. I'd guess that teaching people to code is one of the better ways to teach these underlying concepts. The alternative would be like trying to teach people about fractions without using any numerals.
<1980sStandupComic> Which is what this "Common Core" thing is all about, am I right, folks?</1980sStandupComic>
Everyone doesn't need to learn anything, if we as a culture are satisfied with people not knowing things. Most people only really need to know to read, and maybe some basic arithmetic. And, frankly, there are people who get by their whole lives without it, even in the developed world.
But teaching people that much only takes a couple of years, three, tops. We don't stop there. We teach our students art, and literature, and history, and wood shop, and music, and chemistry, and algebra, and home economics. Why? Why not? Every new thing that people learn makes society better, makes the students themselves better, makes everyone they ever touch better.
Computers are everywhere, and everyone uses them, for hours and hours a day, sometimes. Not a lot of people, by contrast, do a lot of, say, titrating in their everyday life, but we still teach chemistry. There aren't a lot of people who seriously think we shouldn't. Is programming really so esoteric and rarefied a discipline that it isn't worth spending a semester or two on?
The anti systemd sentiment is getting a bit old? The sky certainly hasn't been falling with systemd already running on a lot of systems
"You know that thing that you tried like hell to keep from happening, and later, when it happened over your continual vociferous objections, you swore you wouldn't ever stop fighting to undo it to your last breath? Yeah, well, we, the winners, can't understand why you, the losers, are still angry about that."
I personally don't have a dog in this fight, and I don't know enough about what systemd does or doesn't do to judge, but trying to dismiss the significance of what is clearly a raw and throbbing emotional wound for these people by saying it's "getting a bit old" still seems a little tone-deaf to me.
Fritz: Hey, Hans, you know how we are both software engineers working for Volkswagen?
Hans: What a strange question, Fritz. But yes, I suppose I do know that.
Fritz: Well, I was thinking, these new U.S. emissions standards are actually pretty stringent, and I don't think our diesels can pass them.
Hans: Yes, this is obvious. So?
Fritz: Well, what if we changed the software so that, while the cars were being tested, they behaved in a completely uncharacteristic way so that they could appear to comply with the standard?
Hans: You mean if we wrote a test-detection and -subversion routine into the car's firmware?
Fritz: Yes, of course.
Hans: But how would we personally stand to benefit from that?
Fritz: Well, we'd be able to sell more cars in America that way.
Hans: We? You mean Volkwagen. Sure, until they caught on. But Fritz, we're just engineers--we get paid the same either way.
Fritz: Well, we could tell the executives about it later, and maybe they would reward us.
Hans: No, trust me, the executives won't want to know about it.
Fritz: Yes, they do certainly value integrity over the bottom line. Completely unlike an engineer. Oh well. I guess we'll just have to do it without telling them, and for no good reason at all.
You think he's shilling? Shilling for who? Shilling for some company that markets a telemetry blocker? By being kind of vague about everything? By not naming any names whatsoever?
Maybe you mean he's shilling for Microsoft, by saying that their particular brand of data cancer is sometimes survivable with expensive and careful treatment? By saying, twice, that he suspects that Microsoft, black-hearted as they are, will immediately undo his fixes with the next release?
Or is he shilling for Linux? Yeah, okay, I'd buy that. But isn't being a Linux shill on Slashdot like being a Mormon missionary who's trying to convert the Tabernacle Choir? Plus, can you really shill for something that nobody charges for?
Is he a shill because he claims to be a geek with too much time on his hands? Because this is such an implausible backstory for a Slashdot user?
If this guy's a shill, he's the most amazingly subtle shill I've ever heard of. My God, this means they're learning! Of course, it's so clear now, this is just phase one of his master plan. In the grim future of shilling, we won't be able to tell who the shills are, because they won't actually be shilling for anything!
I can see only one solution. We must, as a group, immediately condemn this "geeky" "retiree" for the fraud he is, on the say-so of an anonymous tipster. Slashdot needs to suspend his account, immediately!
Wait... wait... am... am I a shill? Please, comrades, tell me, I must know!
You're about 400 years too late on the "literally" thing, and much later than that on "decimate". If you're really concerned with nipping things in the bud, you might go for some more recent potential changes. Like singular "you" instead of "thou/thee", and maybe "terrific" for things that don't cause terror.
Sure, but these battles are never really over. My uncle's still mad about Nixon. China's still griping about the Gilded Age. ISIS is still miffed about the Reconquista. Anti-Semites are still trying to pin the rap for Jesus's execution on the Jews at large.
So if I can change just one person's mind, it's one more point for our team. In a hundred years, we'll have won some battles and lost some. And sure, I'm all for bringing back "thee". And, for that matter, "ye", and by extension the letter called "thorn". Oh, and "ash". And that vulgar "you" genie hath been out of the bottle long enough!
Simple fact: people don't like being misunderstood, so the circumstances under which your highly contrived chartreuse-means-pink example might arise are basically nonexistent!
You think my hypothetical scenario is implausible? Try imagining if Kim Kardashian looked at a pink dress and said, on TV, that it was chartreuse. If you don't find that thought as sadly believable as it is chilling, well, I'm nothing but envious.
...a better reply to the 'blights on the landscape' would have been a few pictures of coal mines...
Most coal mines are not technically "a blight on the landscape", because being a blight on the landscape requires there to still be a landscape left to be a blight on.
I imagine the original pitch went like this: "People of Appalachia! Are you as sick as I am of these beautiful, majestic mountains everywhere? Well, what if there was a way to get rid of them?"
the externalized costs of coal and gas are very hard to calculate. It's difficult to evaluate the value of health and a human life, or how much damage can be attributed to energy production and not other things.
It's not that hard, companies do this sort of calculation every day. Their result is: zero dollars. There, that was easy.
Words mean what most of the speakers of the language mean. So your tirade is pointless, unoriginal, and wrong. Utterly wrong.
I am aware that any language's mapping of letters and sounds to meanings is completely arbitrary, and furthermore that these mappings evolve continuously. So yes, if enough people start thinking that "chartreuse" means "pink", then indeed it does, at least to them. But for the rest of it, it still means greenish-yellow. The end result is a failure of communication. What I and people like me--pedants--are trying to do is preserve the integrity of communication by nipping some of these uglier and less consistent forms in the bud, before they metastasize and spread throughout the meme pool, and we all just have to live with them. That is literally all I'm saying.
You can't just ignore the prefix 'deci' because everyone uses it incorrectly.
Yes, you can; that's how language works.
Well said! I'm just going to choose to interpret your "yes" as "no" and "that's" as "that's not", if that's okay. What? You object? How dare you? My feelings about language are just as valid as anyone's! QUIT OPPRESSING ME, YOU SEMANTICS NAZI!
"Decimated nearly half the population" means less than 5%. You can't just ignore the prefix 'deci' because everyone uses it incorrectly, dictionary.
"Decimate" hasn't meant "killed every tenth man by lot" for a lot of years. It's usually not used with exact percentages, but it's often used for percentages other than ten.
That is literally what I was just about to say. Words mean whatever we want, whenever we want! This is also why I pay all my debts in U.S. dollhairs.
Oh lord, I just read the original posts on this, so apparently it was Linus that used that language. Geez, really?
There's no absolute standard for what language is appropriate. The line is different places for different people.
For example, you used the word "geez", which most would say is a fairly innocuous interjection expressing mild disbelief. The word is, however, a corruption of "Jesus", which many would find blasphemous, and therefore offensive.
Is it inappropriate to use administering fellatio as a metaphor for incorporating support for proprietary software in an open-source operating system? Is it appropriate to invoke the name of God's Only Son, Who Bled for Our Sins when your iced latte costs a little more than you expected? I'll be damned if I know.
People, in general, are terrible. So putting people in charge of things is, in general, a mistake. But, and this is important: just because somebody terrible is in charge of something, it doesn't automatically make it a good idea to put somebody else, also terrible, in charge of that thing. If around fifty percent of people think that the the first person's terribleness is manageable-to-nonexistent, that person is probably actually less terrible than average. So the inevitable terribleness of the replacement plus the significant terribleness of the replacement process itself would only serve to increase the total terribleness in the system.
I don't like people yelling at me about how bad I am at doing stuff, especially when they're right, so I don't contribute to open-source projects. But it's not because my critics use swears. As far as I'm concerned, the phrases "no thank you" and "go fuck yourself" are precisely equal in this context. Maybe all that Linus's critics really need to be comfortable is a macro in their email reader that turns "d_ck-sucking" into "corporate partnership" and "deep-throat" into "overadopt" and "f_cking" into "".
Let me preface this by saying that I can see valid points on both sides of this debate.
That being said, I'm pretty much obligated to sympathize with any effort to fork any open source project for any reason, because at least once a week I find myself shaking my fist towards the world's collective Mom's basement and demanding to know why no one has the chutzpah to fork this or that specimen of open-source mismanagement.
That being said, the real reason I'm making this post is that I can't stop myself from suggesting a name for the feminized version of Linux: Vaginux.
Slashdot Mirror
Another premise of Star Trek is a post-religion highly sexually liberated society. In that society, hookers haven't got much of a market because getting laid has become ridiculously easy. Basically - picking somebody up consists "Horny?" and "Yeah/Nay"
I think what really destroyed the market for hookers in the Star Trek universe is the holodeck. At least until the Federation Council passes the Lieutenant Barkley Bill. Speaking of Barkley, just because there's no religion and no disease doesn't mean that everybody's attractive enough to get a date. That's what outpatient radical reconstructive surgery-by-hypospray is for.
That said, I find it delightful that dating in your scenario is reduced to saying "Yea" and "Nay". Is there also a gavel involved? When you want to spare someone's feelings, is it entered into the record as an abstention?
"Robert's Rules of Order? I barely know her."
Wesley: Hey, does anyone remember the episode where I took--
Everyone: Shut up, Wesley!
$ git switch
git: 'switch' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
Sorry, it's actually "git checkout". You know, even though you're not actually "checking out" anything. Hey, I said I didn't use the command line.
I was with a small team of very experienced developers, and even for us going to git had a bunch of surprises. For me it's not so much the UI tools, it's understanding what's going on, and why git does what it does.
That's what I mean when I say there's no simple formula of "do these 3 commands to do this, those 2 commands to do that". You have to understand WHY the commands are doing what they are doing.
That's certainly a common view of Git, but after using it for the last few years, I think that a lot of the problems that beginners have with it are happening because of this assumption. That is, when a developer asks how to merge their code into the shared Git repo for the first time, the wise old Git gurus point them at a site that explains how Git works at the molecular level, called The Git Book. This is almost never helpful, because your average Joe C. Programmer doesn't have time in his schedule to read an entire book, and even if he reads it over the weekend instead of, you know, having a life, he just ends up with his head full of crazy circles-and-arrows diagrams, which, divorced from any concrete, hands-on practice, only serves to confuse the issue more.
What the inexperienced Gitsperson actually needs at that point is a short and to-the-point workflow that he can use to get his goddamn code in the goddamn repo, like (commands for illustration purposes only, I use a Fischer Price GUI): "git clone MyRepo; git switch master; git pull; git branch MyFeature; git switch MyFeature; [implement the code changes]; git commit; git push; git switch master; git pull; git merge MyFeature; [fix conflicts, resolve, commit again if necessary]; git push". And for the love of God, Newbie, please don't try to use "rebase", you'll just cripple our entire product at 5:30 pm on a Friday.
There's documentation of that kind out there, admittedly, but it's really hard to find among all the indistinguishable-from-autogenerated-prank-nonsense man pages and fifteen-part seminars on how the version hashing algorithm works.
Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long â" 14 consecutive quarters â" that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world.
"Please, Old One, tell us again of this wondrous age of 'Early 2012', when the great 'Peesees' roamed across the tops of the desks all over the world."
Not everyone will benefit by learning to code, but I think everyone would benefit by learning some of the ideas behind coding, i.e. analyzing problems, breaking problems into discrete tasks, logical thinking, etc.
I'm not trying (on this occasion) to be smartassed, but that sounds like trying to teach the theory without the application. But application is actually a powerful teaching aid. I'd guess that teaching people to code is one of the better ways to teach these underlying concepts. The alternative would be like trying to teach people about fractions without using any numerals.
<1980sStandupComic> Which is what this "Common Core" thing is all about, am I right, folks?</1980sStandupComic>
Everyone does not need to learn to code. Period.
Period, period. Or do they?
Everyone doesn't need to learn anything, if we as a culture are satisfied with people not knowing things. Most people only really need to know to read, and maybe some basic arithmetic. And, frankly, there are people who get by their whole lives without it, even in the developed world.
But teaching people that much only takes a couple of years, three, tops. We don't stop there. We teach our students art, and literature, and history, and wood shop, and music, and chemistry, and algebra, and home economics. Why? Why not? Every new thing that people learn makes society better, makes the students themselves better, makes everyone they ever touch better.
Computers are everywhere, and everyone uses them, for hours and hours a day, sometimes. Not a lot of people, by contrast, do a lot of, say, titrating in their everyday life, but we still teach chemistry. There aren't a lot of people who seriously think we shouldn't. Is programming really so esoteric and rarefied a discipline that it isn't worth spending a semester or two on?
The anti systemd sentiment is getting a bit old? The sky certainly hasn't been falling with systemd already running on a lot of systems
"You know that thing that you tried like hell to keep from happening, and later, when it happened over your continual vociferous objections, you swore you wouldn't ever stop fighting to undo it to your last breath? Yeah, well, we, the winners, can't understand why you, the losers, are still angry about that."
I personally don't have a dog in this fight, and I don't know enough about what systemd does or doesn't do to judge, but trying to dismiss the significance of what is clearly a raw and throbbing emotional wound for these people by saying it's "getting a bit old" still seems a little tone-deaf to me.
Uh... maybe... The 36th Chamber of SHA-1? That would be, like, a kung-fu one?
To paraphrase Voltaire, in backyard rocketry, it's best not to let the verifiable be the enemy of the awesome.
Oops, bad math. I should have said, only 159.2 km to go. Well, like Mom always said, I'm no rocket scientist.
...only 152.2 km to go.
In all seriousness, I wonder what they could achieve with a multistage version.
Fritz: Hey, Hans, you know how we are both software engineers working for Volkswagen?
Hans: What a strange question, Fritz. But yes, I suppose I do know that.
Fritz: Well, I was thinking, these new U.S. emissions standards are actually pretty stringent, and I don't think our diesels can pass them.
Hans: Yes, this is obvious. So?
Fritz: Well, what if we changed the software so that, while the cars were being tested, they behaved in a completely uncharacteristic way so that they could appear to comply with the standard?
Hans: You mean if we wrote a test-detection and -subversion routine into the car's firmware?
Fritz: Yes, of course.
Hans: But how would we personally stand to benefit from that?
Fritz: Well, we'd be able to sell more cars in America that way.
Hans: We? You mean Volkwagen. Sure, until they caught on. But Fritz, we're just engineers--we get paid the same either way.
Fritz: Well, we could tell the executives about it later, and maybe they would reward us.
Hans: No, trust me, the executives won't want to know about it.
Fritz: Yes, they do certainly value integrity over the bottom line. Completely unlike an engineer. Oh well. I guess we'll just have to do it without telling them, and for no good reason at all.
Hans: Yes, that sounds reasonable.
"Your chilling willingness for shilling is killing us!"
Shill... real fake
You think he's shilling? Shilling for who? Shilling for some company that markets a telemetry blocker? By being kind of vague about everything? By not naming any names whatsoever?
Maybe you mean he's shilling for Microsoft, by saying that their particular brand of data cancer is sometimes survivable with expensive and careful treatment? By saying, twice, that he suspects that Microsoft, black-hearted as they are, will immediately undo his fixes with the next release?
Or is he shilling for Linux? Yeah, okay, I'd buy that. But isn't being a Linux shill on Slashdot like being a Mormon missionary who's trying to convert the Tabernacle Choir? Plus, can you really shill for something that nobody charges for?
Is he a shill because he claims to be a geek with too much time on his hands? Because this is such an implausible backstory for a Slashdot user?
If this guy's a shill, he's the most amazingly subtle shill I've ever heard of. My God, this means they're learning! Of course, it's so clear now, this is just phase one of his master plan. In the grim future of shilling, we won't be able to tell who the shills are, because they won't actually be shilling for anything!
I can see only one solution. We must, as a group, immediately condemn this "geeky" "retiree" for the fraud he is, on the say-so of an anonymous tipster. Slashdot needs to suspend his account, immediately!
Wait... wait... am... am I a shill? Please, comrades, tell me, I must know!
You're about 400 years too late on the "literally" thing, and much later than that on "decimate". If you're really concerned with nipping things in the bud, you might go for some more recent potential changes. Like singular "you" instead of "thou/thee", and maybe "terrific" for things that don't cause terror.
Sure, but these battles are never really over. My uncle's still mad about Nixon. China's still griping about the Gilded Age. ISIS is still miffed about the Reconquista. Anti-Semites are still trying to pin the rap for Jesus's execution on the Jews at large.
So if I can change just one person's mind, it's one more point for our team. In a hundred years, we'll have won some battles and lost some. And sure, I'm all for bringing back "thee". And, for that matter, "ye", and by extension the letter called "thorn". Oh, and "ash". And that vulgar "you" genie hath been out of the bottle long enough!
Simple fact: people don't like being misunderstood, so the circumstances under which your highly contrived chartreuse-means-pink example might arise are basically nonexistent!
You think my hypothetical scenario is implausible? Try imagining if Kim Kardashian looked at a pink dress and said, on TV, that it was chartreuse. If you don't find that thought as sadly believable as it is chilling, well, I'm nothing but envious.
eSports Now a Part of College Athletics
Where's that "donotwant" tag when you need it?
...a better reply to the 'blights on the landscape' would have been a few pictures of coal mines...
Most coal mines are not technically "a blight on the landscape", because being a blight on the landscape requires there to still be a landscape left to be a blight on.
I imagine the original pitch went like this: "People of Appalachia! Are you as sick as I am of these beautiful, majestic mountains everywhere? Well, what if there was a way to get rid of them?"
the externalized costs of coal and gas are very hard to calculate. It's difficult to evaluate the value of health and a human life, or how much damage can be attributed to energy production and not other things.
It's not that hard, companies do this sort of calculation every day. Their result is: zero dollars. There, that was easy.
Words mean what most of the speakers of the language mean. So your tirade is pointless, unoriginal, and wrong. Utterly wrong.
I am aware that any language's mapping of letters and sounds to meanings is completely arbitrary, and furthermore that these mappings evolve continuously. So yes, if enough people start thinking that "chartreuse" means "pink", then indeed it does, at least to them. But for the rest of it, it still means greenish-yellow. The end result is a failure of communication. What I and people like me--pedants--are trying to do is preserve the integrity of communication by nipping some of these uglier and less consistent forms in the bud, before they metastasize and spread throughout the meme pool, and we all just have to live with them. That is literally all I'm saying.
You can't just ignore the prefix 'deci' because everyone uses it incorrectly.
Yes, you can; that's how language works.
Well said! I'm just going to choose to interpret your "yes" as "no" and "that's" as "that's not", if that's okay. What? You object? How dare you? My feelings about language are just as valid as anyone's! QUIT OPPRESSING ME, YOU SEMANTICS NAZI!
"Decimated nearly half the population" means less than 5%. You can't just ignore the prefix 'deci' because everyone uses it incorrectly, dictionary.
"Decimate" hasn't meant "killed every tenth man by lot" for a lot of years. It's usually not used with exact percentages, but it's often used for percentages other than ten.
That is literally what I was just about to say. Words mean whatever we want, whenever we want! This is also why I pay all my debts in U.S. dollhairs.
Oh lord, I just read the original posts on this, so apparently it was Linus that used that language. Geez, really?
There's no absolute standard for what language is appropriate. The line is different places for different people.
For example, you used the word "geez", which most would say is a fairly innocuous interjection expressing mild disbelief. The word is, however, a corruption of "Jesus", which many would find blasphemous, and therefore offensive.
Is it inappropriate to use administering fellatio as a metaphor for incorporating support for proprietary software in an open-source operating system? Is it appropriate to invoke the name of God's Only Son, Who Bled for Our Sins when your iced latte costs a little more than you expected? I'll be damned if I know.
People, in general, are terrible. So putting people in charge of things is, in general, a mistake. But, and this is important: just because somebody terrible is in charge of something, it doesn't automatically make it a good idea to put somebody else, also terrible, in charge of that thing. If around fifty percent of people think that the the first person's terribleness is manageable-to-nonexistent, that person is probably actually less terrible than average. So the inevitable terribleness of the replacement plus the significant terribleness of the replacement process itself would only serve to increase the total terribleness in the system.
I don't like people yelling at me about how bad I am at doing stuff, especially when they're right, so I don't contribute to open-source projects. But it's not because my critics use swears. As far as I'm concerned, the phrases "no thank you" and "go fuck yourself" are precisely equal in this context. Maybe all that Linus's critics really need to be comfortable is a macro in their email reader that turns "d_ck-sucking" into "corporate partnership" and "deep-throat" into "overadopt" and "f_cking" into "".
fork it yourself.... feminize the Linux kernel
Let me preface this by saying that I can see valid points on both sides of this debate.
That being said, I'm pretty much obligated to sympathize with any effort to fork any open source project for any reason, because at least once a week I find myself shaking my fist towards the world's collective Mom's basement and demanding to know why no one has the chutzpah to fork this or that specimen of open-source mismanagement.
That being said, the real reason I'm making this post is that I can't stop myself from suggesting a name for the feminized version of Linux: Vaginux.
I am very sorry.