Congrats. Assuming your new employer isn't as bad as your last of course. Nothing makes one feel like a slave more than compromising principles or working in a job where you have no say. We all do eventually make some sacrifices though.
I don't expect you to agree or otherwise but I've noticed a very anti-customer shift in MS in the last handful of years. They were never brilliantly scrupulous but thi marked shift is worrisome.
I'm a flight sim enthusiast who doesn't really do much in the way of 1st/3rd person shooters but I haven't bought FSX due to activation despite the fact that I love FS9. I'm watching the hobby go down the gurgler because its being heavily commercialized. This makes no sense for a hobby where the sheer volume of freeware has contributed so profoundly to its rise. Though there is some there's not so much freeware for FSX, and all the commercial software companies that produce addons have just about doubled their prices for FSX versions addsons compared to FS9 versions. It's pure greed and it will make the hobby unaffordable to all but an affluent few.
This "have to drink the koolaid" bullshit just means you've sold out and want everyone else to be okay with that as well as yourself. You could always choose to work elsewhere for a company that doesn't foist this shit on its customers. I simply don't buy the "Testing would be too hard" line at all and its sad that you need to justify your decision in this way.
I just read your article and I too am appalled and wish you luck deciding what to do career-wise.
My fiancee and I live in Australia. I have a masters in Astronomy (albeit granted doing an internet course that is meant for educators and which I took up with no intention of changing career from my current one in IT). My fiancee teaches primary school (currently a casual). I've seen her forced repeatedly by various schools to boost reports for kids that in the later years of primary school can't tell 24 hour time, and can't reliably do basic arithmetic. I was shocked at how these kids were being treated, and I'm not so naive that I'm easily schocked. They're going to get to high school or university and absolutely drown when suddenly they're expected to competently do what they should have already learnt as well as pick up new material and become competent quickly.
We're getting married in September and it's becoming clear to me that if we have any academically inclined children we'll either have to supplement their learning ourselves or send them to a selective school where we have access to the curriculum in advance.
One is a faith based way of experiencing the world, the other is a sensory based, practical, and logical way. They are both useful.
On the one hand you have a solidly based theory that can be tested, that can have it's limits tested, and that has real practical repercussions. On the other you have a bunch of mythology. Yet you call these equally useful???
You need to read a book. The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. This book gives a much better set of arguments than I will in one post as to why these "different experiences" should be treated very differently.
The idiots in Kansas who got intelligent design into schools were voted out. (Although I think it took a few years.) So the system works, just slowly.
So you had years of children in their developmental years being taught fairy stories as science, and you say this shows the system works? Shit I'd hate to see one that didn't (by your definition) work.
Then you're probably doing it wrong. Research is discovery and learning. They're very much related to play. Go read some books on famous scientists if you don't believe me.
You're right that we're unlikely to see teleportation in our lifetime, and that it may be that the universe is constructed in such a way that it will never be allowed to happen.
You're wrong about science taking 100-200 years to move from "one level of physics to the next, based on history" as you put it. The rate of scientific advancement has been increasing quite quickly. Take relativity for example.
Einstein put out his famous 4 papers including special relativity in 1905. By 1945 - just 40 years - you had a practical and working atomic bomb. Now you can argue that you need to add another decade or two before 1905 for the groundwork to be laid for relativity (Michelson-Morley experiment and Lorentz transformations) but that's still not 100 years, it's more like 50 years.
In contrast it took from the mid to late 1600s to 1905 to move from a Newtonian picture of the world to a relativistic one. A little under 250 years.
We don't need a new internet specific word for that either. The reality is that people have been ruining games and game experiences for each other well before the internet was invented. Think of board game experiences you may have had as a kid.
Why do we need these words? They're almost as annoying as a teenage girl that won't stop using "omigod". What's wrong with the words "critic" and "vandal"?
But theoretically...Skeptical yes. Pessimist no. Nothing wrong with learning about the scientific method and learning to question things. If you can only do this in a pessimistic fashion then your own education is lacking. If you read what I said the aim was to teach the kid to be skeptical without being a mal adjusted rude little upstart and to realize early on that people - even good people in positions of authority - can and will make errors and that the most powerful thing you can do is learn to use your own mind to work around that - it's a good thing.
So your argument is that the reason that cars are more dangerous is that people are less well trained?
What exactly are we disagreeing on then? You seem to think having a ton of idiots on the road sans mobile phone is a lot safer than having a ton of idiots on the road with mobile phones. I argue educate them not to be idiots on the road and actually include some basic comms while driving before licensing them.
Then you argue that radios make flying safer but mobile phones don't. What about circumstances where users are warned of danger up ahead, traffic etc. You just wanna ignore that.
All of that doesn't matter though. The real problem I have with laws against mobile phone use isn't that I want to use one on the road. It's that it's difficult to police, and you end up with every idiot ignoring the law and using their phone anyway. Same with speeding. The number of idiots getting caught doing well in excess of the speed limit is incredible, but what's really bad is that every time I take a cab (quite often in my job) I've got a cabbie doing 20km/hr over the limit while swapping jobs and arranging pickups between a fleet of cabs on the mobile and on the radio. These guys drive all day for a living - if the laws were going to work, you'd think they'd work to slow these guys down. Worse yet, where I live I do stick to the speed limit. You should see the amount of goddamn abuse I get. Crap like this doesn't make us safer, it just makes everyone behave like an asshole. It makes our lives more stressful.
So what am I proposing? That there's no alternative to educating people. If they're unsafe idiots artificially trying to restrict them to doing the right thing isn't going to replace some common sense.
Yep well try using Safari beta for windows with a proxy. It crashes. You can't set proxy in the application (the button to bring up the dialog is greyed out).
Every time I mention this here I end up being modded troll by some Mac fanboy but the fact is I haven't seen a browser incapable of using proxies since about '95. This is basic functionality. If they put out a public beta without it, resulting in my download being a waste of time (at work we must use a proxy, like most corporate workplaces in existence) well then I just won't waste my time downloading again for quite a while.
Apple being so much more user friendly than everything else is just a bunch of PR BS.
Personally I think you missed an opportunity with your kid. You should have helped him to understand the IAU definition of a planet, and most importantly you should have helped him to understand why the definition is a bunch of bollox. (...and no I couldn't care less if Pluto is labeled a planet or planetismaloid or whatever. The definition is just awful - inconsistent and way too narrow given the common use of the term beforehand, not to mention the brilliant classificational move of ensuring that "dwarf planet" isn't actually a "planet" at all).
In any case, at six it might be a little bit of a stretch but letting your kid know early on that people in authority can and will mislead him, teaching him to be skeptical while being respectful, and teaching him to verify what he hears from multiple sources is a skill that'll put him in good stead. Once you learn not to question, or to be a disrespectful ass when someone is wrong it's very hard to unlearn this behaviour.
I don't know why people put down kid's abilities. It's well known that children learn multiple (human) languages much more quickly than adults. There are things you struggle to teach later in life that if you sew the seeds early are much easier.
Anyone that begins with "Oh shut the fuck up" and admits to moderation tampering is an irritating child but I'll bite.
The bug's well known. My filing a bug report will do nothing to help the team. If they didn't bother testing with proxies, I simply won't take their browser seriously. This release is nothing but a PR stunt.
As for IE, Safari and Firefox being equally crap that simply isn't true. I can use all but Safari at work. You are a Mac fanboi if you're putting Safari which doesn't even fucking work with proxies on the same level as 2 browsers which do. Proxy support isn't a nice to have - its expected in this day and age. Get a clue.
Reductio ad absurdum is just plain weak if you have to exaggerate an argument to that degree. You just end up arguing against yourself. I'm surprised you didn't say we should just shoot everyone when they make a driving mistake. Neither your argument or the one I've just suggested bears any resemblance to what I was suggesting.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Many (read most) aircraft don't have a flight computer. You're only thinking of airliners, which is like having a discussion about motor vehicles and deciding all motor vehicles are modern busses with some kind of cruise control.
Planes travel faster than cars. Pilot reaction times need to be faster by definition. YOu clearly don't know a plane from an aardvark.
I'm the "typical arrogant wanker" that doesn't use his cell phone and doesn't speed but then has to put up with abusive shitheads that do, then honk at you because you're not doing 20km/hr over the limit. Better yet I've once been run off the road by trucks doing 100 in a 40 zone. Speeding and mobile phone usage isn't policed in a rigid enough way to be making up crappy rules.
First of all we're not just talking airliners. Even a 2 seat aircraft has to keep up the comms. Secondly you obviously know nothing about aircraft. Let the speed fall a little and you stall. It's actually harder to fly an aircraft than drive a car. Try landing a plane in a simulator some time (not an arcade style game but a good sim).
I had every intention of using it. I downloaded and installed it at work only to learn that using a proxy caused a crash, and turning the proxy off required that I do so in IE and restart Safari. In any case proxies aren't optional where I work (and many others are in the same boat). What kind of piece of shit browser does not even support proxies in a public beta? Apple wasted my time. The experience irritated me and I probably won't be trying Safari again for a very very long time. I wonder how many others Apple's managed to piss off this way.
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You could always choose to work elsewhere
I did.
Congrats. Assuming your new employer isn't as bad as your last of course. Nothing makes one feel like a slave more than compromising principles or working in a job where you have no say. We all do eventually make some sacrifices though.
I don't expect you to agree or otherwise but I've noticed a very anti-customer shift in MS in the last handful of years. They were never brilliantly scrupulous but thi marked shift is worrisome.
I'm a flight sim enthusiast who doesn't really do much in the way of 1st/3rd person shooters but I haven't bought FSX due to activation despite the fact that I love FS9. I'm watching the hobby go down the gurgler because its being heavily commercialized. This makes no sense for a hobby where the sheer volume of freeware has contributed so profoundly to its rise. Though there is some there's not so much freeware for FSX, and all the commercial software companies that produce addons have just about doubled their prices for FSX versions addsons compared to FS9 versions. It's pure greed and it will make the hobby unaffordable to all but an affluent few.
This "have to drink the koolaid" bullshit just means you've sold out and want everyone else to be okay with that as well as yourself. You could always choose to work elsewhere for a company that doesn't foist this shit on its customers. I simply don't buy the "Testing would be too hard" line at all and its sad that you need to justify your decision in this way.
I just read your article and I too am appalled and wish you luck deciding what to do career-wise.
My fiancee and I live in Australia. I have a masters in Astronomy (albeit granted doing an internet course that is meant for educators and which I took up with no intention of changing career from my current one in IT). My fiancee teaches primary school (currently a casual). I've seen her forced repeatedly by various schools to boost reports for kids that in the later years of primary school can't tell 24 hour time, and can't reliably do basic arithmetic. I was shocked at how these kids were being treated, and I'm not so naive that I'm easily schocked. They're going to get to high school or university and absolutely drown when suddenly they're expected to competently do what they should have already learnt as well as pick up new material and become competent quickly.
We're getting married in September and it's becoming clear to me that if we have any academically inclined children we'll either have to supplement their learning ourselves or send them to a selective school where we have access to the curriculum in advance.
The phrase "I weep for the future" comes to mind.
One is a faith based way of experiencing the world, the other is a sensory based, practical, and logical way. They are both useful.
On the one hand you have a solidly based theory that can be tested, that can have it's limits tested, and that has real practical repercussions. On the other you have a bunch of mythology. Yet you call these equally useful???
You need to read a book. The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. This book gives a much better set of arguments than I will in one post as to why these "different experiences" should be treated very differently.
The idiots in Kansas who got intelligent design into schools were voted out. (Although I think it took a few years.) So the system works, just slowly.
So you had years of children in their developmental years being taught fairy stories as science, and you say this shows the system works? Shit I'd hate to see one that didn't (by your definition) work.
The trouble is that public libraries also lose funding if very small numbers of people use them at all, which is what a lot of libraries are seeing.
I never thought of research as play.
Then you're probably doing it wrong. Research is discovery and learning. They're very much related to play. Go read some books on famous scientists if you don't believe me.
You're right that we're unlikely to see teleportation in our lifetime, and that it may be that the universe is constructed in such a way that it will never be allowed to happen.
You're wrong about science taking 100-200 years to move from "one level of physics to the next, based on history" as you put it. The rate of scientific advancement has been increasing quite quickly. Take relativity for example.
Einstein put out his famous 4 papers including special relativity in 1905. By 1945 - just 40 years - you had a practical and working atomic bomb. Now you can argue that you need to add another decade or two before 1905 for the groundwork to be laid for relativity (Michelson-Morley experiment and Lorentz transformations) but that's still not 100 years, it's more like 50 years.
In contrast it took from the mid to late 1600s to 1905 to move from a Newtonian picture of the world to a relativistic one. A little under 250 years.
Since when is working a night job ("keeping unusual work hours") a suspicious activity?
This is university we're talking about. Surely FAILING to pull all-nighters would be the suspicious activity.
We don't need a new internet specific word for that either. The reality is that people have been ruining games and game experiences for each other well before the internet was invented. Think of board game experiences you may have had as a kid.
....and their water cooling requirements.
Why do we need these words? They're almost as annoying as a teenage girl that won't stop using "omigod". What's wrong with the words "critic" and "vandal"?
I have no kids (yet). Getting married in Sept.
But theoretically...Skeptical yes. Pessimist no. Nothing wrong with learning about the scientific method and learning to question things. If you can only do this in a pessimistic fashion then your own education is lacking. If you read what I said the aim was to teach the kid to be skeptical without being a mal adjusted rude little upstart and to realize early on that people - even good people in positions of authority - can and will make errors and that the most powerful thing you can do is learn to use your own mind to work around that - it's a good thing.
Plan B (hexadecimal) is actually plan 11 decimal. They've been stuck on plan 9 for ages now.
So your argument is that the reason that cars are more dangerous is that people are less well trained?
What exactly are we disagreeing on then? You seem to think having a ton of idiots on the road sans mobile phone is a lot safer than having a ton of idiots on the road with mobile phones. I argue educate them not to be idiots on the road and actually include some basic comms while driving before licensing them.
Then you argue that radios make flying safer but mobile phones don't. What about circumstances where users are warned of danger up ahead, traffic etc. You just wanna ignore that.
All of that doesn't matter though. The real problem I have with laws against mobile phone use isn't that I want to use one on the road. It's that it's difficult to police, and you end up with every idiot ignoring the law and using their phone anyway. Same with speeding. The number of idiots getting caught doing well in excess of the speed limit is incredible, but what's really bad is that every time I take a cab (quite often in my job) I've got a cabbie doing 20km/hr over the limit while swapping jobs and arranging pickups between a fleet of cabs on the mobile and on the radio. These guys drive all day for a living - if the laws were going to work, you'd think they'd work to slow these guys down. Worse yet, where I live I do stick to the speed limit. You should see the amount of goddamn abuse I get. Crap like this doesn't make us safer, it just makes everyone behave like an asshole. It makes our lives more stressful.
So what am I proposing? That there's no alternative to educating people. If they're unsafe idiots artificially trying to restrict them to doing the right thing isn't going to replace some common sense.
Yep well try using Safari beta for windows with a proxy. It crashes. You can't set proxy in the application (the button to bring up the dialog is greyed out).
Every time I mention this here I end up being modded troll by some Mac fanboy but the fact is I haven't seen a browser incapable of using proxies since about '95. This is basic functionality. If they put out a public beta without it, resulting in my download being a waste of time (at work we must use a proxy, like most corporate workplaces in existence) well then I just won't waste my time downloading again for quite a while.
Apple being so much more user friendly than everything else is just a bunch of PR BS.
Personally I think you missed an opportunity with your kid. You should have helped him to understand the IAU definition of a planet, and most importantly you should have helped him to understand why the definition is a bunch of bollox. (...and no I couldn't care less if Pluto is labeled a planet or planetismaloid or whatever. The definition is just awful - inconsistent and way too narrow given the common use of the term beforehand, not to mention the brilliant classificational move of ensuring that "dwarf planet" isn't actually a "planet" at all).
In any case, at six it might be a little bit of a stretch but letting your kid know early on that people in authority can and will mislead him, teaching him to be skeptical while being respectful, and teaching him to verify what he hears from multiple sources is a skill that'll put him in good stead. Once you learn not to question, or to be a disrespectful ass when someone is wrong it's very hard to unlearn this behaviour.
I don't know why people put down kid's abilities. It's well known that children learn multiple (human) languages much more quickly than adults. There are things you struggle to teach later in life that if you sew the seeds early are much easier.
Have we become Digg while I was sleeping?
You must have been in a coma for about 3-4 years then?
Anyone that begins with "Oh shut the fuck up" and admits to moderation tampering is an irritating child but I'll bite.
The bug's well known. My filing a bug report will do nothing to help the team. If they didn't bother testing with proxies, I simply won't take their browser seriously. This release is nothing but a PR stunt.
As for IE, Safari and Firefox being equally crap that simply isn't true. I can use all but Safari at work. You are a Mac fanboi if you're putting Safari which doesn't even fucking work with proxies on the same level as 2 browsers which do. Proxy support isn't a nice to have - its expected in this day and age. Get a clue.
Reductio ad absurdum is just plain weak if you have to exaggerate an argument to that degree. You just end up arguing against yourself. I'm surprised you didn't say we should just shoot everyone when they make a driving mistake. Neither your argument or the one I've just suggested bears any resemblance to what I was suggesting.
Who the hell said anything about re-testing anyone? Just make it part of the standard test from now on and over time things will improve.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Many (read most) aircraft don't have a flight computer. You're only thinking of airliners, which is like having a discussion about motor vehicles and deciding all motor vehicles are modern busses with some kind of cruise control.
Fuckbrain,
Planes travel faster than cars. Pilot reaction times need to be faster by definition. YOu clearly don't know a plane from an aardvark.
I'm the "typical arrogant wanker" that doesn't use his cell phone and doesn't speed but then has to put up with abusive shitheads that do, then honk at you because you're not doing 20km/hr over the limit. Better yet I've once been run off the road by trucks doing 100 in a 40 zone. Speeding and mobile phone usage isn't policed in a rigid enough way to be making up crappy rules.
First of all we're not just talking airliners. Even a 2 seat aircraft has to keep up the comms. Secondly you obviously know nothing about aircraft. Let the speed fall a little and you stall. It's actually harder to fly an aircraft than drive a car. Try landing a plane in a simulator some time (not an arcade style game but a good sim).
I had every intention of using it. I downloaded and installed it at work only to learn that using a proxy caused a crash, and turning the proxy off required that I do so in IE and restart Safari. In any case proxies aren't optional where I work (and many others are in the same boat). What kind of piece of shit browser does not even support proxies in a public beta? Apple wasted my time. The experience irritated me and I probably won't be trying Safari again for a very very long time. I wonder how many others Apple's managed to piss off this way.