What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?
My workplace: about 55 I think.
I don't have the impression that they have difficulty accepting new technology - after all, we are producing bleeding edge technology ourselves - but with 25+ years under the belt, you really have seen it all before and mostly been unimpressed.
As for myself - my son is about your age, and he is just like you (and so was I once); that's good, too. But there are reasons why us old-timers have returned to the command line and use things like make directly. I used to be in love with Windows back when it was version 2; I lived and breathed DOS and BIOS. I have programmed for Windows 2, 3, NT,... as well as OS/2, GNOME and KDE. I write Java EE applications and I even enjoy some of the music my son likes. So I don't think I am particularly reactionary - but I don't fall on my nose in worship as soon as I see yet another 'new' gimmick, 'cause I have seen it before, and it turned out to be crap. Trust me, you'll get there yourself.
I think the main difference is likely to be that sociological students are more used to questioning fundamental assumptions. I suppose this it because hard logic is a lot less useful when a large proportion of your reasoning is based intuition. So be prepared to explain just about anything you consider "obvious", and to having your pedagogical skills tested to the limit.
I myself came to mathematics at university as an outsider; I found that my peers would simply accept most of what the teachers said, but I had a hard time adjusting to many of the viewpoints. Another thing I found difficult was spotting what it was I was supposed to learn - in the first years I would work hard on applying the major theorems to all exercises, and it was not until after my bachelor that one of my toturs exclaimed, with some exasperation: "Why don't you use the techniques that you have been shown in the proofs, like you are supposed to!?" - So the second thing you will need to do is, point out explicitly what you expect your students to learn.
I can sympathise with your sentiment, but I think you base your views on the wrong things.
First of all, I don't think pornograpy is the reason why children learn some sick ideas about how sex, relationships and the world in general works - we are all immersed in rubbish culture from our TVs, advertising etc etc.
Secondly, pornography is only superficially related to sex. It has always struck me how unsexy porn is; with it's focus on unnaturally perfect, hairless bodies, and the complete lack of intellectual or emotional appeal, this is perhaps not all that surprising. You can say, in a way, that pornography is actually quite prudish.
I have never tried to stop my children from accessing pornography. What I have done, though, is to discuss the mater openly and without trying to impose my views - after all, I might be wrong - and instead talked about things. Funny enough, their reaction to pornography has always been one of revulsion. I think this is related to what is called the Uncanny Valley (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) - porn looks almost, but not quite, like the real thing, and therefore feels creepy.
What goes well together is very much a cultural thing, as I think anybody who travels will know. Personally, I've had boiled sweets with garlic or durian flavour in Thailand; my Chinese wife tends to combine foods in surprising ways too - like apple pie with baked beans or cakes with a fruit and chicken filling. Or take this new, stomach churning trend where you get chocolate sauce with meat (shudder).
I guess if you are open minded enough, most things can go well together. And if you are pregnant, well.... let's say no more, but I knew one lady who had a craving for fishcakes and blue cheese (with nothing else).
Isn't it just nice when our allies decide to send this kind of shit out on the network where it risks going on to wreak havoc indiscriminately? And for what - to satisfy cravings of a bunch of paranoid Mossad and CIA officers?
There is, believe it or not, another way - it consists in treating your employees as real people, with fairness, respect, dignity and honour. The fact is, you basically get what you ask for; if your whole attitude is that your coworkers are criminals, then for the most part that is exactly what they will choose to be.
I know this from personal experience - at one point I felt ostracised and treated with suspicion and contempt; and I wouldn't have hesitated with stripping the company of all valuables if I had got the chance. Then we got a new manager, who gave a fair chance to prove myself - and now I wouldn't dream of betraying the trust of my workplace. Of course, the problem is finding a manager who has the integrity and the guts.
Trust me, malaria is not a neglected problem. It might surprise you to hear that it is a difficult problem to fix.
It isn't now. It wasn't when it affected us directly. But there was a number of years when it was neglected, not because DDT and draining went out of fashion, but because pharmaceuticals didn't think it would give them a worthwhile return on investment.
I know perfectly well that it isn't easy to treat, but it is worth noting that since Mr Gates started putting his weight behind it, significant progress has been made; this could have happened much sooner, I think.
Now, why don't you come up with a better plan?
OK, here it is: nationalise the pharma industry. People's lives and health shouldn't be dictated by corporate greed.
Well, first of all, this is intended to be controversial, thus has to be taken with a grain or two of salt. I wanted to provoke people to try to think before automatically talking about "ethical", because I feel too many don't.
But to answer your question - is it necessarily always ethical to save lives, no matter the price? We know what the logical consequence is going to be, if we keep crowding the planet more and more: population crash at some point; and the populations grow even in the industrialised nations, where we actually have the means to do something about it. We can't let people die, because it is obviously unethical; and we can't stop people having children by force, because it would impinge on their personal freedom, which is unethical. And so on.
Put this way, as far as I can see, if we are ethical on the small scale and in the short term, we are going to kill un-counted billions at some point in the future; which to me seems more unethical. We choose to be "ethical" the easy way.
I don't have the answer to these issues, but if we simply put off thinking about them, we will never find an answer either.
Program development is one of those disciplines where experience really is significant, and where you can, if you believe in yourself, go on and on, careerwise.
I speak from personal experience: I spent my first many years as a so-so developer, then about 7 years more as UNIX system manager; all good, clever stuff. But it is only recently, after I turned 54, that my career is beginning to take off, both in terms of position and technically.
The thing is, when you have that much experience, you can speak with authority about things. I can tell managers exactly why relying on a Windows domain and a half-witted MSCE is not the best way to ensure the stability of your IT infrastructure. And no matter how many questions they think up, I have experience that allows me to give a thoughtful answer.
Technically, I remember how it was quite a lot of effort to learn the basic - BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++,... and of course Oracl, DB2, and so on and so... However, I have in recent few months actually managed to learn, not just Java, but Java EE, and those who know what that entails will no doubt be impressed - it is not so much that each element in Java EE is hard, more that there are so many, each with their own peculiarities.
Now, what was the point of this display immodesty? That all us oldies should take heart; we really are a lot better than all those young 'uns, and we are able to prove it. Plus, one of the previous posters mentioned that hey didn't have as much energy as before - I actually find that while I don't have the energy to jump and skip as I used to, I can certainly put in far longer hours than in my younger time. For one thing, I don't have young kids to worry about - my time is all mine. You don't need to sprint forward all night, a steady pace will do.
May I be controversial and point out that saving lives on an overpopulated planet may in itself not be ethical?
No, of course I don't think we should let people just die; and I think it is possible to perform animal experiments in an ethical way. But I think we need a major rethinking and refocusing of our perspectives. Things like religiously based notions about "the sanctity of life" and the perhaps equally religious notion of "the sanctity of the profit margin" are poor guidelines for any research, and the pharmaceuticals spend a huge proportion of their research on relatively inconsequential problems as a consequence. That is why they have neglected really serious problems like malaria, and instead like to concentrate on chronic diseases. The thing about eg malaria is that 1) those affected are poor, and 2) if you cure it, you make no more money. Chronic patients, on the other hand, will keep paying all of their, hopefully, long lives.
It strikes me that Intelligent Design is compatible with Natural Selection.
Not really. Yes, the idea that there could be "somebody out there" who had started it all off is not in itself in contradiction with the theory of evolution; however, ID springs from a certain class of religious belief, which is in opposition to the whole premise for scientific thought. In science one seeks to abstain from making any pronouncements that are not based on measurable, reproducible evidence, whereas in the religioun underlying ID, you make a flying leap into the unknown and decide that "this is what it is", and then you start fitting the evidence to the conclusion.
As a scientist you are expected to be willing to give up your theory in the face of compelling evidence; as a believer in ID that is not an option as far as I can see. Put another way: It is possible that you can convince a scientist that God exists (if you evidence is strong enough, but you can't convince the believer that his God doesn't exist, no matter what the evidence. And that is why the two are incompatible.
Your insights are interesting, but I think perhaps you are needlessly scathing in your criticism. I don't actually see an opposition between what you are saying and the idea that there is a link between genius and madness.
Intelligence - even extemely high intelligence - in itself is no guarantee that a person is a genius; if you lack creativity, most likely your intelligence just lies idle or is used to gain enormous insight into something extremely limited in scope. To me intelligence is merely "the accountant of the soul"; that might also go some way towards explaining the negative correlation between intelligence and the major psychiatric disorders: if you have enormous creativity, but not enough intelligence, you become schizophrenic because your intelligence in overwhelmed. If your intelligence is sufficiently strong, you become a genius. Thus, creativity correlates to "madness"; and also brings "madness" close to "genius".
Being a genius is not equivalent with being higly intelligent; intelligence is only one part of the equation. Creativity (or imagination, as Einstein put it) is much more important - the importance of intelligence comes when making sense of your ideas, but without the ideas in the first place, intelligence is merely an accountant; as illustrated by many, highly intelligent people with autism - when you are hugely intelligent, but have no flow of creativity, you tend to concentrate on cataloguing very narrow subject in incredible detail.
Also, some research suggests that people suffer from schizophrenia when their creativity overwhelms their intelligence, loosely speaking.
...its actually pretty difficult to prove the Judeo Christian God doesn't exist becuase of the way they define him
That has always struck me as being obvious: God is all-powerful and he is exclusively good. The first means he is among other things, behind everything that happens, including evil; so he isn't only good. And the other way round; if he is good, then he isn't behind evil, then he isn't all-powerful. Simplistic, but it convinces me.
But it may even be possible to prove the non-existence of any God that in any way interacts with reality. Not quite sure how to do that, though. Yet.
I spent a couple of years in China and saw nonstop belching smoke and dumping factories.
Could you be a bit more specific? China is a big place, and it changes a lot. So, when and where?
I remember in the 70es and 80es how polluted places like Ruhr in Germany and allegedly whole of USA were covered in smog and crap, and the Thames in London was nearly void of life. But I have been through the Ruhr District many times and there is nothing like that now; and the salmon has returned to the Thames, as far as I know. Just goes to show that things can change for the better if we want them to.
The Chinese are not the bunch of mindless pigs you and others try to make out; in fact, the pigs are the ones most aligned to Western capitalism, which is not exactly the government, if you catch my drift.
I think it goes a bit further than that. Let's for example assume that God is real, and that he is all-powerful, kind, merciful and wants us to communicate with him; this is one of the portraits that are often painted of him. So, if I try to get an answer out of him and receive no communication at all, despite anything I try, it doesn't go any way to prove that he exists, as far as I can see.
One can of course keep trying to come up with explanations for the comlete lack of response - but to my mind, the simplest is the most likely: he just doesn't exist in a form that is consistent with the hypothesis. And, to be quite honest, the question is not important enough for me to let it consume the whole of my existence in the hope that I may one day find God, certainly not when the likely outcome is that I will just waste my time.
The sea levels have been rising since the last ice age, and for much of that time much faster than now.
True, on the surface - but we can account for that. With an attitude like yours we would still be saying things like "stones fly through the air, they have always done so and it is no use explaining why", or "the harvest has always fluctuated, sometimes it fails, sometimes it is abundant, it is no use speculating about why" etc
This is about scientific discovery; whether it is good or bad is another discussion. Personally I think it is bloody amazing that anybody can measure changes in the order of 1mm of the level of the oceans, especially since the surface isn't exactly calm. And it is even more impressive that it is possible to model our plant to that precision.
Yes, I know, you have probably been going "I can't hear you, I can't hear you" with your fingers in your ears since the start of this post, so it is probably wasted trying to communicate with you. That sort of thing disgusts me, frankly.
I do realise that a proportion of/. readers are Americans, and there have a higher probability of having been born with blinkers on (this, by the way, is known as mild sarcasm - non-Americans are likely to smile at this point); BUT honestly: "78 feet long" vs "yard-thick" and "250 tons each" vs "16 million pounds"? As far as I can see, this is just somebody getting horny* over big numbers and jerking off in public.
Just imagine the Chinese, Russians or Indians going on about the dimensions of things in their own, traditional units. And I bet they'd still be consistent and stick to the same, general system of units. Pounds and tons? What kind of tons or tonnes are we on about? Good grief, what has the world become, oh dear, oh dear.
*horny: aka "randy" in UK - most Brits feel Americans are a bit forthright, and I suspect it comes from eg. American guys declaring "Hi, I'm Randy" by way of introduction.
... this is about adults exploiting clueless kids for their own crusade
Probably; but I wouldn't be too dismissive about it, all the same. A lot of people have a lot of saved up worry about the environment, the climate and the future of everything - they will follow anything that appears to do something about it.
Remember the hippies - people now tend to think of them as a bunch stupid, superficial kids, exploited by cynical adults, which they were. But they were also a main part of the changes that led to many of the freedoms you enjoy today.
I think the looks of models relates to natural beauty in pretty much the same way as pornography relates to sex - there are similarities, but if you look closer, it falls in the "uncanny valley", so to speak. For pornography this means that the material becomes revolting rather than sexy, and for model the result is similar.
I think you can see why the advertisers think "thin" = "beautiful": the superfit bodies of top athletes are pretty impressive, and in many ways represent an ideal of natural beauty, if we accept the idea that our perception of beauty is a way to judge the health status of a potential partner. Where it slips into the uncanny valley is when you replace "fit and healthy" with "skinny" - because it is perfectly possible to be skinny and fat at the same time if you have no muscles, but a layer of blubber instead.
Just as a counterweight against the by now almost automatic reply of "Python".
Firstly, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against python; after all, I don't know the language, and judging from the popularity, it seems obvious that it is not bad.
So why recommend Java? First a bit of background: I am, like you, experienced - 25 years and counting, on anything with more than 8 bits. I have always preferred C, or if need be, C++, but I have had to come to terms with Java (and especially Java EE), with its many, and sometimes absurd, buzzwords. I don't like it, but I have come to respect the toolset that it represents.
So, my recommendation is to learn Java EE 6: Get the latest Glassfish and NetBeans (both free) and study the free material that is available - and believe me, it will keep you occupied for a while. I have never come across anything as full of words and concepts that I didn't immediately understand, but it is worthwhile, in the end, as you will end up mastering the world of enterprise aplications.
Java in itself, I have to say, is a little bit pointless; yes, you can create applications that are somewhat portable on a good day, but they have to run in a JVM which eat a huge chunk of memory and takes quite a while to load. Java EE is the point of Java, so go all the way.
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What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?
My workplace: about 55 I think.
I don't have the impression that they have difficulty accepting new technology - after all, we are producing bleeding edge technology ourselves - but with 25+ years under the belt, you really have seen it all before and mostly been unimpressed.
As for myself - my son is about your age, and he is just like you (and so was I once); that's good, too. But there are reasons why us old-timers have returned to the command line and use things like make directly. I used to be in love with Windows back when it was version 2; I lived and breathed DOS and BIOS. I have programmed for Windows 2, 3, NT, ... as well as OS/2, GNOME and KDE. I write Java EE applications and I even enjoy some of the music my son likes. So I don't think I am particularly reactionary - but I don't fall on my nose in worship as soon as I see yet another 'new' gimmick, 'cause I have seen it before, and it turned out to be crap. Trust me, you'll get there yourself.
I think the main difference is likely to be that sociological students are more used to questioning fundamental assumptions. I suppose this it because hard logic is a lot less useful when a large proportion of your reasoning is based
intuition. So be prepared to explain just about anything you consider "obvious", and to having your pedagogical skills tested to the limit.
I myself came to mathematics at university as an outsider; I found that my peers would simply accept most of what the teachers said, but I had a hard time adjusting to many of the viewpoints. Another thing I found difficult was spotting what it was I was supposed to learn - in the first years I would work hard on applying the major theorems to all exercises, and it was not until after my bachelor that one of my toturs exclaimed, with some exasperation: "Why don't you use the techniques that you have been shown in the proofs, like you are supposed to!?" - So the second thing you will need to do is, point out explicitly what you expect your students to learn.
I can sympathise with your sentiment, but I think you base your views on the wrong things.
First of all, I don't think pornograpy is the reason why children learn some sick ideas about how sex, relationships and the world in general works - we are all immersed in rubbish culture from our TVs, advertising etc etc.
Secondly, pornography is only superficially related to sex. It has always struck me how unsexy porn is; with it's focus on unnaturally perfect, hairless bodies, and the complete lack of intellectual or emotional appeal, this is perhaps not all that surprising. You can say, in a way, that pornography is actually quite prudish.
I have never tried to stop my children from accessing pornography. What I have done, though, is to discuss the mater openly and without trying to impose my views - after all, I might be wrong - and instead talked about things. Funny enough, their reaction to pornography has always been one of revulsion. I think this is related to what is called the Uncanny Valley (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) - porn looks almost, but not quite, like the real thing, and therefore feels creepy.
What goes well together is very much a cultural thing, as I think anybody who travels will know. Personally, I've had boiled sweets with garlic or durian flavour in Thailand; my Chinese wife tends to combine foods in surprising ways too - like apple pie with baked beans or cakes with a fruit and chicken filling. Or take this new, stomach churning trend where you get chocolate sauce with meat (shudder).
I guess if you are open minded enough, most things can go well together. And if you are pregnant, well.... let's say no more, but I knew one lady who had a craving for fishcakes and blue cheese (with nothing else).
Isn't it just nice when our allies decide to send this kind of shit out on the network where it risks going on to wreak havoc indiscriminately? And for what - to satisfy cravings of a bunch of paranoid Mossad and CIA officers?
There was a time when the right mix of brains, creativity, and guts came together
There still is - it's called haggis.
Simple: control.
Another simple reason: they may not have the facilities you want - like GlassFish3 in my case.
There is, believe it or not, another way - it consists in treating your employees as real people, with fairness, respect, dignity and honour. The fact is, you basically get what you ask for; if your whole attitude is that your coworkers are criminals, then for the most part that is exactly what they will choose to be.
I know this from personal experience - at one point I felt ostracised and treated with suspicion and contempt; and I wouldn't have hesitated with stripping the company of all valuables if I had got the chance. Then we got a new manager, who gave a fair chance to prove myself - and now I wouldn't dream of betraying the trust of my workplace. Of course, the problem is finding a manager who has the integrity and the guts.
Trust me, malaria is not a neglected problem. It might surprise you to hear that it is a difficult problem to fix.
It isn't now. It wasn't when it affected us directly. But there was a number of years when it was neglected, not because DDT and draining went out of fashion, but because pharmaceuticals didn't think it would give them a worthwhile return on investment.
I know perfectly well that it isn't easy to treat, but it is worth noting that since Mr Gates started putting his weight behind it, significant progress has been made; this could have happened much sooner, I think.
Now, why don't you come up with a better plan?
OK, here it is: nationalise the pharma industry. People's lives and health shouldn't be dictated by corporate greed.
Well, first of all, this is intended to be controversial, thus has to be taken with a grain or two of salt. I wanted to provoke people to try to think before automatically talking about "ethical", because I feel too many don't.
But to answer your question - is it necessarily always ethical to save lives, no matter the price? We know what the logical consequence is going to be, if we keep crowding the planet more and more: population crash at some point; and the populations grow even in the industrialised nations, where we actually have the means to do something about it. We can't let people die, because it is obviously unethical; and we can't stop people having children by force, because it would impinge on their personal freedom, which is unethical. And so on.
Put this way, as far as I can see, if we are ethical on the small scale and in the short term, we are going to kill un-counted billions at some point in the future; which to me seems more unethical. We choose to be "ethical" the easy way.
I don't have the answer to these issues, but if we simply put off thinking about them, we will never find an answer either.
Well said.
Program development is one of those disciplines where experience really is significant, and where you can, if you believe in yourself, go on and on, careerwise.
I speak from personal experience: I spent my first many years as a so-so developer, then about 7 years more as UNIX system manager; all good, clever stuff. But it is only recently, after I turned 54, that my career is beginning to take off, both in terms of position and technically.
The thing is, when you have that much experience, you can speak with authority about things. I can tell managers exactly why relying on a Windows domain and a half-witted MSCE is not the best way to ensure the stability of your IT infrastructure. And no matter how many questions they think up, I have experience that allows me to give a thoughtful answer.
Technically, I remember how it was quite a lot of effort to learn the basic - BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, ... and of course Oracl, DB2, and so on and so ... However, I have in recent few months actually managed to learn, not just Java, but Java EE, and those who know what that entails will no doubt be impressed - it is not so much that each element in Java EE is hard, more that there are so many, each with their own peculiarities.
Now, what was the point of this display immodesty? That all us oldies should take heart; we really are a lot better than all those young 'uns, and we are able to prove it. Plus, one of the previous posters mentioned that hey didn't have as much energy as before - I actually find that while I don't have the energy to jump and skip as I used to, I can certainly put in far longer hours than in my younger time. For one thing, I don't have young kids to worry about - my time is all mine. You don't need to sprint forward all night, a steady pace will do.
May I be controversial and point out that saving lives on an overpopulated planet may in itself not be ethical?
No, of course I don't think we should let people just die; and I think it is possible to perform animal experiments in an ethical way. But I think we need a major rethinking and refocusing of our perspectives. Things like religiously based notions about "the sanctity of life" and the perhaps equally religious notion of "the sanctity of the profit margin" are poor guidelines for any research, and the pharmaceuticals spend a huge proportion of their research on relatively inconsequential problems as a consequence. That is why they have neglected really serious problems like malaria, and instead like to concentrate on chronic diseases. The thing about eg malaria is that 1) those affected are poor, and 2) if you cure it, you make no more money. Chronic patients, on the other hand, will keep paying all of their, hopefully, long lives.
It strikes me that Intelligent Design is compatible with Natural Selection.
Not really. Yes, the idea that there could be "somebody out there" who had started it all off is not in itself in contradiction with the theory of evolution; however, ID springs from a certain class of religious belief, which is in opposition to the whole premise for scientific thought. In science one seeks to abstain from making any pronouncements that are not based on measurable, reproducible evidence, whereas in the religioun underlying ID, you make a flying leap into the unknown and decide that "this is what it is", and then you start fitting the evidence to the conclusion.
As a scientist you are expected to be willing to give up your theory in the face of compelling evidence; as a believer in ID that is not an option as far as I can see. Put another way: It is possible that you can convince a scientist that God exists (if you evidence is strong enough, but you can't convince the believer that his God doesn't exist, no matter what the evidence. And that is why the two are incompatible.
Your insights are interesting, but I think perhaps you are needlessly scathing in your criticism. I don't actually see an opposition between what you are saying and the idea that there is a link between genius and madness.
Intelligence - even extemely high intelligence - in itself is no guarantee that a person is a genius; if you lack creativity, most likely your intelligence just lies idle or is used to gain enormous insight into something extremely limited in scope. To me intelligence is merely "the accountant of the soul"; that might also go some way towards explaining the negative correlation between intelligence and the major psychiatric disorders: if you have enormous creativity, but not enough intelligence, you become schizophrenic because your intelligence in overwhelmed. If your intelligence is sufficiently strong, you become a genius. Thus, creativity correlates to "madness"; and also brings "madness" close to "genius".
Being a genius is not equivalent with being higly intelligent; intelligence is only one part of the equation. Creativity (or imagination, as Einstein put it) is much more important - the importance of intelligence comes when making sense of your ideas, but without the ideas in the first place, intelligence is merely an accountant; as illustrated by many, highly intelligent people with autism - when you are hugely intelligent, but have no flow of creativity, you tend to concentrate on cataloguing very narrow subject in incredible detail.
Also, some research suggests that people suffer from schizophrenia when their creativity overwhelms their intelligence, loosely speaking.
...its actually pretty difficult to prove the Judeo Christian God doesn't exist becuase of the way they define him
That has always struck me as being obvious: God is all-powerful and he is exclusively good. The first means he is among other things, behind everything that happens, including evil; so he isn't only good. And the other way round; if he is good, then he isn't behind evil, then he isn't all-powerful. Simplistic, but it convinces me.
But it may even be possible to prove the non-existence of any God that in any way interacts with reality. Not quite sure how to do that, though. Yet.
I spent a couple of years in China and saw nonstop belching smoke and dumping factories.
Could you be a bit more specific? China is a big place, and it changes a lot. So, when and where?
I remember in the 70es and 80es how polluted places like Ruhr in Germany and allegedly whole of USA were covered in smog and crap, and the Thames in London was nearly void of life. But I have been through the Ruhr District many times and there is nothing like that now; and the salmon has returned to the Thames, as far as I know. Just goes to show that things can change for the better if we want them to.
The Chinese are not the bunch of mindless pigs you and others try to make out; in fact, the pigs are the ones most aligned to Western capitalism, which is not exactly the government, if you catch my drift.
I think it goes a bit further than that. Let's for example assume that God is real, and that he is all-powerful, kind, merciful and wants us to communicate with him; this is one of the portraits that are often painted of him. So, if I try to get an answer out of him and receive no communication at all, despite anything I try, it doesn't go any way to prove that he exists, as far as I can see.
One can of course keep trying to come up with explanations for the comlete lack of response - but to my mind, the simplest is the most likely: he just doesn't exist in a form that is consistent with the hypothesis. And, to be quite honest, the question is not important enough for me to let it consume the whole of my existence in the hope that I may one day find God, certainly not when the likely outcome is that I will just waste my time.
huh. they couldn't prove God ~doesn't~ exist.
True; but all theories so far, which assume a God interacting with reality in a consistent, measurable way, have been proven to be false.
The sea levels have been rising since the last ice age, and for much of that time much faster than now.
True, on the surface - but we can account for that. With an attitude like yours we would still be saying things like "stones fly through the air, they have always done so and it is no use explaining why", or "the harvest has always fluctuated, sometimes it fails, sometimes it is abundant, it is no use speculating about why" etc
This is about scientific discovery; whether it is good or bad is another discussion. Personally I think it is bloody amazing that anybody can measure changes in the order of 1mm of the level of the oceans, especially since the surface isn't exactly calm. And it is even more impressive that it is possible to model our plant to that precision.
Yes, I know, you have probably been going "I can't hear you, I can't hear you" with your fingers in your ears since the start of this post, so it is probably wasted trying to communicate with you. That sort of thing disgusts me, frankly.
Aww, did I hurt your feeling? I do apologise; us Europeans are usually able to laugh at ourselves, my mistake.
Your parody of Britishism isn't too bad - a bit stilted and too much "My Fair Lady", but not a bad effort. I'll give 7 out of 10.
Ah! One of my favourite irritations!
I do realise that a proportion of /. readers are Americans, and there have a higher probability of having been born with blinkers on (this, by the way, is known as mild sarcasm - non-Americans are likely to smile at this point); BUT honestly: "78 feet long" vs "yard-thick" and "250 tons each" vs "16 million pounds"? As far as I can see, this is just somebody getting horny* over big numbers and jerking off in public.
Just imagine the Chinese, Russians or Indians going on about the dimensions of things in their own, traditional units. And I bet they'd still be consistent and stick to the same, general system of units. Pounds and tons? What kind of tons or tonnes are we on about? Good grief, what has the world become, oh dear, oh dear.
*horny: aka "randy" in UK - most Brits feel Americans are a bit forthright, and I suspect it comes from eg. American guys declaring "Hi, I'm Randy" by way of introduction.
... this is about adults exploiting clueless kids for their own crusade
Probably; but I wouldn't be too dismissive about it, all the same. A lot of people have a lot of saved up worry about the environment, the climate and the future of everything - they will follow anything that appears to do something about it.
Remember the hippies - people now tend to think of them as a bunch stupid, superficial kids, exploited by cynical adults, which they were. But they were also a main part of the changes that led to many of the freedoms you enjoy today.
I think the looks of models relates to natural beauty in pretty much the same way as pornography relates to sex - there are similarities, but if you look closer, it falls in the "uncanny valley", so to speak. For pornography this means that the material becomes revolting rather than sexy, and for model the result is similar.
I think you can see why the advertisers think "thin" = "beautiful": the superfit bodies of top athletes are pretty impressive, and in many ways represent an ideal of natural beauty, if we accept the idea that our perception of beauty is a way to judge the health status of a potential partner. Where it slips into the uncanny valley is when you replace "fit and healthy" with "skinny" - because it is perfectly possible to be skinny and fat at the same time if you have no muscles, but a layer of blubber instead.
Just as a counterweight against the by now almost automatic reply of "Python".
Firstly, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against python; after all, I don't know the language, and judging from the popularity, it seems obvious that it is not bad.
So why recommend Java? First a bit of background: I am, like you, experienced - 25 years and counting, on anything with more than 8 bits. I have always preferred C, or if need be, C++, but I have had to come to terms with Java (and especially Java EE), with its many, and sometimes absurd, buzzwords. I don't like it, but I have come to respect the toolset that it represents.
So, my recommendation is to learn Java EE 6: Get the latest Glassfish and NetBeans (both free) and study the free material that is available - and believe me, it will keep you occupied for a while. I have never come across anything as full of words and concepts that I didn't immediately understand, but it is worthwhile, in the end, as you will end up mastering the world of enterprise aplications.
Java in itself, I have to say, is a little bit pointless; yes, you can create applications that are somewhat portable on a good day, but they have to run in a JVM which eat a huge chunk of memory and takes quite a while to load. Java EE is the point of Java, so go all the way.