Most are. But there are different views among nerds like anyone else. Who's politics do you cater to? Or do you make the blanket statement that nerds=*insert political position*? That's why you should keep the two seperate here, unless you want to drive away the other side (and their advertising dollars).
That's why this perplexes me so much; why on Earth would you want to offend one half of the spectrum and jeapordize a chunk of your readership?
It was a blatantly political hit piece, painting Rumsfeld and the administration in Gestapo-like terms. If you're going to support that kind of activity here, then be honest about it. Don't smother it with a thick layer of bullshit, and go "no, it was a technical article, really".
Why the hell are we putting these political stories up now? Bad enough that we do it at all, but Slashdot is fast becoming a kind of geeky Daily Kos; Taco and all you other editors...you guys have to be approving this stuff. Non-technical political articles shouldn't be posted, simply because this isn't the place for them. What's next? Stories about the CIA bombing the Twin Towers on Bush's orders? A guest column from Michael Moore? What's else?
What do you say to scientistslikethese that say the Sun may be just as, if not more responsible for, Global Warming, if it exists, than CO2 emissions? Kind of hard to wave the Kyoto treaty at the Sun and expect it to care. Despite claims to the contrary, plenty of people are still unconvinced, and not because they're sticking their heads in the sand...
Look at our recent elections -- winners have won through largely anti-intellectual platforms.
No, that's not the case, and it betrays a fundemental lack of understanding about what's really going on. Intellectual activity is not being attacked...intellectual arrogance is being attacked. There's a huge difference. People are simply tired of a relatively small subset of society going "we're smarter than you, better than you, and we know what's best for you". In fact, Americans have never been comfortable with such people. And so are Americans anti-intellectual? Of course not.
As for the political angle, when people look at the adminstration and say they're anti-intellectual, again, what evidence is there for this? "They blocked stem-cell research!". No, they only blocked certain kinds of stem cell research, on moral and ethical grounds. Global Warming? Sorry, that's not a settled issue yet, even among scientists. Stem Cell research wasn't federally funded at all until now. The administration is pushing for a revived space exploration program (in part by killing the Shuttle program), and new nuclear power research and new reactor construction. While there are no super conducting super colliders out there on the horizon, you can't say with a straight face that basic science has been defunded in any way.
One more thing....if you don't like the "anti-intellectual" party in power now, you can try voting them out. However, looking at their oppositions lack of electoral success against them, I'd say your bigger problem is convincing other Americans of our dire intellectual straits. They don't seem to think things are so bad.
The only reason he's still around is due to a generally incompetent opposition.
While the Left as a whole may not be terribly adept at presenting themselves as a viable governing authority, your attitude seems to match the American Democratic Party's line: Bush is evil, the Republicans are evil, all conservatives of all stripes are evil, so elect us instead.
And yet the Left keeps losing. Has it ever occurred to you, just for a second, that maybe most of the populations of the US, UK, and Australia don't think they're in a Tyranny, and agree with the policies of their elected officials? That you just might be in the minority on this?
They should have followed Netscape's example and opensource their IDEs.
And we see how much good that did for Netscape.
I learned C on a Turbo C++ 3 for DOS. I'll miss it, but maybe we've entered an era where it's Microsoft vs. Open Source, with no room left for anyone in between. If that's the case, it's kind of sad, and somewhat ironic, considering the spread of open source was supposed to enhance consumer freedom, not curtail it.
...I think Linus is the only Human in the OS leadership. He seems to have a remarkable amount of common sense. Too bad it isn't rubbing off on his compatriots...
That is part of being a scientist. You don't let your ego get in the way of the truth.
Hwang Woo-Suk - "No...really, I cloned life, I tell you!"
Charles Dawson - "I present to you...Piltdown Man!"
Robert Gallo - "I discovered the HIV virus"
Scientists are human, and greedy, and fallable, just like everyone else. And they play old-boy politics, just like everyone else, science be damned.
O'Toole's ordeal spotlights how science's allegedly self-correcting mechanisms broke down at every checkpoint. It never occurred to the referees assigned to review the paper that there could be anything even slightly shady in an article co-authored by David Baltimore, one of the world's most distinguished scientists. Fellow scientists likely wasted countless hours and money trying to build on the bogus findings. Investigators at Tufts University, MIT, and, initially, at the NIH performed little more than a perfunctory probe of O'Toole's charges. As the New York Times wrote in a scathing editorial, "the initial investigations of Dr. O'Toole's complaints smacked of an oldboy network drawing up the wagons to protect scientific reputations."
Our aircraft were so old that the parts to maintain them simply weren't made anymore. Yet those same aircraft are still flying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Which aircraft would those be? There are no aircraft in the USMC inventory that doesn't have manufacturer support. AV-8B? Sea and Super Stallions? F-18s? How about the Huey's and Cobras the Corps still uses? All have a spare parts supply chain from their manufacturers. Corps aircraft tend to be older than Navy or USAF birds, but they're very well maintained. Hell, Bell Aircraft is putting the Huey and Cobra line back into production. I'm ex-Navy, an airdale, and I've worked with Corps aviation units. Your whole story smells of bullshit.
I scavenged parts from the trash to make working equipment, because working equipment wasn't in the budget. Wanna talk about extreme case modding? I saw guys design and build electronic test equipment inside old suitcases because we couldn't get real stuff
That sounds like an exageration. Go back to the hillbilly armor thing...the press makes that out to be some disgrace, but there's a long history of American troops using brilliant methods to equip themselves until the supply chain could catch up to their needs. Military planners didn't forsee the dangers of IEDs and vulnerability to the Hummers.....so the troops took matters into their own hands, by using scrap steel to armor up their vehicles. In previous wars, soldiers have done similar things, especially to thinly-armored explosion prone tanks of early WW II.
Yet another military-derived technology we use...before GPS, LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation)was the primary method for nautical navigation; even with GPS, it's still extensively used in flight and nautical circles. LORAN was derived from British WW II radar navigation experiments. After the war, American researches adapted it for civilian use.
According to Think Secret anyway. Their sources have tipped them off about the Mac Mini and photo Ipod before, so it may be reliable....
Those sources have told Think Secret to not rule out the possible release of other Intel-based Macs at Macworld Expo, but that it is more likely the initial release of products with the new processor will be consumer-based products only and not professional, high-end lines, such as PowerBooks and towers, as some Web sites have reported.
The thinking apparently is that business software vendors need more time to port their stuff to Apple X86, but that Apple's own X86 consumer Mac software is ready to go.
IE is pretty much the native browser to them, and there's more Mac Classic users out there than you think. There's no Firefox, and the last official Mozilla product for classic was 1.2.1; there are some third party hacks to attempt to fix various instability issues on classic, but they're just that...third party hacks.
Since IE for Mac is indeed a totally different beast from the Windows IE product, why not open source it? I'm speaking theoretically of course, because I know Steve Balmer would rather chew off his left testicle than open source anything at Microsoft...
I've got DSL.....my speed averages about 1.3 mbps...I'm pretty happy with that. What I want is not more download speed....I want more upload speed. It's a damn crock that my upload is only 256 kbps.
Bill Gates gets lauded for his charity work, and what do we hear from Slashdot? "he actually doesn't give much, he stole his money anyway, it's all a plot to kill free software".
Listen to yourselves for a second...pull your fucking tinfoil hats off for a minute, and listen to yourselves....you sound like black-helicopter grassy-knol types...I don't care how much free software RMS has written, people dying of aids in africa don't give a flying fuck about GNU\anything but staying alive. Getting the latest version of GCC is great...if you're not wasting away in the Kalahari somewhere.
Would it be too much to ask for you people to get a little perspective???
"Because the central tenet of Baptist theology is that all you need to do is have faith to go to Heaven, the profession of faith becomes all important, and all other forms of interaction with the mundane world are negligible."
And? That IS what the Bible says....
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: [it is] the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. - Ephesians 2: 8-9
So Baptists are just following the Book, so to speak.
"I hate Fundamentalists, regardless of their religion or lack thereof."
You can hate them all you want. You're not in charge of a RELIGIOUS STUDIES department. Your hatred has no bearing on anything but yourself. Everyone has opinions.
First, Paul Mirecki is a well-respected scholar in the field of Christianity.
WAS well respected...
The released text was taken out of any context (the vast majority of the message had nothing to do with the class in question
So what? It still revealed his hostile views to "fundies", and now we have discovered, Catholics. Looks like the only ones missing were them thar' Jews, but he probably just didn't have time to get around to them yet...
Third, the Kansas legislature has a history of trying to destroy the University of Kansas.
DESTROY Kansas U? What??? What are you, a Drama major?
he conservative majority in our state legislature is uneducated, inept, and scary - only our governer is keeping things from getting too out of control.
And that's because, hmmm, your Gov is a Democrat? Nice...
Here's the truth; Mirecki had nothing but contempt for middle America people of faith. He spouted off his true views of American Christians, thinking it would go unseen. And he GOT CAUGHT. He believed the worst stereotypes about them, and the people of Kansas went "I'm sending my kids to college for this?"
We're posting stories about how a girl complains no one believes she's a girl...a girl with a really, really horrid looking website. Is it that slow a newsday? Didn't Microsoft do anything wrong today?
"I think that Apple will pick up the economies of scale from the x86 component vendors and run with it"
Nope.
Apple will continue to charge as much as they can get away with. For all of Apple's virtues, the Mac is the designer jeans of operating systems. People buy Macs for image and identity as much as the technical merits. As long as you have that kind of fanatical customer base, you can get away with big margins in your profit.
The G3 and G4 CPUs were produced in sufficient quantities to get the benefits of economy of scale. That didnt' stop Apple from keeping it's prices above PCs. And higher prices is actually a good thing in the minds of Apple marketing: you can't price a premium product below a premium pricetag, or the public will think quality or desirability is declining. Back in the mid 80's, when Jordache jeans tanked, it wasn't because of quality problems or supply....it was because the public suddenly didn't see anything cool about paying three times what a pair of Levi's cost. Jordache couldn't keep that marketing magic going, the public looked behind the curtain, and saw the Wizard was this regular old guy.
One of the things I think that scares the PPC diehards in Apple's camp is that the public will go "So? It's a PC. It's got a Pentium, just like that Dell or that HP", and the game will be up, and Apple will no longer be cool.
Woz is too charitable to Jobs, methinks. I sure woudn't have been that forgiving if I found out my business partner ripped me off so badly (woz went so far to admit this actually made him cry). From parking in handicapped spaces and fire lanes, to ripping off Woz, to his insane tirades, it's pretty clear Jobs is a selfish man, perhaps even proudly so. This isn't a guy that values other people at all.
Oh, and for all you people screaming about John Sculley ruining the company, again, Woz seems to think a bit differently. Sculley did his best to get Jobs to start making sensible decisions during the first lull in Macintosh sales. He tried to get Jobs to allow the Mac more PC compatibility. Jobs would have none of it, and was actually impeding the progress of his Mac team. That's why the board pretty much sacked him from his duties. He was making absolutely stupid decisions. Andy Hertzfeld gives a rather scathing account of the famous reality distortion field, and how the board essentially made Jobs a powerless figurehead. But it's pretty obvious he brought it on himself. And as for Sculley's contributions:
John was more concerned with the total company operation and keeping things going while Steve wanted to keep advancing on the future, company and profits or not, in his own internally conceived directions. Actually, John Sculley promoted technologies like AppleTalk and PowerTalk and QuickTime and PlainTalk and the Newton. He was very supportive of the rare technical geniuses in the company. He was not just a "marketeer" who dressed things up in colors.
So if history is any guide, letting Jobs run things without the board making him responsive to actual business pressures can be a disastrous thing in the long run. Maybe the guy has learned his lesson. He once said in the mid 90's (before his return to Apple) that if he were running the company again, he'd milk the Macintosh for all it's worth, and get busy on the next big thing. That pretty much sounds like what he's done since his return, with the Ipod now being Apple's premier product. So maybe an old dog can learn new tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
Most are. But there are different views among nerds like anyone else. Who's politics do you cater to? Or do you make the blanket statement that nerds=*insert political position*? That's why you should keep the two seperate here, unless you want to drive away the other side (and their advertising dollars).
That's why this perplexes me so much; why on Earth would you want to offend one half of the spectrum and jeapordize a chunk of your readership?
It was a blatantly political hit piece, painting Rumsfeld and the administration in Gestapo-like terms. If you're going to support that kind of activity here, then be honest about it. Don't smother it with a thick layer of bullshit, and go "no, it was a technical article, really".
I notice that you went from a 4 to a 1 pronto like. It didn't take the leftrolls long to find you and mod you down...
Why the hell are we putting these political stories up now? Bad enough that we do it at all, but Slashdot is fast becoming a kind of geeky Daily Kos; Taco and all you other editors...you guys have to be approving this stuff. Non-technical political articles shouldn't be posted, simply because this isn't the place for them. What's next? Stories about the CIA bombing the Twin Towers on Bush's orders? A guest column from Michael Moore? What's else?
What do you say to scientists like these that say the Sun may be just as, if not more responsible for, Global Warming, if it exists, than CO2 emissions? Kind of hard to wave the Kyoto treaty at the Sun and expect it to care. Despite claims to the contrary, plenty of people are still unconvinced, and not because they're sticking their heads in the sand...
Maybe if you're a socialist, but sorry, everyone else puts it in the left side of the political spectrum.
No, that's not the case, and it betrays a fundemental lack of understanding about what's really going on. Intellectual activity is not being attacked...intellectual arrogance is being attacked. There's a huge difference. People are simply tired of a relatively small subset of society going "we're smarter than you, better than you, and we know what's best for you". In fact, Americans have never been comfortable with such people. And so are Americans anti-intellectual? Of course not.
As for the political angle, when people look at the adminstration and say they're anti-intellectual, again, what evidence is there for this? "They blocked stem-cell research!". No, they only blocked certain kinds of stem cell research, on moral and ethical grounds. Global Warming? Sorry, that's not a settled issue yet, even among scientists. Stem Cell research wasn't federally funded at all until now. The administration is pushing for a revived space exploration program (in part by killing the Shuttle program), and new nuclear power research and new reactor construction. While there are no super conducting super colliders out there on the horizon, you can't say with a straight face that basic science has been defunded in any way.
One more thing....if you don't like the "anti-intellectual" party in power now, you can try voting them out. However, looking at their oppositions lack of electoral success against them, I'd say your bigger problem is convincing other Americans of our dire intellectual straits. They don't seem to think things are so bad.
While the Left as a whole may not be terribly adept at presenting themselves as a viable governing authority, your attitude seems to match the American Democratic Party's line: Bush is evil, the Republicans are evil, all conservatives of all stripes are evil, so elect us instead.
And yet the Left keeps losing. Has it ever occurred to you, just for a second, that maybe most of the populations of the US, UK, and Australia don't think they're in a Tyranny, and agree with the policies of their elected officials? That you just might be in the minority on this?
...these two are obviously pawns of Pat Robertson. No real scientist would make these claims. Stupid religious idiots...
And we see how much good that did for Netscape.
I learned C on a Turbo C++ 3 for DOS. I'll miss it, but maybe we've entered an era where it's Microsoft vs. Open Source, with no room left for anyone in between. If that's the case, it's kind of sad, and somewhat ironic, considering the spread of open source was supposed to enhance consumer freedom, not curtail it.
...I think Linus is the only Human in the OS leadership. He seems to have a remarkable amount of common sense. Too bad it isn't rubbing off on his compatriots...
Hwang Woo-Suk - "No...really, I cloned life, I tell you!"
Charles Dawson - "I present to you...Piltdown Man!"
Robert Gallo - "I discovered the HIV virus"
Scientists are human, and greedy, and fallable, just like everyone else. And they play old-boy politics, just like everyone else, science be damned.
Which aircraft would those be? There are no aircraft in the USMC inventory that doesn't have manufacturer support. AV-8B? Sea and Super Stallions? F-18s? How about the Huey's and Cobras the Corps still uses? All have a spare parts supply chain from their manufacturers. Corps aircraft tend to be older than Navy or USAF birds, but they're very well maintained. Hell, Bell Aircraft is putting the Huey and Cobra line back into production. I'm ex-Navy, an airdale, and I've worked with Corps aviation units. Your whole story smells of bullshit.
That sounds like an exageration. Go back to the hillbilly armor thing...the press makes that out to be some disgrace, but there's a long history of American troops using brilliant methods to equip themselves until the supply chain could catch up to their needs. Military planners didn't forsee the dangers of IEDs and vulnerability to the Hummers.....so the troops took matters into their own hands, by using scrap steel to armor up their vehicles. In previous wars, soldiers have done similar things, especially to thinly-armored explosion prone tanks of early WW II.
Yet another military-derived technology we use...before GPS, LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation)was the primary method for nautical navigation; even with GPS, it's still extensively used in flight and nautical circles. LORAN was derived from British WW II radar navigation experiments. After the war, American researches adapted it for civilian use.
See the Wikipedia info...
The thinking apparently is that business software vendors need more time to port their stuff to Apple X86, but that Apple's own X86 consumer Mac software is ready to go.
IE is pretty much the native browser to them, and there's more Mac Classic users out there than you think. There's no Firefox, and the last official Mozilla product for classic was 1.2.1; there are some third party hacks to attempt to fix various instability issues on classic, but they're just that...third party hacks.
Since IE for Mac is indeed a totally different beast from the Windows IE product, why not open source it? I'm speaking theoretically of course, because I know Steve Balmer would rather chew off his left testicle than open source anything at Microsoft...
I've got DSL.....my speed averages about 1.3 mbps...I'm pretty happy with that. What I want is not more download speed....I want more upload speed. It's a damn crock that my upload is only 256 kbps.
...Santa is magic, you insensitive clod. Normal rules of spacetime don't apply to him. Off with you and your lump of coal, Scrooge...
Bill Gates gets lauded for his charity work, and what do we hear from Slashdot? "he actually doesn't give much, he stole his money anyway, it's all a plot to kill free software".
Listen to yourselves for a second...pull your fucking tinfoil hats off for a minute, and listen to yourselves....you sound like black-helicopter grassy-knol types...I don't care how much free software RMS has written, people dying of aids in africa don't give a flying fuck about GNU\anything but staying alive. Getting the latest version of GCC is great...if you're not wasting away in the Kalahari somewhere.
Would it be too much to ask for you people to get a little perspective???
And? That IS what the Bible says....
So Baptists are just following the Book, so to speak.
"I hate Fundamentalists, regardless of their religion or lack thereof."
You can hate them all you want. You're not in charge of a RELIGIOUS STUDIES department. Your hatred has no bearing on anything but yourself. Everyone has opinions.
WAS well respected...
So what?
It still revealed his hostile views to "fundies", and now we have discovered, Catholics. Looks like the only ones missing were them thar' Jews, but he probably just didn't have time to get around to them yet...
DESTROY Kansas U? What??? What are you, a Drama major?
And that's because, hmmm, your Gov is a Democrat? Nice...
Here's the truth; Mirecki had nothing but contempt for middle America people of faith. He spouted off his true views of American Christians, thinking it would go unseen. And he GOT CAUGHT. He believed the worst stereotypes about them, and the people of Kansas went "I'm sending my kids to college for this?"
We're posting stories about how a girl complains no one believes she's a girl...a girl with a really, really horrid looking website. Is it that slow a newsday? Didn't Microsoft do anything wrong today?
"I think that Apple will pick up the economies of scale from the x86 component vendors and run with it"
Nope.
Apple will continue to charge as much as they can get away with. For all of Apple's virtues, the Mac is the designer jeans of operating systems. People buy Macs for image and identity as much as the technical merits. As long as you have that kind of fanatical customer base, you can get away with big margins in your profit.
The G3 and G4 CPUs were produced in sufficient quantities to get the benefits of economy of scale. That didnt' stop Apple from keeping it's prices above PCs. And higher prices is actually a good thing in the minds of Apple marketing: you can't price a premium product below a premium pricetag, or the public will think quality or desirability is declining. Back in the mid 80's, when Jordache jeans tanked, it wasn't because of quality problems or supply....it was because the public suddenly didn't see anything cool about paying three times what a pair of Levi's cost. Jordache couldn't keep that marketing magic going, the public looked behind the curtain, and saw the Wizard was this regular old guy.
One of the things I think that scares the PPC diehards in Apple's camp is that the public will go "So? It's a PC. It's got a Pentium, just like that Dell or that HP", and the game will be up, and Apple will no longer be cool.
Oh, and for all you people screaming about John Sculley ruining the company, again, Woz seems to think a bit differently. Sculley did his best to get Jobs to start making sensible decisions during the first lull in Macintosh sales. He tried to get Jobs to allow the Mac more PC compatibility. Jobs would have none of it, and was actually impeding the progress of his Mac team. That's why the board pretty much sacked him from his duties. He was making absolutely stupid decisions. Andy Hertzfeld gives a rather scathing account of the famous reality distortion field, and how the board essentially made Jobs a powerless figurehead. But it's pretty obvious he brought it on himself. And as for Sculley's contributions:
So if history is any guide, letting Jobs run things without the board making him responsive to actual business pressures can be a disastrous thing in the long run. Maybe the guy has learned his lesson. He once said in the mid 90's (before his return to Apple) that if he were running the company again, he'd milk the Macintosh for all it's worth, and get busy on the next big thing. That pretty much sounds like what he's done since his return, with the Ipod now being Apple's premier product. So maybe an old dog can learn new tricks.
He's still probably an asshole, though...