"What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity. "
I find that statement to be pretty naïve. Good journalism is synonymous with good judgment.
In this case, even assuming that Obama's and Sarkozy's statements were genuine, they obviously seemed to be personal opinions and had little relevance to actual foreign policy. What if Obama was simply lying about his opinion of Netanyahu to amuse and placate Sarkozy? What's the public benefit to reporting such pleasantries?
But more importantly, how can you be so sure what the administration "doesn't want you to publish"? What if the statement was meant to be overheard, and even leaked, as a red herring to put pressure on Netanyahu during some upcoming talk? Then the journalist is simply being duped into acting as an indirect mouthpiece of the administration.
Good journalists don't just print stuff because they think they overheard it. That's why they're called "journalists" and not "tattle-tales."
Journalism becomes nothing but PR when journalists don't report a story because they overheard something that 'was considered private and off-the-record'.
Disagree strongly, and I have worked as a journalist. A journalist is not a spy. Also, a journalist has a duty to determine what is news and what is simply information that has not been publicly disclosed. I'm sure there are lots of people who would like to know where Nancy Pelosi is on her menstrual cycle every time she makes a speech of votes in Congress, but this type of information simply isn't "fit to print," as the New York Times motto goes.
27. Staff members and others on assignment for us must obey the law in the gathering of news. They may not break into buildings, homes, apartments or offices. They may not purloin data, documents or other property, including such electronic property as databases and e-mail or voice-mail messages. They may not tap telephones, invade computer files or otherwise eavesdrop electronically on news sources. In the case of government orders or court directives to disclose a confidential source, journalists will consult with the newsroom management and the legal department on the application of this paragraph.
(emphasis mine)
Trust me, you are far better off when responsible journalists develop sources in a fair, honest, professional manner, rather than resorting to tabloid tactics. A journalist who blasts the slightest gaffe in 72-point headlines will quickly cease to hear anything at all.
It's like the beat cop who hauls everybody down to the precinct for the slightest infraction, versus the one who lets folks slide for the occasional open container or vandalism charge. Of the two, the one with the "zero tolerance policy" is going to have a much tougher time doing his job when something really important comes along.
In effect, the editorial was stating that we should oppose the WTO because it creates local employment.
I think that's a simplistic view of it. The WTO could yet harm you. You might gain local employment in some areas (call centers?), but what few local industries (or small businesses) you do have could be decimated by mass-produced cheap imports. Then, once local business disappear and your people are forced to buy imported goods, your country essentially loses its economic independence. Buying locally was a key component of Mahatma Gandhi's move for Indian independence from the British Empire. I don't know what country you're talking about or what it hopes to gain from the WTO, but I would consider very carefully before I leapt into such a thing.
I bought a Nook Color last Christmas and have been pretty disappointed. The eBook prices are ridiculously high. They are often higher than the physical book in the store or Amazon.
Blame the publishers. Amazon used to like to sell new ebooks for $9.99, but the publishers got mad and wanted more. They banded together and successfully created the "agency model" for ebook pricing, which resulted in what you see now: New ebook releases for $12.99 (on every store including B&N), new paper releases discounted to $11.99 on Amazon. I'm sure Amazon would gladly undersell the paper versions, but its hands are tied.
They also seem to be consistently higher than Amazon's prices for the same eBook (which are also too high).
That's not my experience. They are either the same price or, in rare cases, the B&N price is cheaper. Also, prices of new books generally go down once the paperback is issued... you're really only paying top-tier price on new releases.
Not quite - if you install the standard Nook app, you lose "More in Store" and "Read in Store"
I always found those features a little strange. Especially "read in store" -- aren't you in, y'know, a store full of books? What's the advantage of downloading the book to your device if you still have to physically be there? And then the only B&N in San Francisco closed down (not that I would have gone anyway, it was a terrible store) and the whole thing became moot.
What's the difference? If you were being held in prison and every day the guards would come in and smack you around with leather belts for a while, would that be OK because the guards weren't actually "beating" you?
I dunno, all the really important stuff still seems to be available. Maybe try a Google search instead of Slashdot's built-in search. Preface your query with "site:slashdot.org".
A philosophical background doesn't prove anything. As long as religion takes some random text from some random book as the only truth it is arbirary
Centuries of scholarship and debate based on the works of the likes of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, etc. should be sufficient evidence that it doesn't "take some random text from some random book." You seem to be assuming that a bunch of deluded evangelicals who believe anything the TV tells them are somehow representative of "religion." They are not; those people may indeed be religious, but they are also quite stupid. You can't paint every believer with the same brush.
You will also find that the vast majority of Christians do not believe Eve was literally created from Adam's rib, or that the Earth is 7,000 years old; nor do they have any particular beef with science as a whole. The Catholic Church certainly doesn't believe any of these things, and Catholicism represents the largest single denomination of Christianity in the United States and makes up about half of Christianity worldwide. Many other denominations have similarly "liberal" views, though I doubt they would describe their views as such.
At the end of the day, this current "debate" has mostly been framed by a bunch of paranoid atheists with chips on their shoulders, like Mr. Coyne. I can understand why some of them feel threatened by the vocal minority of Christians who attack science (especially since that minority seems to have disproportionate access to politicians and media), but some of them just seem to hate what they don't understand. (Which is an odd attitude for someone who claims to defend science, IMHO.)
The whole idea of science is to create a *useful* model of the world.
And religion does not aim to create a model of the physical world at all, but to explore the dimensions of the spiritual one; therefore science and religion can coexist, as neither duplicates the efforts of the other. QED.
Having seen some of it first hand now, I'm pretty repelled by Coyne, his comments, and the comments of just about everybody that hangs around his online forum. They all seem like a bunch of ignorant, blinkered, petty, rabid zealots. Not one of them seems prepared to communicate with even a modicum of civility -- which they term "accommodation" -- let alone actual academic discourse. Everything is straw men, ad hominem attacks, appeals to ridicule, and every other logical fallacy in the book. This isn't the way to "defend science"; the whole forum is like a cage of shrieking gibbons. I'm not a religious person, but I would never want to associate myself with this lot, not online and certainly not in person. I can't imagine what a bunch of pompous, stuck-up pricks they'd be around a dinner table. Truly amazing. And in closing, I doff my hat at Mr. Haught for his patience in putting up with such a gang of idiots. He seems like an intelligent, considerate, highly rational man who got suckered into spending an hour on a panel with the theological equivalent of Ann Coulter.
As I said, religion is arbitrary, you can claim whatever you want
Some try, but not all do. A lot of theological thought is well-grounded in classical philosophy (from Plato and Aristotle straight through to the modern day), which itself laid the foundation for the scientific method.
String theory is also considered to be unfalsifiable -- hence, arbitrary and non-scientific -- by many physicists, yet rational people don't try to argue that the only way to discuss and debate string theory is to ridicule it. That's the tactic of a schoolyard bully, not an intellectual.
If the only reason you buy a new Mac every few years is to put it to use in a business, you ought to be able to write off the full amount as a Section 179 expense instead of depreciating.
I don't remember Turbo Pascal 3.0, but I do remember Turbo C 1.0, and its IDE was essentially a GUI (even though it was text mode). Borland made great tools back then. Microsoft has pretty much always made great developer tools, but I liked Turbo C much better than MSC at the time. I defy anybody who says Borland's IDEs "sucked" to tell me what they used. Emacs?
One of the examples given in TFA was that the Wikipedia article for C is bigger than all of Turbo Pascal 3.0. Short version: Text is bigger than code. So when you have a very small program that's been localized into 15 different languages, what do you get? A very big very small program.
I don't understand why the "size" of a given piece of software is important anyway. Inside my phone right now is a piece of rewritable solid-state storage that's smaller than my fingernail but holds the equivalent of 20 Zip disks. Taking up a small fraction of its storage is a library that would probably weigh 100 pounds in paperback. This is a non-issue.
I agree that the ridiculously inefficient code shouldn't be allowed, but I don't think that ruthless efficiency as in the days of old is actually worth it at this point - in the olden days it was cheaper to be super efficient because hardware was expensive, now it isn't.
What's more, a lot of that old "squeezing the last drop out of the hardware" stuff really meant exploiting tricks that would barely enable you to get the job done by the skin of your teeth, and everybody would marvel that you got it done at all. Those wow-factor programs amaze people with what they can do, but in the world of real software they're a problem because they are usually not in the slightest bit portable. And you don't even need to want to port to a different OS to want your software to be portable; what about when Macs switched from PowerPC to Intel? What about any incremental hardware improvement that obviates the need for your "squeezing the last drop" tricks? Outside the realm of embedded systems, which often don't/can't get upgraded, there really isn't much need for this kind of coding anymore. It should usually be discouraged, in fact.
I thought it was interesting that it takes more bytes of data to explain in English what a programming language is like than to implement an entire toolchain that lets you build executable programs written in that language. (Although the examples were Turbo Pascal and the Wikipedia entry for C, I imagine the entry for Pascal is about as long.)
This. Pascal pointers were straightforward and almost fun. C pointers break my brain.
That's weird. I'm with the other guy; I hated Pascal pointers, but when I learned C they seemed natural and intuitive. Maybe it's just that in the meantime I had been playing around with a lot of assembly language and had kind of drifted away from Pascal.
Learn C, and you should have no trouble at all picking up C++, C#, Objective-C, or even Java. But like everybody else says, immerse yourself in the concepts first -- and personally I don't think "object orientation" is a really fundamental concept that developers need to learn up front, though that might just be my bias from being an Old Guy.
I'd add that my impression of Java has always been that it's a fairly pedantic and unforgiving language to code in... which, for a noob, is probably a good thing.
And I'd hardly call Ruby and Python "also-rans". They aren't used a lot in "Enterprise" software but they're still very popular, especially for web backends.
Who knows what "enterprise" is supposed to mean, but you may actually be surprised by how often both Ruby and Python are used for professional projects. For example, I don't think much public-facing code at Google is written in Python, but a ton of their internal-use tools are.
No way dude, I'm pretty sure that the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans, and the aliens who built Atlantis all did exactly this. Who are we to question what's worked for thousands of years?
the Christian Science Monitor was created to show how science doesn't rule out the existence of a higher power
Actually, it was not created for this purpose. It's a newspaper. It covers science, just like the New York Times does, but its mission as a newspaper has very little to do with science or "the existence of a higher power," but with reporting the news. If you're curious, you might want to find out something about its history. From its own Web page:
The Christian Science church doesn’t publish news to propagate denominational doctrine; it provides news purely as a public service. Here’s why: If the basic theology of that church says that what reaches and affects thought shapes experience, it follows that a newspaper would have significant impact on the lives of those who read it. News with the motive “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” cannot but help improve society and individual lives. The idea is that the unblemished truth is freeing (as a fundamental human right); with it, citizens can make informed decisions and take intelligent action, for themselves and for society.
The Monitor was founded more than 100 years ago, in an era when "fair, unbiased journalism" was virtually an alien concept in the United States, around the heyday of what came to be called "yellow journalism." The tabloid papers of the time were filled with slanders, misreporting and outright lies. In that business climate, the idea that a church would start a fair and accurate newspaper seemed natural -- because who else would embark on such a fool's errand, when it would put them in competition with men like Pullitzer and Hearst? Those two made Fox News look like pikers. The Monitor stepped in to provide the public with news -- real news -- not as an opportunity to preach, but in the same spirit that many churches feed the poor.
As for the rest of your childish, ignorant rant, may I kindly suggest that you slow your roll.
Slashdot Mirror
"What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity. "
I find that statement to be pretty naïve. Good journalism is synonymous with good judgment.
In this case, even assuming that Obama's and Sarkozy's statements were genuine, they obviously seemed to be personal opinions and had little relevance to actual foreign policy. What if Obama was simply lying about his opinion of Netanyahu to amuse and placate Sarkozy? What's the public benefit to reporting such pleasantries?
But more importantly, how can you be so sure what the administration "doesn't want you to publish"? What if the statement was meant to be overheard, and even leaked, as a red herring to put pressure on Netanyahu during some upcoming talk? Then the journalist is simply being duped into acting as an indirect mouthpiece of the administration.
Good journalists don't just print stuff because they think they overheard it. That's why they're called "journalists" and not "tattle-tales."
Journalism becomes nothing but PR when journalists don't report a story because they overheard something that 'was considered private and off-the-record'.
Disagree strongly, and I have worked as a journalist. A journalist is not a spy. Also, a journalist has a duty to determine what is news and what is simply information that has not been publicly disclosed. I'm sure there are lots of people who would like to know where Nancy Pelosi is on her menstrual cycle every time she makes a speech of votes in Congress, but this type of information simply isn't "fit to print," as the New York Times motto goes.
And speaking of the Times, here is a passage from that paper's journalistic ethics policy:
27. Staff members and others on assignment for us must obey the law in the gathering of news. They may not break into buildings, homes, apartments or offices. They may not purloin data, documents or other property, including such electronic property as databases and e-mail or voice-mail messages. They may not tap telephones, invade computer files or otherwise eavesdrop electronically on news sources. In the case of government orders or court directives to disclose a confidential source, journalists will consult with the newsroom management and the legal department on the application of this paragraph.
(emphasis mine)
Trust me, you are far better off when responsible journalists develop sources in a fair, honest, professional manner, rather than resorting to tabloid tactics. A journalist who blasts the slightest gaffe in 72-point headlines will quickly cease to hear anything at all.
It's like the beat cop who hauls everybody down to the precinct for the slightest infraction, versus the one who lets folks slide for the occasional open container or vandalism charge. Of the two, the one with the "zero tolerance policy" is going to have a much tougher time doing his job when something really important comes along.
In effect, the editorial was stating that we should oppose the WTO because it creates local employment.
I think that's a simplistic view of it. The WTO could yet harm you. You might gain local employment in some areas (call centers?), but what few local industries (or small businesses) you do have could be decimated by mass-produced cheap imports. Then, once local business disappear and your people are forced to buy imported goods, your country essentially loses its economic independence. Buying locally was a key component of Mahatma Gandhi's move for Indian independence from the British Empire. I don't know what country you're talking about or what it hopes to gain from the WTO, but I would consider very carefully before I leapt into such a thing.
I bought a Nook Color last Christmas and have been pretty disappointed. The eBook prices are ridiculously high. They are often higher than the physical book in the store or Amazon.
Blame the publishers. Amazon used to like to sell new ebooks for $9.99, but the publishers got mad and wanted more. They banded together and successfully created the "agency model" for ebook pricing, which resulted in what you see now: New ebook releases for $12.99 (on every store including B&N), new paper releases discounted to $11.99 on Amazon. I'm sure Amazon would gladly undersell the paper versions, but its hands are tied.
They also seem to be consistently higher than Amazon's prices for the same eBook (which are also too high).
That's not my experience. They are either the same price or, in rare cases, the B&N price is cheaper. Also, prices of new books generally go down once the paperback is issued... you're really only paying top-tier price on new releases.
Uh, yes. There's one demo showing one playing Transformers (the movie)
Ah, well there you go. It's a trick. Given that demo content, it's impossible to make out what you're actually seeing.
Not quite - if you install the standard Nook app, you lose "More in Store" and "Read in Store"
I always found those features a little strange. Especially "read in store" -- aren't you in, y'know, a store full of books? What's the advantage of downloading the book to your device if you still have to physically be there? And then the only B&N in San Francisco closed down (not that I would have gone anyway, it was a terrible store) and the whole thing became moot.
Tell it to mashiki -- he seems to think beating kids is what made Canada great.
What's the difference? If you were being held in prison and every day the guards would come in and smack you around with leather belts for a while, would that be OK because the guards weren't actually "beating" you?
John Cage is interesting, but he created music that was random. That's not what this is.
I dunno, all the really important stuff still seems to be available. Maybe try a Google search instead of Slashdot's built-in search. Preface your query with "site:slashdot.org".
A philosophical background doesn't prove anything. As long as religion takes some random text from some random book as the only truth it is arbirary
Centuries of scholarship and debate based on the works of the likes of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, etc. should be sufficient evidence that it doesn't "take some random text from some random book." You seem to be assuming that a bunch of deluded evangelicals who believe anything the TV tells them are somehow representative of "religion." They are not; those people may indeed be religious, but they are also quite stupid. You can't paint every believer with the same brush.
You will also find that the vast majority of Christians do not believe Eve was literally created from Adam's rib, or that the Earth is 7,000 years old; nor do they have any particular beef with science as a whole. The Catholic Church certainly doesn't believe any of these things, and Catholicism represents the largest single denomination of Christianity in the United States and makes up about half of Christianity worldwide. Many other denominations have similarly "liberal" views, though I doubt they would describe their views as such.
At the end of the day, this current "debate" has mostly been framed by a bunch of paranoid atheists with chips on their shoulders, like Mr. Coyne. I can understand why some of them feel threatened by the vocal minority of Christians who attack science (especially since that minority seems to have disproportionate access to politicians and media), but some of them just seem to hate what they don't understand. (Which is an odd attitude for someone who claims to defend science, IMHO.)
The whole idea of science is to create a *useful* model of the world.
And religion does not aim to create a model of the physical world at all, but to explore the dimensions of the spiritual one; therefore science and religion can coexist, as neither duplicates the efforts of the other. QED.
Having seen some of it first hand now, I'm pretty repelled by Coyne, his comments, and the comments of just about everybody that hangs around his online forum. They all seem like a bunch of ignorant, blinkered, petty, rabid zealots. Not one of them seems prepared to communicate with even a modicum of civility -- which they term "accommodation" -- let alone actual academic discourse. Everything is straw men, ad hominem attacks, appeals to ridicule, and every other logical fallacy in the book. This isn't the way to "defend science"; the whole forum is like a cage of shrieking gibbons. I'm not a religious person, but I would never want to associate myself with this lot, not online and certainly not in person. I can't imagine what a bunch of pompous, stuck-up pricks they'd be around a dinner table. Truly amazing. And in closing, I doff my hat at Mr. Haught for his patience in putting up with such a gang of idiots. He seems like an intelligent, considerate, highly rational man who got suckered into spending an hour on a panel with the theological equivalent of Ann Coulter.
As I said, religion is arbitrary, you can claim whatever you want
Some try, but not all do. A lot of theological thought is well-grounded in classical philosophy (from Plato and Aristotle straight through to the modern day), which itself laid the foundation for the scientific method.
String theory is also considered to be unfalsifiable -- hence, arbitrary and non-scientific -- by many physicists, yet rational people don't try to argue that the only way to discuss and debate string theory is to ridicule it. That's the tactic of a schoolyard bully, not an intellectual.
If the only reason you buy a new Mac every few years is to put it to use in a business, you ought to be able to write off the full amount as a Section 179 expense instead of depreciating.
I don't remember Turbo Pascal 3.0, but I do remember Turbo C 1.0, and its IDE was essentially a GUI (even though it was text mode). Borland made great tools back then. Microsoft has pretty much always made great developer tools, but I liked Turbo C much better than MSC at the time. I defy anybody who says Borland's IDEs "sucked" to tell me what they used. Emacs?
One of the examples given in TFA was that the Wikipedia article for C is bigger than all of Turbo Pascal 3.0. Short version: Text is bigger than code. So when you have a very small program that's been localized into 15 different languages, what do you get? A very big very small program.
I don't understand why the "size" of a given piece of software is important anyway. Inside my phone right now is a piece of rewritable solid-state storage that's smaller than my fingernail but holds the equivalent of 20 Zip disks. Taking up a small fraction of its storage is a library that would probably weigh 100 pounds in paperback. This is a non-issue.
I agree that the ridiculously inefficient code shouldn't be allowed, but I don't think that ruthless efficiency as in the days of old is actually worth it at this point - in the olden days it was cheaper to be super efficient because hardware was expensive, now it isn't.
What's more, a lot of that old "squeezing the last drop out of the hardware" stuff really meant exploiting tricks that would barely enable you to get the job done by the skin of your teeth, and everybody would marvel that you got it done at all. Those wow-factor programs amaze people with what they can do, but in the world of real software they're a problem because they are usually not in the slightest bit portable. And you don't even need to want to port to a different OS to want your software to be portable; what about when Macs switched from PowerPC to Intel? What about any incremental hardware improvement that obviates the need for your "squeezing the last drop" tricks? Outside the realm of embedded systems, which often don't/can't get upgraded, there really isn't much need for this kind of coding anymore. It should usually be discouraged, in fact.
I thought it was interesting that it takes more bytes of data to explain in English what a programming language is like than to implement an entire toolchain that lets you build executable programs written in that language. (Although the examples were Turbo Pascal and the Wikipedia entry for C, I imagine the entry for Pascal is about as long.)
This. Pascal pointers were straightforward and almost fun. C pointers break my brain.
That's weird. I'm with the other guy; I hated Pascal pointers, but when I learned C they seemed natural and intuitive. Maybe it's just that in the meantime I had been playing around with a lot of assembly language and had kind of drifted away from Pascal.
Whatever happened to learning plain ol' C?
Learn C, and you should have no trouble at all picking up C++, C#, Objective-C, or even Java. But like everybody else says, immerse yourself in the concepts first -- and personally I don't think "object orientation" is a really fundamental concept that developers need to learn up front, though that might just be my bias from being an Old Guy.
I'd add that my impression of Java has always been that it's a fairly pedantic and unforgiving language to code in ... which, for a noob, is probably a good thing.
And I'd hardly call Ruby and Python "also-rans". They aren't used a lot in "Enterprise" software but they're still very popular, especially for web backends.
Who knows what "enterprise" is supposed to mean, but you may actually be surprised by how often both Ruby and Python are used for professional projects. For example, I don't think much public-facing code at Google is written in Python, but a ton of their internal-use tools are.
Have you tried GWT? Basically, you code in Java and it compiles it to JavaScript. There are other languages that cross-compile into JavaScript, too.
No way dude, I'm pretty sure that the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans, and the aliens who built Atlantis all did exactly this. Who are we to question what's worked for thousands of years?
the Christian Science Monitor was created to show how science doesn't rule out the existence of a higher power
Actually, it was not created for this purpose. It's a newspaper. It covers science, just like the New York Times does, but its mission as a newspaper has very little to do with science or "the existence of a higher power," but with reporting the news. If you're curious, you might want to find out something about its history. From its own Web page:
The Christian Science church doesn’t publish news to propagate denominational doctrine; it provides news purely as a public service. Here’s why: If the basic theology of that church says that what reaches and affects thought shapes experience, it follows that a newspaper would have significant impact on the lives of those who read it.
News with the motive “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” cannot but help improve society and individual lives. The idea is that the unblemished truth is freeing (as a fundamental human right); with it, citizens can make informed decisions and take intelligent action, for themselves and for society.
The Monitor was founded more than 100 years ago, in an era when "fair, unbiased journalism" was virtually an alien concept in the United States, around the heyday of what came to be called "yellow journalism." The tabloid papers of the time were filled with slanders, misreporting and outright lies. In that business climate, the idea that a church would start a fair and accurate newspaper seemed natural -- because who else would embark on such a fool's errand, when it would put them in competition with men like Pullitzer and Hearst? Those two made Fox News look like pikers. The Monitor stepped in to provide the public with news -- real news -- not as an opportunity to preach, but in the same spirit that many churches feed the poor.
As for the rest of your childish, ignorant rant, may I kindly suggest that you slow your roll.