I have no obsession or real concern with the behaviour of others, and I'm not sure how my post could be interpreted that way.
How odd. To me, everything you've said on this topic seems to be infused with a "do X because it will cause / force / prevent others from doing Y" mentality. So far as I can tell, pretty much everything you've said on the topic has been about the behavior of others; I haven't seen any "I do / won't do X because I choose not to / enjoy it / whatever" statements.
Perhaps you mean imposing an anti-binary driver policy on Linux users? That would be one instance. Also, your stated motivation for supporting the patch:
it forces them to open up their binary drivers
I suspect you and your friends boycott is not the greatest threat to their bottom line and provides no incentive for them to concede to the desires of the open source community. Here you seem to assume that I don't buy things I don't want in order to effect the behavior of the vendors.
quality open source products are valuable in their own right, but also as an incentive for commercial manufacturers to produce higher quality products
corporate manufacturer who can continue to reproduce binary closed drivers without consequence
policy is driven by the gatekeepers
all the "the masses do / think this or that" stuff
In the case of the binary-only drivers, our behaviour is dictated to us by the video card manufacturers
Mine isn't. And really, I doubt that yours is either.
We just aren't communicating. I never said I was boycotting anyone. What I said was that some people (for whatever reason) choose to produce products that I don't consume (for whatever reason). That was the point of the diet food reference. It's not that I'd love to buy overpriced proprietary food but choose not to because I have this burning desire to punish the company that makes it for their business practices. I don't buy it because I don't want it at the price, in the form, and under the conditions they are offering it.
The rest of your response follows the same sort of pattern. You seem to be obsessed with controlling the behavior of others, for "the greater good" or whatever, while I am more concerned with not allowing others to control my behavior. Part of my policy for doing that is to engage in cooperative agreements with others, wherein we agree not to try to control each other's behavior.
In other words, I think freedom is important, and don't place much value on playing World of Warcraft or whatever, while you seem to be very concerned with being able to buy new things and play games and so forth, thus see controlling the rights of others and the "perceptions of the marketplace", promoting "the common good," retaliation against oligopolies, etc. as necessary to obtaining your goals. While I can support restricting the rights of some people to protect others in certain situations (e.g., I would restrict the US government's "right" to hold people indefinitely without charges in order to protect those people, and myself, from a potential police state) I just don't see the issue of gaming on bleeding edge graphics cards as being at that level of urgency.
While this is an interesting example I think it misses an important difference; the self destructive behavior that is typically associated with addiction. If you had been unable to keep your eyes closed, and as a result had caused yourself permanent blindness, which you were aware of in advance, then your starting to get the feel of addiction. It is more than inconvenience or difficulty.
I wasn't missing that difference, I was underscoring it to make my point: the internet appears "addicting" because it is a valuable source of information about the world; it differs from many other true addictions (drugs, alcohol, etc.) that are by their very nature disconnected from reality and thus have serious repercussions. Saying people are "addicted to the internet" is like saying they are "addicted to listening to what others are saying to them" or to "paying attention to where they are walking;" while it is in theory possible to become obsessive / compulsive about such things, the desire itself is perfectly rational and thus not (IMHO) an addiction.
Your comment about anorexia brings up a good point: could we say, with equal validity (i.e., in my opinion, none) that people who refuse to go on-line are "addicted to being ignorant" or some such?
You seem to have a very different view of the free software movement than I do.
Where you see people "denied access to commodity products with limited alternatives" I see companies locking themselves out of a growing share of the market; they won't get my money, nor the money of most of my friends, until/unless they change their ways. I don't have an intrinsic need to buy their overpriced crap (as evidenced by the fact that they have hefty advertising budgets to woo me, and not the other way around) and don't feel particularly heart broken if I can't. Did you know that there are proprietary foods (for dieters, I gather) that you can only buy if you sign a contract to only eat food that you buy from them, and to eat all of it on the specified schedule? Do you care?
And as for the limited alternatives nonsense, that is so backwards from a free software / open source perspective that I can't even get my head around it. You have more alternatives facing you right now than 99.9% of the people who ever lived, and if you don't like any of them you also have a greater opportunity to create your own alternatives by an even wider margin.
As for the otherwise indifferent masses "blaming Linux" for things why, exactly, do you care? Do you get a nickel every time someone installs Linux? Or did the masses get together and appoint you their Lord Protector while I was busy doing something?
And finally, Linus isn't a "gatekeeper" in any but the most narrow sense; you are free to fork Linux anytime you want, and start your own version with the "no-binaries allowed" patch (just as, if he were to include it in his tree, you would be free to fork and take it right back out). Linus may be a gatekeeper, but since there's no fence on either side of the gate it's mostly a symbolic role.
What I didn't realize, until reading Linus's post, was why he didn't see things this way.
His point, which he made quite clearly (to me at least) is that locking out binary-only drivers falls into the same category of trying to tell other people what they can and can't do with their computers; it would be a clear case of adopting the very tactics to which some people (myself included) object in order to prevent the "bad guys" from doing it. It's a "we have to burn the village in order to save it" strategy, and for that reason he doesn't want to follow it.
Note that he quite clearly states that he isn't going to try to prevent others from locking out binary only drivers from their trees, just that he isn't going to fire the first shot.
I am not sure that I entirely agree with his position, but I understand it much better than I did before, and consequently can see the merit of it where I previously did not.
Yes, I find it hard to go without the internet for a few days. In fact, it was just about as bad as going without my eyes for a few days after surgery and, I imagine (though I've never had this happen) going without my ears. Of course, going without my eyes wasn't as bad as it might have been, because I had use of the internet before hand, and was thus able to gather a fair number of useful coping tips from other people who had had the same operation.
The internet is "addicting" in the same way any other sense organ or sense-enhancing tool is addicting--once you are aware that there is a way to find out useful things about the world around you it can be very frustrating to have to live without it. For people who don't get it, I suggest removing all the mirrors from their cars for a few days to see how they like having to twist themselves into knots just to find out what's going on around them.
Oh, well. I realize nobody is likely going to listen to me, and everybody has their opinion set in stone.
In fact, I had never understood his point until reading that post. As he points out, it clearly is hypocritical to object to the RIAA tactics (which I do) on the one hand and then propose using exactly the same sort of technological barriers to fair use on the other. If people object to binary only drivers, the sollution is for those people to refuse to use them, not for them to try to game the system to prevent other people from using them.
One hydrogen atom is bigger than a helium atom, IIRC (although not by much).
But more importantly, hydrogen gas comes as H2 - two atoms joined together, which is even bigger again - probably a very similar size to Nitrogen or Oxygen gas molecules
Hydrogen and helium atoms are about the same size (both have S1 as their outermost shell); oxygen and nitrogen are about twice as large, give or take a little depending on how you measure (e.g. van der Waals vs. covalent bond length).
In art classes they teach students to draw the space around the objects they are trying to depict. It's a useful skill in many areas.
Rather than imagining that there is this atomic transition point that one side or the other must own, look more closely at what happens when changes are put into production, zooming in until you have enough detail that every piece naturally belongs to one team or the other.
Then look at how this would play out in the real world, to find the "frothy" or "tangled" parts (well, IT should do this, then Dev should do that, then IT should do two more things, then it's Dev's turn again). These parts should be sorted out by requiring documentation (or scripting) to flow one way or the other, so that the process can be performed by one group without the direct involvement of the other.
In short, the problem here is the granularity of your question.
if it can be fully explained by the classical physics approximations, then by the laws of causal closure included there we cannot possibly have free will
Hold on just a minute. You are making quite a leap there, while acting as if you were just stating the obvious.
Unless you can do something along the lines of:
Say exactly what free will actually is.
Explain how to work out the consequences of applying the laws of classical physics in every possible physical system (possibly lumping systems together by the form of their consequences)
Show that set of results from #2 does not contain #1
...you are just making an unsupported assumption there. You may think that free will doesn't sound like something that could come out of a system under the classical approximation, but that's nothing more than a hunch. There are undoubtedly countless logical consequences of classical physics that no one has worked out yet (and many times more that never will be worked out) so it is a bit premature to claim that something we can't even define isn't among them. (To put this in perspective, radio, quicksand, thunderstorms, slinkys, tubas, and static cling are all classical phenomena; do you really think you could fill in the rest of the list without missing many more than you capture?)
You're way off base on several other points as well (e.g. "instantiation" vs. "simulation" and the long ago exposed "Chinese Room" straw man), but I suspect you are only clinging to them because of your (unfounded) principle worry--that without some sort of magic escape hatch you are at risk of losing your free will to physics. Since this fear is unfounded, I won't bother with the secondary issues here.
Thanks for the link; I had not heard any of that. While some of the points are hearsay, the pattern does make it look like the boyfriend should be considered at least as much of a suspect as Reiser.
The difference is in how it's delivered. Having a steady flow of melt-water is much nicer for agriculture than occasional flash flooding, even if the later does provide more water per year on average.
Thirty years ago? In 1976? Really? Don't think so.
I'm confused. Are you disputing the existence of hash tables thirty years ago (which would be silly) or that the year 1976 existed at all (which would be slightly sillier)? I suppose that you might be disputing the present existence of people from this long forgotten era, which would be slightly less silly but vastly more insulting. We do in fact exist.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And yes, people really did dress like they show on TV. We thought it was normal then. Don't ask me why.
Every day we move closer to the edge of a humanitarian abyss. Think the Balkans, Rwanda or Darfur, but with this grim difference: the United States won't be able to stand back from the slaughter and wring its hands in Iraq. It is implicated up to its elbows already, and there's more to come. Attempts to hold Iraq together by political compromise have failed. If the Americans stay there in any way, shape or form, they're going to have to choose sides, backing Iraqi "friends" who will do whatever they think is necessary to impose order.
But on the bright side:
The United States, grabbing here and there for a politically correct model to control the chaos, has only engendered more bloodshed. Most Iraqis want us gone, according to the polls, and the U.S. trainers giving instruction in combat techniques eventually will see that knowledge turned against us by their students. "All they really teach is how to fight Americans," says Van Creveld. "How stupid can they be?"
Thus, our brave leaders wisely decide to address the more urgent matters and leave the problems of foreigners for another day.
A responsible researcher could have created a proof-of-concept, and raised awareness through media channels, research paper, blog etc. He should have also presented his research to the TSA and the airlines.
You seem to be forgetting that that had already been done, up to and including having the information on how to create a fake boarding pass published on a congressman's web site for a year or so prior to his arrest. And yes, there had already be newspaper articles on it, and the TSA was either well aware of it and doing nothing or unaware of it even though it had been reported to them multiple times.
Let's call this for what it is: trouble-making, not research.
Ok, fine. It was trouble making. But for whom? It didn't lower airport security one iota. Anyone who cared about it already new how to do it. What it did do, though, was make trouble for the fake "security" providers at the TSA, and point out the fact that they are ripping us (the taxpayers) off.
We saw the same sort of misleading argument come up when people started pointing out that US Military personnel were being given ineffective bulletproof vests; somehow the people who were trying to raise awareness of the issue were supposedly "helping the terrorists." Which is just nuts. What they were doing is making things uncomfortable for the crooks selling the defective jackets, and having zero impact on the people wearing them unless and until they could raise enough awareness of the issue to get things changed--in which case their actions would have helped the roops, not hurt them.
I certainly wouldn't call Kerry "Mr. Science" either.
On the other hand, I doubt that Kerry (with a Republican Congress fighting him every step of the way) could have done nearly as much damage to the Constitution, the budget, or to America in general as Bush managed with the help of the Rubber Stamp Congress. At the very least, when the two parties are split the keep each other from getting too wildly anti-science as part of a general question-everything-the-other-guy-does mentality.
Uh, no they didn't. In both elections, more people voted against him than for him, or at least thought they did. And many of those that voted for him wouldn't have if the media had been more honest with them and not repeatedly worked to cover up his lies.
Wow. Can you also convince yourself that the sky is green and that the Sun rises in the west (or at least it *would* if the media stopped lying about the east)?
BTW, with all the close elections in the mid-terms where is all the nuts claiming the Democrats *stole* the elections? Or does that only happen when it's Republicans winning?
Wow. This is exactly the sort of emotionally charged irrational invective that (IMHO) is making it so hard to practice science in the US. Your heated response to two points (the claims that 1) more people voted against Bush than for him, and 2) even fewer would have voted for him had the media been more forthcoming/honest) contains...what? A rhetorical question about the color of the sky, a straw man about symmetry in election fraud, one explicit and two implicit ad hominim attacks, and absolutely nothing about the points you pretend to be responding to.
So let me show you how this whole logical argument thing is done:
First, to substantiate my points which you seem to be trying to question:
No one disputes that Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000
No one disputes that Bush would have gotten fewer votes in 2004 if the media hadn't:
Sat on the unwarranted wiretapping story till after the election
Downplayed the level of violence in Iraq
Allowed the Whitehouse lies about contact with Abramoff to go unchallenged until after the election
Failed to aggressively pursue the phone logs showing repeated calls between the New Jersey election tampering operation and the Whitehouse during the 2002 midterms.
And so on and so forth...
Which leaves the claim that more people voted against Bush than for him in 2004 (or at least thought they did) as the only vaguely controversial claim in my post. While you might argue the validity of exit polls (which showed Bush loosing until they were "adjusted" to match the official results) or discount the impact of election fraud, you have not done so.
Now for your remarks:
I do not believe the sky to be green.
I do not believe the sun rises at all; rather on most parts of the globe for most of the year it appears to rise (generally in the wast) because the Earth rotates on its axis. Note that, near the poles, it may appear to rise or set in the north or south but, to AFAIK, never in the west.
To my knowledge the media is not "lying about the east", though I admit that I can't even imagine how you could lie about a direction.
While I do not know of any "nuts that are claiming the Democrats stole elections", I'm sure they are out there. You might want to try the Free Republic, as that particular type of nut can often be found there.
Your question as posed (Do people only claim that the Democrats stole an election when the Republicans win?) is nonsensical. What I believe you were trying to ask is, "Does the frequency of claims of electoral fraud depend on the party of the winning candidate?" to which I would respond no. It seems to be much more strongly correlated to evidence of actual shenanigans (machines not registering votes, precincts reporting negative votes for one candidate, people who voted for themselves not receiving any votes, precints repoerting more votes than registered voters, etc.
The fact that, as you note, such incidents tend to be strongly correlated with Republican candidates winning is possibly a statistical fluke, unless you are wanting to suggest that there has been an organized effort on the part of the Republican party to subvert our democracy.
And then he won't have to worry about his Systems job any more,
because he'll have been fired for insubordination! Hurrah!
Not if he works in a company that does engineering. People who can hold onto the mindset and keep moving are incredibly valuable to a company that does real engineering--far more valuable that leaf-node managers, though you'd never guess from the pay schedules.
Much more likely, he would be "demoted" by giving him responsibility for one of the issues he was drilling down on (fine, fix it then), which is exactly what he's wanting.
You really don't know what it's like to be an engineer, do you?
At least, the examles you give sound like an engineer trying to move into management and not the other way around.
Real engineers ask lots of questions. Managers can often get away with nodding and smiling, or issuing edicts as you suggest, but an engineer (or someone who's thinking like one) won't be satisfied by that at all.
Management is about getting things done the way you want. Engineering is about understanding why you get what you get, and under what circumstance, and how it all interacts.
Well, US voters elected twice (not just once, but twice!) a man that does not care about science
Uh, no they didn't. In both elections, more people voted against him than for him, or at least thought they did. And many of those that voted for him wouldn't have if the media had been more honest with them and not repeatedly worked to cover up his lies.
Blaming the voters for Bush's election is like blaming them for "lacking the will" to win in Iraq.
But the two are not unrelated. If the people were more science/math/tech savvy it would be harder to pull the wool over their eyes. Which means that, at least in some circles, as you suggest, the decline in science is seen as a good thing.
It's easy, really. Act like an engineer. Think like an engineer. Constantly. Don't let yourself get sidetracked by manager speak or pper pressure. Especially in meetings.
Whenever you encounter a number look for the error bars, and be sure to include them when you give a number ("I'll be down in five plus or minus three minutes!"). Call out peo9ple for sloppy thinking, find ways to set bounds that rule out unworkable alternatives early, troubleshoot everything.
If you have the right sort of personality, and the right sort of boss, you can get your point across by repeatedly showing how silly the logic is.
For example (I actually used this once):
Me: Would it be better to buy or rent a volcano?
PHB: What?
Me: Would it be more cost effective to buy a volcano, or rent one?
PHB: What are you talking about? Why would we need a volcano in the first place?
Me: Well, we have to plant the coffee someplace, and according to what I recall, it grows well on the sides of volcanoes.
PHB: We don't need to plant coffee in the first place.
Me: But what about our competitive advantage? If we aren't drinking special coffee that's a little better than the...
PHB: Ok, I get your point. Submit the damn patches.
Of course, there were twenty or so intermediate steps, including my arguing that we should refuse to answer a product satisfaction survey from a vendor, because they might use the information to improve their product, and so forth. But since the argument against submitting patches is so weak in the first place it real was a pretty easy sell.
Someone else has already pointed out that you don't seem to understand stock splits, so I'll tackle another of your misconceptions:
Google's shares cost what they cost because of scarcity--they didn't sell the whole company!
This is exactly backwards. If I sell N shares representing half the company they are each worth half as much as if the same number of shares represented the whole company.
conservatism is about what problems should be addressed, not about how.
And these are?
*sigh* I could (and probably should) just answer by giving the same definition I gave to start with, inverted by the application of a little formal logic to provide a grammatical answer to the question as posed: The government should only address problems which can be addressed without throwing out, risking, abandoning, or dismantling something of value except for specific, coherent reasons that aren't part of a flim-flam show.
The bigger problem is that you felt the need to ask the question at all (which suggests that we just aren't communicating).
Suppose I said that "This arson law is about which people should be located and arrested, not about how to find them or capture them" and you said "And these people are?" as if you expected my to pop off a list of arsonists.
Conservatism (and, for that matter, progressivism, at least as practiced in some quarters) provides a framework for narrowing down your choices of which issues are good candidates for political solutions. It does not provide a ready list all made up in advance of the facts; and the people who come to the table with such a list are generally ideologues with no need of a political philosophy since all the answers are already provided by their ideology.
With that in mind, I will repeat as clearly as I can what I have said several times on this and related threads: I think you are barking up the wrong tree. You are trying to fight a conservative vs. progressive battle that is at this point in history no more real (or at least no more fundamental) than the taste-great/less-filling tripe the public is spoon fed on American Idol or Survivor or whatever. The real battle is between the bulk of the world and a small but powerful group of people who are willing to do or say anything to get and maintain power over the rest of us, even if it kills us. Granted, there are considerable faction fights within both groups, but the big issue isn't so much what color jersey the bastards wear or what terms they use as they try to lie us into WWIII, but that they are doing it at all.
I would dearly love to get back to the point where you and I could argue about the best way to handle street crime, and how best to fund things like the space program, but right now we should probably focus on the heavily armed lunatics that are willing to destroy everything that America (or Islam, or whatever) stands for in order to seize and hold control over the oil that they think we must keep burning until we run out, it kills us, or both.
I would almost agree with you. However, it doesn't take a lot of people to successfully jepordize the legitimacy of an election with a voter verifiable record. The fact that votes are verifiable after being cast at all means that a FUD campaign can be launched attacking the validity of an election.
Say what? It would be easier to convince people that an election had been tampered with if they couldn't see that their vote was counted correctly? That some how it's easier to convince people that everything is on the up-and-up if they aren't allowed to confirm that their vote was counted at all?
To be blunt, that makes no sense.
Anyone wanting to launch a FUD campaign could do so under the present system just fine. In fact, it is easier under the present system, due to all the dark corners in which nasty things might be hiding (and who can prover they're not?) than it would be with voter verifiable records.
It's about the plausability of cheating so much as the ability to cheat.
Uh, yeah. It's more plausible that people are cheating if they show you all the votes and give you (and everyone else) the ability to see that their vote is in there and was counted correctly. 'cause doing things in secret with no records is a much better way to gain the people's trust.
Saddam Hussein was voted in with 99% approval ratings each term, though I contend that it's safe to say that the votes cast were not the population's "true feelings" on the subject of government.
How on earth can you conclude that?!? You're just going to trust Saddam's count? It is just as plausible that almost everyone voted their true feelings and when the results were announced a large percentage of the people were surprised to find that they and their friends were in the 1% minority that voted against Saddam. And then they probably railed privately against their fellow countrymen for failing to stand up and vote him out.
Non-vote verifiable records are to insure that there is no effective way to pressure someone to vote against their personal convictions.
More realistically, to assure there's no need to pressure them, since you can just say the count was whatever you like and everyone has to take your word for it.
Slashdot Mirror
How odd. To me, everything you've said on this topic seems to be infused with a "do X because it will cause / force / prevent others from doing Y" mentality. So far as I can tell, pretty much everything you've said on the topic has been about the behavior of others; I haven't seen any "I do / won't do X because I choose not to / enjoy it / whatever" statements.
That would be one instance. Also, your stated motivation for supporting the patch:
Here you seem to assume that I don't buy things I don't want in order to effect the behavior of the vendors.
Mine isn't. And really, I doubt that yours is either.
--MarkusQ
We just aren't communicating. I never said I was boycotting anyone. What I said was that some people (for whatever reason) choose to produce products that I don't consume (for whatever reason). That was the point of the diet food reference. It's not that I'd love to buy overpriced proprietary food but choose not to because I have this burning desire to punish the company that makes it for their business practices. I don't buy it because I don't want it at the price, in the form, and under the conditions they are offering it.
The rest of your response follows the same sort of pattern. You seem to be obsessed with controlling the behavior of others, for "the greater good" or whatever, while I am more concerned with not allowing others to control my behavior. Part of my policy for doing that is to engage in cooperative agreements with others, wherein we agree not to try to control each other's behavior.
In other words, I think freedom is important, and don't place much value on playing World of Warcraft or whatever, while you seem to be very concerned with being able to buy new things and play games and so forth, thus see controlling the rights of others and the "perceptions of the marketplace", promoting "the common good," retaliation against oligopolies, etc. as necessary to obtaining your goals. While I can support restricting the rights of some people to protect others in certain situations (e.g., I would restrict the US government's "right" to hold people indefinitely without charges in order to protect those people, and myself, from a potential police state) I just don't see the issue of gaming on bleeding edge graphics cards as being at that level of urgency.
--MarkusQ
I wasn't missing that difference, I was underscoring it to make my point: the internet appears "addicting" because it is a valuable source of information about the world; it differs from many other true addictions (drugs, alcohol, etc.) that are by their very nature disconnected from reality and thus have serious repercussions. Saying people are "addicted to the internet" is like saying they are "addicted to listening to what others are saying to them" or to "paying attention to where they are walking;" while it is in theory possible to become obsessive / compulsive about such things, the desire itself is perfectly rational and thus not (IMHO) an addiction.
Your comment about anorexia brings up a good point: could we say, with equal validity (i.e., in my opinion, none) that people who refuse to go on-line are "addicted to being ignorant" or some such?
--MarkusQ
You seem to have a very different view of the free software movement than I do.
Where you see people "denied access to commodity products with limited alternatives" I see companies locking themselves out of a growing share of the market; they won't get my money, nor the money of most of my friends, until/unless they change their ways. I don't have an intrinsic need to buy their overpriced crap (as evidenced by the fact that they have hefty advertising budgets to woo me, and not the other way around) and don't feel particularly heart broken if I can't. Did you know that there are proprietary foods (for dieters, I gather) that you can only buy if you sign a contract to only eat food that you buy from them, and to eat all of it on the specified schedule? Do you care?
And as for the limited alternatives nonsense, that is so backwards from a free software / open source perspective that I can't even get my head around it. You have more alternatives facing you right now than 99.9% of the people who ever lived, and if you don't like any of them you also have a greater opportunity to create your own alternatives by an even wider margin.
As for the otherwise indifferent masses "blaming Linux" for things why, exactly, do you care? Do you get a nickel every time someone installs Linux? Or did the masses get together and appoint you their Lord Protector while I was busy doing something?
And finally, Linus isn't a "gatekeeper" in any but the most narrow sense; you are free to fork Linux anytime you want, and start your own version with the "no-binaries allowed" patch (just as, if he were to include it in his tree, you would be free to fork and take it right back out). Linus may be a gatekeeper, but since there's no fence on either side of the gate it's mostly a symbolic role.
--MarkusQ
Yes, I realize this.
What I didn't realize, until reading Linus's post, was why he didn't see things this way.
His point, which he made quite clearly (to me at least) is that locking out binary-only drivers falls into the same category of trying to tell other people what they can and can't do with their computers; it would be a clear case of adopting the very tactics to which some people (myself included) object in order to prevent the "bad guys" from doing it. It's a "we have to burn the village in order to save it" strategy, and for that reason he doesn't want to follow it.
Note that he quite clearly states that he isn't going to try to prevent others from locking out binary only drivers from their trees, just that he isn't going to fire the first shot.
I am not sure that I entirely agree with his position, but I understand it much better than I did before, and consequently can see the merit of it where I previously did not.
--MarkusQ
Yes, I find it hard to go without the internet for a few days. In fact, it was just about as bad as going without my eyes for a few days after surgery and, I imagine (though I've never had this happen) going without my ears. Of course, going without my eyes wasn't as bad as it might have been, because I had use of the internet before hand, and was thus able to gather a fair number of useful coping tips from other people who had had the same operation.
The internet is "addicting" in the same way any other sense organ or sense-enhancing tool is addicting--once you are aware that there is a way to find out useful things about the world around you it can be very frustrating to have to live without it. For people who don't get it, I suggest removing all the mirrors from their cars for a few days to see how they like having to twist themselves into knots just to find out what's going on around them.
--MarkusQ
Linus was wrong on one point:
In fact, I had never understood his point until reading that post. As he points out, it clearly is hypocritical to object to the RIAA tactics (which I do) on the one hand and then propose using exactly the same sort of technological barriers to fair use on the other. If people object to binary only drivers, the sollution is for those people to refuse to use them, not for them to try to game the system to prevent other people from using them.
--MarkusQ
Hydrogen and helium atoms are about the same size (both have S1 as their outermost shell); oxygen and nitrogen are about twice as large, give or take a little depending on how you measure (e.g. van der Waals vs. covalent bond length).
--MarkusQ
In art classes they teach students to draw the space around the objects they are trying to depict. It's a useful skill in many areas.
Rather than imagining that there is this atomic transition point that one side or the other must own, look more closely at what happens when changes are put into production, zooming in until you have enough detail that every piece naturally belongs to one team or the other.
Then look at how this would play out in the real world, to find the "frothy" or "tangled" parts (well, IT should do this, then Dev should do that, then IT should do two more things, then it's Dev's turn again). These parts should be sorted out by requiring documentation (or scripting) to flow one way or the other, so that the process can be performed by one group without the direct involvement of the other.
In short, the problem here is the granularity of your question.
--MarkusQ
Hold on just a minute. You are making quite a leap there, while acting as if you were just stating the obvious.
Unless you can do something along the lines of:
...you are just making an unsupported assumption there. You may think that free will doesn't sound like something that could come out of a system under the classical approximation, but that's nothing more than a hunch. There are undoubtedly countless logical consequences of classical physics that no one has worked out yet (and many times more that never will be worked out) so it is a bit premature to claim that something we can't even define isn't among them. (To put this in perspective, radio, quicksand, thunderstorms, slinkys, tubas, and static cling are all classical phenomena; do you really think you could fill in the rest of the list without missing many more than you capture?)
You're way off base on several other points as well (e.g. "instantiation" vs. "simulation" and the long ago exposed "Chinese Room" straw man), but I suspect you are only clinging to them because of your (unfounded) principle worry--that without some sort of magic escape hatch you are at risk of losing your free will to physics. Since this fear is unfounded, I won't bother with the secondary issues here.
--MarkusQ
Thanks for the link; I had not heard any of that. While some of the points are hearsay, the pattern does make it look like the boyfriend should be considered at least as much of a suspect as Reiser.
--MarkusQ
The difference is in how it's delivered. Having a steady flow of melt-water is much nicer for agriculture than occasional flash flooding, even if the later does provide more water per year on average.
--MarkusQ
I'm confused. Are you disputing the existence of hash tables thirty years ago (which would be silly) or that the year 1976 existed at all (which would be slightly sillier)? I suppose that you might be disputing the present existence of people from this long forgotten era, which would be slightly less silly but vastly more insulting. We do in fact exist.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And yes, people really did dress like they show on TV. We thought it was normal then. Don't ask me why.
Quite simply, they are afraid to confront the real job facing them: Iraq.
To quote a recent news article:
But on the bright side:
Thus, our brave leaders wisely decide to address the more urgent matters and leave the problems of foreigners for another day.
--MarkusQ
You seem to be forgetting that that had already been done, up to and including having the information on how to create a fake boarding pass published on a congressman's web site for a year or so prior to his arrest. And yes, there had already be newspaper articles on it, and the TSA was either well aware of it and doing nothing or unaware of it even though it had been reported to them multiple times.
Ok, fine. It was trouble making. But for whom? It didn't lower airport security one iota. Anyone who cared about it already new how to do it. What it did do, though, was make trouble for the fake "security" providers at the TSA, and point out the fact that they are ripping us (the taxpayers) off.
We saw the same sort of misleading argument come up when people started pointing out that US Military personnel were being given ineffective bulletproof vests; somehow the people who were trying to raise awareness of the issue were supposedly "helping the terrorists." Which is just nuts. What they were doing is making things uncomfortable for the crooks selling the defective jackets, and having zero impact on the people wearing them unless and until they could raise enough awareness of the issue to get things changed--in which case their actions would have helped the roops, not hurt them.
--MarkusQ
True, to an extent.
I certainly wouldn't call Kerry "Mr. Science" either.
On the other hand, I doubt that Kerry (with a Republican Congress fighting him every step of the way) could have done nearly as much damage to the Constitution, the budget, or to America in general as Bush managed with the help of the Rubber Stamp Congress. At the very least, when the two parties are split the keep each other from getting too wildly anti-science as part of a general question-everything-the-other-guy-does mentality.
--MarkusQ
Wow. This is exactly the sort of emotionally charged irrational invective that (IMHO) is making it so hard to practice science in the US. Your heated response to two points (the claims that 1) more people voted against Bush than for him, and 2) even fewer would have voted for him had the media been more forthcoming/honest) contains...what? A rhetorical question about the color of the sky, a straw man about symmetry in election fraud, one explicit and two implicit ad hominim attacks, and absolutely nothing about the points you pretend to be responding to.
So let me show you how this whole logical argument thing is done:
The fact that, as you note, such incidents tend to be strongly correlated with Republican candidates winning is possibly a statistical fluke, unless you are wanting to suggest that there has been an organized effort on the part of the Republican party to subvert our democracy.
--MarkusQ
Not if he works in a company that does engineering. People who can hold onto the mindset and keep moving are incredibly valuable to a company that does real engineering--far more valuable that leaf-node managers, though you'd never guess from the pay schedules.
Much more likely, he would be "demoted" by giving him responsibility for one of the issues he was drilling down on (fine, fix it then), which is exactly what he's wanting.
--MarkusQ
You really don't know what it's like to be an engineer, do you?
At least, the examles you give sound like an engineer trying to move into management and not the other way around.
Real engineers ask lots of questions. Managers can often get away with nodding and smiling, or issuing edicts as you suggest, but an engineer (or someone who's thinking like one) won't be satisfied by that at all.
Management is about getting things done the way you want. Engineering is about understanding why you get what you get, and under what circumstance, and how it all interacts.
--MarkusQ
Uh, no they didn't. In both elections, more people voted against him than for him, or at least thought they did. And many of those that voted for him wouldn't have if the media had been more honest with them and not repeatedly worked to cover up his lies.
Blaming the voters for Bush's election is like blaming them for "lacking the will" to win in Iraq.
But the two are not unrelated. If the people were more science/math/tech savvy it would be harder to pull the wool over their eyes. Which means that, at least in some circles, as you suggest, the decline in science is seen as a good thing.
--MarkusQ
It's easy, really. Act like an engineer. Think like an engineer. Constantly. Don't let yourself get sidetracked by manager speak or pper pressure. Especially in meetings.
Whenever you encounter a number look for the error bars, and be sure to include them when you give a number ("I'll be down in five plus or minus three minutes!"). Call out peo9ple for sloppy thinking, find ways to set bounds that rule out unworkable alternatives early, troubleshoot everything.
They'll get the hint real quickly.
--MarkusQ
If you have the right sort of personality, and the right sort of boss, you can get your point across by repeatedly showing how silly the logic is.
For example (I actually used this once):
Me: Would it be better to buy or rent a volcano?
PHB: What?
Me: Would it be more cost effective to buy a volcano, or rent one?
PHB: What are you talking about? Why would we need a volcano in the first place?
Me: Well, we have to plant the coffee someplace, and according to what I recall, it grows well on the sides of volcanoes.
PHB: We don't need to plant coffee in the first place.
Me: But what about our competitive advantage? If we aren't drinking special coffee that's a little better than the...
PHB: Ok, I get your point. Submit the damn patches.
Of course, there were twenty or so intermediate steps, including my arguing that we should refuse to answer a product satisfaction survey from a vendor, because they might use the information to improve their product, and so forth. But since the argument against submitting patches is so weak in the first place it real was a pretty easy sell.
--MarkusQ
Someone else has already pointed out that you don't seem to understand stock splits, so I'll tackle another of your misconceptions:
This is exactly backwards. If I sell N shares representing half the company they are each worth half as much as if the same number of shares represented the whole company.
--MarkusQ
*sigh* I could (and probably should) just answer by giving the same definition I gave to start with, inverted by the application of a little formal logic to provide a grammatical answer to the question as posed: The government should only address problems which can be addressed without throwing out, risking, abandoning, or dismantling something of value except for specific, coherent reasons that aren't part of a flim-flam show.
The bigger problem is that you felt the need to ask the question at all (which suggests that we just aren't communicating).
Suppose I said that "This arson law is about which people should be located and arrested, not about how to find them or capture them" and you said "And these people are?" as if you expected my to pop off a list of arsonists.
Conservatism (and, for that matter, progressivism, at least as practiced in some quarters) provides a framework for narrowing down your choices of which issues are good candidates for political solutions. It does not provide a ready list all made up in advance of the facts; and the people who come to the table with such a list are generally ideologues with no need of a political philosophy since all the answers are already provided by their ideology. With that in mind, I will repeat as clearly as I can what I have said several times on this and related threads: I think you are barking up the wrong tree. You are trying to fight a conservative vs. progressive battle that is at this point in history no more real (or at least no more fundamental) than the taste-great/less-filling tripe the public is spoon fed on American Idol or Survivor or whatever. The real battle is between the bulk of the world and a small but powerful group of people who are willing to do or say anything to get and maintain power over the rest of us, even if it kills us. Granted, there are considerable faction fights within both groups, but the big issue isn't so much what color jersey the bastards wear or what terms they use as they try to lie us into WWIII, but that they are doing it at all. I would dearly love to get back to the point where you and I could argue about the best way to handle street crime, and how best to fund things like the space program, but right now we should probably focus on the heavily armed lunatics that are willing to destroy everything that America (or Islam, or whatever) stands for in order to seize and hold control over the oil that they think we must keep burning until we run out, it kills us, or both.
--MarkusQ
Say what? It would be easier to convince people that an election had been tampered with if they couldn't see that their vote was counted correctly? That some how it's easier to convince people that everything is on the up-and-up if they aren't allowed to confirm that their vote was counted at all?
To be blunt, that makes no sense.
Anyone wanting to launch a FUD campaign could do so under the present system just fine. In fact, it is easier under the present system, due to all the dark corners in which nasty things might be hiding (and who can prover they're not?) than it would be with voter verifiable records.
Uh, yeah. It's more plausible that people are cheating if they show you all the votes and give you (and everyone else) the ability to see that their vote is in there and was counted correctly. 'cause doing things in secret with no records is a much better way to gain the people's trust.
How on earth can you conclude that?!? You're just going to trust Saddam's count? It is just as plausible that almost everyone voted their true feelings and when the results were announced a large percentage of the people were surprised to find that they and their friends were in the 1% minority that voted against Saddam. And then they probably railed privately against their fellow countrymen for failing to stand up and vote him out.
More realistically, to assure there's no need to pressure them, since you can just say the count was whatever you like and everyone has to take your word for it.
--MarkusQ