I think you are probably right. The language and the structure of the GP's ranting reminds of schizophrenia: the introduction of bizarre word constructs (such as man+girl: what does it mean? Something perhaps with pedophile connotations?) and the cognition that seems to be jumping incoherently around without much logic; both are often found in schizophrenia, or it could be mania, I suppose.
It is probably not entirely appropriate to "diagnose" somebody like this, over a long, thin wire, but it fills me with great sadness when I see this kind of thing; we shouldn't bash him - it isn't a nice illness.
Why are we posting nasty things like this with no effort to investigate their veracity?
Because bloggers are not often real journalists, and it is so much easier - and less risky - to sit in a dark corner and pontificate. And of course, social media are even less about journalism and more about idle gossip and rumour mongering. Even Fox News do a better job of investigating their stories, and believe you me, I am no fan of Murdoch's Sewage Pumps.
Trump 2016. The wall will be built. LYING GOOGLE won't change this
Allahu Akhbar!! Oops, sorry, different group of fanatics. In the longer run it doesn't matter, I suspect - American democracy is seriously ill and needs to relaunch itself in a fundamental way; only it is hard to see how that can happen peacefully.
It is interesting to observe the two elections, the EU referendum in UK and the presidential elections in the US; in UK it is mostly fairly cool-headed with at least the Remain side trying to lay out a somewhat coherent, pragmatic argument, and the Leave side responding in kind, although rather more emotionally, I feel. Compare to the US elections, where things are getting ever more hysterical; and the actual election campaign hasn't even started officially yet. I don't know - where's your dignity, if you don't mind my asking?
With a length of at least 10, preferably 20 or more.
I don't think so, for several reasons:
- A password should be hard to guess, but not so hard to remember that you start writing it down or use a password store (or SSO). - Can we really trust a third party random password generator? How well designed is the algorithm? How well protected is the software from attack?
I tend to start with a word in an obscure language that I happen to know reasonably well and mangle the spelling a bit - like if you start with a word in Her Majesty's English, translate it into a regional dialect, and then "chenge ther spaling" to something that is more phonetic in your opinion. There are many languages, if you are keen on that sort of thing: Middle English, Sumerian, Inuit, Mayan, Swahili,... It will take a while before the average cracker gets around to collecting dictionaries to cover them all. And one could start moving into the further reaches of Unicode as well. The point of this exercise is to avoid having to try to remember a string of meaningless characters, that difficult to type and impossible to pronounce, while being difficult to guess.
Does the author of this posting not realise that "UNIX" isn't the same as bash or whatever you use for you login shell? Anyway, in UNIX (incl. Linux), you can use anything as a login shell, including less productive commands like "/sbin/shutdown -r" and "/usr/games/sl". This is not unique to UNIX, BTW - I once worked with an IBM product called AS, which had a fascinating command that could log you out and then log in as a different user; well, I say different - this included the same user, of course. You could also specify this command as you login shell, and if you didn't use a password, you would then have a loop that could only be stopped by atking the whole of AS down.
This reminds of a completely irrelevant joke: A man comes into a pub carrying a goose. The publican asks "Does it honk?" - "No", says the man, "- he can hold his drink".
I'm afraid that "We visually organize your email and cloud-based content for ultra fast access. It's visual storytelling with any type of content." was perfectly clear to me.
I think I've spent too much time absorbing technical buzzwords.
Not techinal buzzwords - this is sales-speak. It is also typical of the sort of common misunderstanding of what is actually going to add value to modern life. In an age with constant information overload, intrusive graphics everywhere and "content" without actual content, do we really need more "visual" delivered even faster? I tend more and more to turn off my connectivity when I don't have a specific purpose to get online, I filter out most graphical content and so on. I'm not alone either. I think, what really adds value to my life is something that can filter out most of the shitstorm, but let through the actual information - it's called adblockers.
Theories are, at best, models of reality - that is something people keep forgetting. A model can never represent the whole truth about what reality is - I think we can probably even prove that with some of Goedel's theorems (I say probably, it is still not uncontroversial, what his results actually tell us). The best of our theories are useful, because they give us a practical tool for making calculations and predictions; even QM and GR are only models - when we say "space is curved", it means that our calculations are much easier to handle and understand in that model; it is quite likely that we could make a workable theory if we decided that space must be Euclidean - but the physics would look much weirder and much, much messier as a result. The same goes for quantum mechanics. Models are only tools that simplify our understanding of reality.
This is the background on which we need to see the holographic models and the models that interpret reality as computer simulations: they are proposing new ways of looking at the same reality, in the hope that it may simplify certain aspects of our observations. And, crucially, we know from the start that they are not accurate - reality stretches far beyond any model we know of or can imagine yet. And, embarrassingly, there are always people around the fringes of any theory, who will start reading Gods and Intentions into anything that is new and sounds mysterious enough. Quantum mechanics used to be riddled with it, and as far as I know, the same happened when electro-magnetic theory was first developed; there are simply people around, who are determined to be idiots, no matter what.
PTSD from looking at images on the screen of a computer? Seriously??
Yes, seroiusly. PTSD does not arise from the graveness of the danger you were in, but from the feeling of complete loss of control and the prolonged state of emotional stress you are subjected to, so it is quite credible that you can get PTSD from something that most people would not be affected by. Are people too sensitive, if they are affected that much? Perhaps - but what would you do? Lock them up just so you don't feel that too much consideration is given to them? It doesn't cost most people a lot to show a bit of consideration, so why make a fuss about it? If you really want to find this kind of things, you can do so with relatively little effort, even if they were somewhat restricted in availability.
exactly. who gets to decide what hate speech is real and what is imagined? will facts equal hate speech??? will not believing in some political views equal hate speech???
Ultimately, the courts, one would imagine. Any one who has taken an interest in court cases, even in passing, will know that the higher courts do examine the evidence in a great deal of detail before reaching a decision, so I don't think this is something that will lead to summary executions for having the wrong thoughts on a bad day. And anyway - these huge Internet companies are still private companies; they are entitled to set the rules for the conduct of their users - if they wish, they could decide to ban people for declaring their undying love for latex clothing, or some other silly things. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.
Office in particular is also something that legacy users like to hold onto.
This is something I really can not understand. Office is not a bad set of applications, but I - a Linux user who never uses Windows - have to help friends and family with Office. Sometimes I manage to find the solution to something that is fairly obvious in LibreOffice, but hard to figure out in Office, but it really shouldn't be necessary. There just seems to be so many things in Word in particular, that work in a surprising way. Like that horizontal line you can't simply get rid of - I still have to search online to figure out what is going on. It ought to have been obvious even to the non-professional user.
Police: Can you give us your location data for all your users? Webmaster: Sure. Court: Valid information sharing...
On the other hand - if the police have to get a warrant every time, then so would the emergency services. Personally, I wouldn't to wade through red tape if I was in a serious accident and didn't know the location; or if I was calling for help while hiding from an ongoing attack. I'd just want them to get on with finding me ASAP.
I've seen absolutely horrible things on the internet and I don't have PTSD.
People are different, and one of the great achievements of modern society is that we have developed a culture that shows some level of consideration to even the weakest members of society. And to be fair - there is always a possibility that it isn't the more sensitive that are too sensitive, but the less sensitive that are simply too callous. And in practical terms, if you really enjoy watching graphical portrayals of cruelty, then you will be able to find it, even if it isn't readily available, whereas if you don't, and it is everywhere, then your only option would be to stay away from most of the web; the burden, if you want to avoid something that is everywhere is vastly bigger than the burden of having to find something that isn't readily available.
I've encountered Cobol systems that offload accounting calls
What you are saying is that COBOL programs do what all other programs do: make calls into an external API. Which has little to do with what Isaid: that the COBOL language is a very useful tool for doing the sort of things that you need for accounting etc. IOW, if you start from scratch, choosing COBOL for this kind of project is actually a very sensible choice. The very limitations in COBOL, which make it all but impossible to do advanced stuff (even including floating point calculations), also make the language very reliable and easy to use for what it was designed for. It may be about as sexy as a battered, white van, but sometimes you need a battered, white van; after all, you probably wouldn't load your Ferrari with horse manure. Well, each to his own, I suppose, but I wouldn't.
Indeed. I'm rather confused by the editorial commentary. To put it in terms of the summary regarding a question of color, imagine if someone asked the question, "What color is the sky?" Conjecture: The sky is blue.
Proof? Point an instrument at the sky and measure the light coming from it. Looking at the spectrum of frequencies coming from the sky, it falls into a range of colors that humans would generally associate with "blue."
That's it -- you've "proved" what the color of the sky is, i.e., "blue."
Which illustrates the naive idea of what a proof is: a bit confused. For one thing, mathematical proof does not work this way - what comes closest, conceptually, is a physical experiment, but it fails, in the sense that the purpose of an experiment in empirical science is not to prove something; at best you can hope to disprove, or if you fail convincingly in doing that, you can confirm you theory. But a proof it aint. Only mathemetics can provide positive proof of anything, and only because it restricts itself to purely logical considerations of a set of axioms. Experiments have no place in mathematical proofs; at best you can try to calculate some things a number of times and try to discover what may be a likely pattern, and then you can try to establish a real proof.
Although it is very impressive to have worked through a mind-bogglingly huge dataset to determine the truth of a conjecture, it is strangely unsatisfactory; we didn't really learn anything new, we didn't find a new, interesting logical connection, we just worked out all the possible combinations and checked to see that they all had the right format.
If you have problem with the registry how do you cope with the file system with all its folders?
The problem with the registry isn't that it is hard to navigate a hierarchical database, but the way it is being used, apparently to deliberately obfuscate the way applications are configured. As a result, it has become an obscenely hideous structure - compare this to the traditional UNIX style of configuration, in simple text files requiring just a text editor and a manual telling you how to do (another thing that is very often absent in Windows). And even if the manual doesn't exist, you can often make reasonable guesses, because it is in clear text. For me it is this, more than anything else, that makes Windows so profoundly unattractive - I cannot think of any good reason not to follow the UNIX method; I can think of bad reasons, like wanting to make the system less easy for the user to control, but no good ones.
I don't understand why Hawking's opinions about anything outside of physics is given publicity. Although one of the most brilliant minds of our time, in his field, he's not a politician nor a businessman.
Along the same line of thought, one could ask why somebody like you, who presumably isn't an expert in political science, an attorney or a professional politician, is given space in this forum; the answer, of course, is that politics is literally for everybody - that is what democracy is about. Hawking has proven rather convincingly that he is capable of thinking coherently and clearly, and he is widely admired for his achievements - a lot of people think his opinion matters, certainly a lot more than the opinion of some Hollywood actor or a CEO, whose only achievement was to line his own pocket.
As for trump - are you saying that he isn't a demagogue that appeals to the lowest common denominator? He certainly has the look and feel of a demagogue: he issues an outrageous statement - if it evokes too much criticism, he just changes his "opinion", if it seems popular, he keeps it. If he was a man of real principles, there would most likely be several things that he kept saying despite it being not popular, and there would be thing he wouldn't say, even if it might please his followers. His "policies" so far seem to consist of little more than headline grabbing -"build a wall on the Mexican border", "deport all illegal immigrants", "get along with Putin", "speak tough to the Chinese", "make America great again"; but how? We all know - as does he - that the first two simply can't be done. If you try to get along with Putin, then he will simply rob you blind and make you thank him for it - he is a very clever and devious man, way out of Trump's league. If you "talk tough to the Chinese", you will get a polite smile, and then you will be put on ice; they can hold their breath much longer than the States. In the end, how does any of that amount to something that makes America great?
Anyway, America is already great in so many ways, economically, militarily, culturally, technologically, scientifically - but the greatest thing about America is the ordinary people, who have built the nation up through the immense hardship of your pioneer ancestors - all of whom were immigrants, incidentally. That enormous diversity is probably your greatest strength: one culture that emerged from all the world's cultures. The reason you are feeling down at the moment isn't that America is no longer great, it is because a certain, small group has stolen your wealth and your dignity and now say "It was THEM that did it" - THEM being immigrants, the Chinese, whatever. The truth is that they are not making America greater, they are selling your greatness behind your backs. And Trump is one of them.
But nobody is even thinking of converting the 40000-and-some COBOL programs off the mainframe, not cost-effective at all.
And more to the point, using any other language would not add any value. COBOL may look incredibly clunky and weirdly underpowered, but it has all the functionality you need for moving accountacy-type data around, and none of the temptations of too many other languages to go into interesting constructions that you may not quite understand the full consequences of. COBOL may not be all-powerful, but it is the right tool for the job.
Parents should teach their children how to be good members of society, and it is not only not the place of schools to teach that, but it is explicitly overstepping their role to assume they have the right to teach children social values. Schools are for teaching facts and how to learn, not to shape hearts and minds (although they certainly think thats their job these days)..
I profoundly disagree with that - social values are SOCIAL, ie they don't exist in a vacuum, but are part of the context in which we live. How will you go about teaching children only 'the facts'? It is only in very narrowly focused subjects that we even know simply the objective facts - even mathematics and physics have to be interpreted into a social context: numbers are not just numbers, but "how many apples can you buy for $10, if one apple costs $.45?" and so on. And the children will inevitably ask their teachers about things that by your definition should only be answered by their parents - should they stonewall them? Should they keep saying "Sorry, I am not authorised to answer that question", and "I can't comfort you for the loss of you grandmother, because that is not part of my remit"? And of course, a very large part of what we teach our children, is not communicated verbally, but through our behaviour - if you look uncomfortable when asked about something, then you teach the child that this subject is somehow taboo, and so on. Parents have responsibility for their children, but it is the community as a whole that teaches them, even if the parents have the greatest say in the formative years. And so much of that gets thrown out when they become teenagers.
Teaching social values - how to fit into society as you grow up, how to think for yourself, how to ask questions about everything - is very much at the heart of teaching.
A mildly comical story: The word "slut" - spelled exactly like that - means "the end" or "finished" in Danish. It became a bit embarassing once, in the 60es, I think, when they Danish Film Institute produced an educational documentary about life in Greenland in the modern world. It ended with a scene of a young, Greenlandish woman walking away from the camera and and the narrator asking "What does the future hold for her?2 - followed, as in all Danish films, by the word "SLUT". This was distributed to several countries, of course, what else?
Jay Rosen, media critic and a professor of journalism at New York University, said: Trying to kill a publication you don't like by funding lawsuits against them isn't very libertarian, is it?
Freedom with a capital 'F' and a loud voice so often means only "my freedom" - especially when you are rich and feel entitled to take what you want. It is so very rare that it actually means "I will defend you freedom, even if it costs me".
This is much more common than one would think - I have worked in two major institutions where they used very early computers. One was the GIER - a Danish built, 2nd generation computer with no OS. We would in essence boot with the program we wanted to run from a paper tape - like the Algol compiler, which would compile a program that we'd then boot up afterwards. The main problem was that the capacitors tended to dry out every 5 - 10 years. Things have changed since then:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There is something seriously wrong with you
I think you are probably right. The language and the structure of the GP's ranting reminds of schizophrenia: the introduction of bizarre word constructs (such as man+girl: what does it mean? Something perhaps with pedophile connotations?) and the cognition that seems to be jumping incoherently around without much logic; both are often found in schizophrenia, or it could be mania, I suppose.
It is probably not entirely appropriate to "diagnose" somebody like this, over a long, thin wire, but it fills me with great sadness when I see this kind of thing; we shouldn't bash him - it isn't a nice illness.
Why are we posting nasty things like this with no effort to investigate their veracity?
Because bloggers are not often real journalists, and it is so much easier - and less risky - to sit in a dark corner and pontificate. And of course, social media are even less about journalism and more about idle gossip and rumour mongering. Even Fox News do a better job of investigating their stories, and believe you me, I am no fan of Murdoch's Sewage Pumps.
Trump 2016. The wall will be built. LYING GOOGLE won't change this
Allahu Akhbar!! Oops, sorry, different group of fanatics. In the longer run it doesn't matter, I suspect - American democracy is seriously ill and needs to relaunch itself in a fundamental way; only it is hard to see how that can happen peacefully.
It is interesting to observe the two elections, the EU referendum in UK and the presidential elections in the US; in UK it is mostly fairly cool-headed with at least the Remain side trying to lay out a somewhat coherent, pragmatic argument, and the Leave side responding in kind, although rather more emotionally, I feel. Compare to the US elections, where things are getting ever more hysterical; and the actual election campaign hasn't even started officially yet. I don't know - where's your dignity, if you don't mind my asking?
The trick is to get hotels on some of the more expensive addresses. Unfortunately they are all occupied by big property tychoons.
It runs on clockwork, of course, and comes with hundreds of little, useful tools, such as knife blades, saws etc, all made to the highest standards.
https://www.random.org/passwor...
With a length of at least 10, preferably 20 or more.
I don't think so, for several reasons:
- A password should be hard to guess, but not so hard to remember that you start writing it down or use a password store (or SSO).
- Can we really trust a third party random password generator? How well designed is the algorithm? How well protected is the software from attack?
I tend to start with a word in an obscure language that I happen to know reasonably well and mangle the spelling a bit - like if you start with a word in Her Majesty's English, translate it into a regional dialect, and then "chenge ther spaling" to something that is more phonetic in your opinion. There are many languages, if you are keen on that sort of thing: Middle English, Sumerian, Inuit, Mayan, Swahili, ... It will take a while before the average cracker gets around to collecting dictionaries to cover them all. And one could start moving into the further reaches of Unicode as well. The point of this exercise is to avoid having to try to remember a string of meaningless characters, that difficult to type and impossible to pronounce, while being difficult to guess.
Does the author of this posting not realise that "UNIX" isn't the same as bash or whatever you use for you login shell? Anyway, in UNIX (incl. Linux), you can use anything as a login shell, including less productive commands like "/sbin/shutdown -r" and "/usr/games/sl". This is not unique to UNIX, BTW - I once worked with an IBM product called AS, which had a fascinating command that could log you out and then log in as a different user; well, I say different - this included the same user, of course. You could also specify this command as you login shell, and if you didn't use a password, you would then have a loop that could only be stopped by atking the whole of AS down.
Not so much drunk as the effects of being too drunk. Our culture is blessed with veritbale multitude of expressions for vomiting.
This reminds of a completely irrelevant joke: A man comes into a pub carrying a goose. The publican asks "Does it honk?" - "No", says the man, "- he can hold his drink".
I'm afraid that "We visually organize your email and cloud-based content for ultra fast access. It's visual storytelling with any type of content." was perfectly clear to me.
I think I've spent too much time absorbing technical buzzwords.
Not techinal buzzwords - this is sales-speak. It is also typical of the sort of common misunderstanding of what is actually going to add value to modern life. In an age with constant information overload, intrusive graphics everywhere and "content" without actual content, do we really need more "visual" delivered even faster? I tend more and more to turn off my connectivity when I don't have a specific purpose to get online, I filter out most graphical content and so on. I'm not alone either. I think, what really adds value to my life is something that can filter out most of the shitstorm, but let through the actual information - it's called adblockers.
Theories are, at best, models of reality - that is something people keep forgetting. A model can never represent the whole truth about what reality is - I think we can probably even prove that with some of Goedel's theorems (I say probably, it is still not uncontroversial, what his results actually tell us). The best of our theories are useful, because they give us a practical tool for making calculations and predictions; even QM and GR are only models - when we say "space is curved", it means that our calculations are much easier to handle and understand in that model; it is quite likely that we could make a workable theory if we decided that space must be Euclidean - but the physics would look much weirder and much, much messier as a result. The same goes for quantum mechanics. Models are only tools that simplify our understanding of reality.
This is the background on which we need to see the holographic models and the models that interpret reality as computer simulations: they are proposing new ways of looking at the same reality, in the hope that it may simplify certain aspects of our observations. And, crucially, we know from the start that they are not accurate - reality stretches far beyond any model we know of or can imagine yet. And, embarrassingly, there are always people around the fringes of any theory, who will start reading Gods and Intentions into anything that is new and sounds mysterious enough. Quantum mechanics used to be riddled with it, and as far as I know, the same happened when electro-magnetic theory was first developed; there are simply people around, who are determined to be idiots, no matter what.
PTSD from looking at images on the screen of a computer? Seriously??
Yes, seroiusly. PTSD does not arise from the graveness of the danger you were in, but from the feeling of complete loss of control and the prolonged state of emotional stress you are subjected to, so it is quite credible that you can get PTSD from something that most people would not be affected by. Are people too sensitive, if they are affected that much? Perhaps - but what would you do? Lock them up just so you don't feel that too much consideration is given to them? It doesn't cost most people a lot to show a bit of consideration, so why make a fuss about it? If you really want to find this kind of things, you can do so with relatively little effort, even if they were somewhat restricted in availability.
exactly. who gets to decide what hate speech is real and what is imagined? will facts equal hate speech??? will not believing in some political views equal hate speech???
Ultimately, the courts, one would imagine. Any one who has taken an interest in court cases, even in passing, will know that the higher courts do examine the evidence in a great deal of detail before reaching a decision, so I don't think this is something that will lead to summary executions for having the wrong thoughts on a bad day. And anyway - these huge Internet companies are still private companies; they are entitled to set the rules for the conduct of their users - if they wish, they could decide to ban people for declaring their undying love for latex clothing, or some other silly things. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.
Office in particular is also something that legacy users like to hold onto.
This is something I really can not understand. Office is not a bad set of applications, but I - a Linux user who never uses Windows - have to help friends and family with Office. Sometimes I manage to find the solution to something that is fairly obvious in LibreOffice, but hard to figure out in Office, but it really shouldn't be necessary. There just seems to be so many things in Word in particular, that work in a surprising way. Like that horizontal line you can't simply get rid of - I still have to search online to figure out what is going on. It ought to have been obvious even to the non-professional user.
Police: Can you give us your location data for all your users?
Webmaster: Sure.
Court: Valid information sharing...
On the other hand - if the police have to get a warrant every time, then so would the emergency services. Personally, I wouldn't to wade through red tape if I was in a serious accident and didn't know the location; or if I was calling for help while hiding from an ongoing attack. I'd just want them to get on with finding me ASAP.
I've seen absolutely horrible things on the internet and I don't have PTSD.
People are different, and one of the great achievements of modern society is that we have developed a culture that shows some level of consideration to even the weakest members of society. And to be fair - there is always a possibility that it isn't the more sensitive that are too sensitive, but the less sensitive that are simply too callous. And in practical terms, if you really enjoy watching graphical portrayals of cruelty, then you will be able to find it, even if it isn't readily available, whereas if you don't, and it is everywhere, then your only option would be to stay away from most of the web; the burden, if you want to avoid something that is everywhere is vastly bigger than the burden of having to find something that isn't readily available.
I've encountered Cobol systems that offload accounting calls
What you are saying is that COBOL programs do what all other programs do: make calls into an external API. Which has little to do with what Isaid: that the COBOL language is a very useful tool for doing the sort of things that you need for accounting etc. IOW, if you start from scratch, choosing COBOL for this kind of project is actually a very sensible choice. The very limitations in COBOL, which make it all but impossible to do advanced stuff (even including floating point calculations), also make the language very reliable and easy to use for what it was designed for. It may be about as sexy as a battered, white van, but sometimes you need a battered, white van; after all, you probably wouldn't load your Ferrari with horse manure. Well, each to his own, I suppose, but I wouldn't.
Indeed. I'm rather confused by the editorial commentary. To put it in terms of the summary regarding a question of color, imagine if someone asked the question, "What color is the sky?" Conjecture: The sky is blue.
Proof? Point an instrument at the sky and measure the light coming from it. Looking at the spectrum of frequencies coming from the sky, it falls into a range of colors that humans would generally associate with "blue."
That's it -- you've "proved" what the color of the sky is, i.e., "blue."
Which illustrates the naive idea of what a proof is: a bit confused. For one thing, mathematical proof does not work this way - what comes closest, conceptually, is a physical experiment, but it fails, in the sense that the purpose of an experiment in empirical science is not to prove something; at best you can hope to disprove, or if you fail convincingly in doing that, you can confirm you theory. But a proof it aint. Only mathemetics can provide positive proof of anything, and only because it restricts itself to purely logical considerations of a set of axioms. Experiments have no place in mathematical proofs; at best you can try to calculate some things a number of times and try to discover what may be a likely pattern, and then you can try to establish a real proof.
Although it is very impressive to have worked through a mind-bogglingly huge dataset to determine the truth of a conjecture, it is strangely unsatisfactory; we didn't really learn anything new, we didn't find a new, interesting logical connection, we just worked out all the possible combinations and checked to see that they all had the right format.
If you have problem with the registry how do you cope with the file system with all its folders?
The problem with the registry isn't that it is hard to navigate a hierarchical database, but the way it is being used, apparently to deliberately obfuscate the way applications are configured. As a result, it has become an obscenely hideous structure - compare this to the traditional UNIX style of configuration, in simple text files requiring just a text editor and a manual telling you how to do (another thing that is very often absent in Windows). And even if the manual doesn't exist, you can often make reasonable guesses, because it is in clear text. For me it is this, more than anything else, that makes Windows so profoundly unattractive - I cannot think of any good reason not to follow the UNIX method; I can think of bad reasons, like wanting to make the system less easy for the user to control, but no good ones.
I don't understand why Hawking's opinions about anything outside of physics is given publicity. Although one of the most brilliant minds of our time, in his field, he's not a politician nor a businessman.
Along the same line of thought, one could ask why somebody like you, who presumably isn't an expert in political science, an attorney or a professional politician, is given space in this forum; the answer, of course, is that politics is literally for everybody - that is what democracy is about. Hawking has proven rather convincingly that he is capable of thinking coherently and clearly, and he is widely admired for his achievements - a lot of people think his opinion matters, certainly a lot more than the opinion of some Hollywood actor or a CEO, whose only achievement was to line his own pocket.
As for trump - are you saying that he isn't a demagogue that appeals to the lowest common denominator? He certainly has the look and feel of a demagogue: he issues an outrageous statement - if it evokes too much criticism, he just changes his "opinion", if it seems popular, he keeps it. If he was a man of real principles, there would most likely be several things that he kept saying despite it being not popular, and there would be thing he wouldn't say, even if it might please his followers. His "policies" so far seem to consist of little more than headline grabbing -"build a wall on the Mexican border", "deport all illegal immigrants", "get along with Putin", "speak tough to the Chinese", "make America great again"; but how? We all know - as does he - that the first two simply can't be done. If you try to get along with Putin, then he will simply rob you blind and make you thank him for it - he is a very clever and devious man, way out of Trump's league. If you "talk tough to the Chinese", you will get a polite smile, and then you will be put on ice; they can hold their breath much longer than the States. In the end, how does any of that amount to something that makes America great?
Anyway, America is already great in so many ways, economically, militarily, culturally, technologically, scientifically - but the greatest thing about America is the ordinary people, who have built the nation up through the immense hardship of your pioneer ancestors - all of whom were immigrants, incidentally. That enormous diversity is probably your greatest strength: one culture that emerged from all the world's cultures. The reason you are feeling down at the moment isn't that America is no longer great, it is because a certain, small group has stolen your wealth and your dignity and now say "It was THEM that did it" - THEM being immigrants, the Chinese, whatever. The truth is that they are not making America greater, they are selling your greatness behind your backs. And Trump is one of them.
But nobody is even thinking of converting the 40000-and-some COBOL programs off the mainframe, not cost-effective at all.
And more to the point, using any other language would not add any value. COBOL may look incredibly clunky and weirdly underpowered, but it has all the functionality you need for moving accountacy-type data around, and none of the temptations of too many other languages to go into interesting constructions that you may not quite understand the full consequences of. COBOL may not be all-powerful, but it is the right tool for the job.
Parents should teach their children how to be good members of society, and it is not only not the place of schools to teach that, but it is explicitly overstepping their role to assume they have the right to teach children social values. Schools are for teaching facts and how to learn, not to shape hearts and minds (although they certainly think thats their job these days)..
I profoundly disagree with that - social values are SOCIAL, ie they don't exist in a vacuum, but are part of the context in which we live. How will you go about teaching children only 'the facts'? It is only in very narrowly focused subjects that we even know simply the objective facts - even mathematics and physics have to be interpreted into a social context: numbers are not just numbers, but "how many apples can you buy for $10, if one apple costs $.45?" and so on. And the children will inevitably ask their teachers about things that by your definition should only be answered by their parents - should they stonewall them? Should they keep saying "Sorry, I am not authorised to answer that question", and "I can't comfort you for the loss of you grandmother, because that is not part of my remit"? And of course, a very large part of what we teach our children, is not communicated verbally, but through our behaviour - if you look uncomfortable when asked about something, then you teach the child that this subject is somehow taboo, and so on. Parents have responsibility for their children, but it is the community as a whole that teaches them, even if the parents have the greatest say in the formative years. And so much of that gets thrown out when they become teenagers.
Teaching social values - how to fit into society as you grow up, how to think for yourself, how to ask questions about everything - is very much at the heart of teaching.
...number of uses of "slut" and "whore"...
A mildly comical story: The word "slut" - spelled exactly like that - means "the end" or "finished" in Danish. It became a bit embarassing once, in the 60es, I think, when they Danish Film Institute produced an educational documentary about life in Greenland in the modern world. It ended with a scene of a young, Greenlandish woman walking away from the camera and and the narrator asking "What does the future hold for her?2 - followed, as in all Danish films, by the word "SLUT". This was distributed to several countries, of course, what else?
Jay Rosen, media critic and a professor of journalism at New York University, said: Trying to kill a publication you don't like by funding lawsuits against them isn't very libertarian, is it?
Freedom with a capital 'F' and a loud voice so often means only "my freedom" - especially when you are rich and feel entitled to take what you want. It is so very rare that it actually means "I will defend you freedom, even if it costs me".
This is much more common than one would think - I have worked in two major institutions where they used very early computers. One was the GIER - a Danish built, 2nd generation computer with no OS. We would in essence boot with the program we wanted to run from a paper tape - like the Algol compiler, which would compile a program that we'd then boot up afterwards. The main problem was that the capacitors tended to dry out every 5 - 10 years. Things have changed since then :-)