Race warfare and class warfare: they never go away. Maybe it's time to stop trying to make everyone get along, because we are radically different.
Diversity doesn't work. Not of religion, not of basic philosophy, not of intelligence, and not of race and ethnicity. Our modern deconstructive society can't see that, but observers of history can. Human beings have not fundamentally changed since the dawn of time.
And the same problems remain, without us learning. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place for solutions. Maybe diversity is one of these failures. Well, things to ponder.
Of twentieth-century orchestral/"high art" composers, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, and Strauss were all at least on a par with Bruckner (and better than Wagner), and Shostakovich's symphonies were as important as Beethoven's and at least as good as Schubert's.
I could never agree to this.
The depth of Beethoven and Bruckner is lacking in these rather transparent substitutes you have suggested.
You may think your opinion is witty, and universal, but the majority of classical listeners disagree with you for a simple reason: the newer stuff isn't as good.
(And to the other 'net wit above: of course I'm familiar with the newer stuff. I'd have to be to make the comment I did. Were you trying to imply I lacked knowledge, instead of making a counterargument? Didn't we get over that in middle school?)
No one has asked me to join Mafia wars, take a pointless quiz, figure out what five food items represent me, or requested I indulge in some disgusting-sounding activity called "tweeting."
From where I stand, if you're "tweeting" a lot, you need to eat more fiber.
Email is great because it allows complete formalized communication, which gives the greatest clarity.
If I wanted to conduct my life through the palsied pidgin of IM, I'd do it that way. But the results just aren't that great.
The whole point of the 1980s in computing was that if we created an open standard, we would not be tied in to some corporation or another's business plan involving planned obsolescence and product line lock-in. The whole point of reliability is that you don't end up hucking the thing in the landfill after only a few years of use. Open standards is another form of reliability, ensuring that the printer can stay in use as long as it is physically operating.
The above are good design standards.
What has happened to printers is the process of democratization, which is when consumers demand a cheaper product and get it -- but because that was never a realistic notion, they get a plastic piece of junk with corporate product line lock-in. Until you buy a business-level printer, preferably a network printer, you're going to get one of these cheap pieces of junk.
In my view, it's a tendency of all bottom-up systems.
Top-down systems require a central leader and plan; bottom-up systems involve many small entities that do what is convenient for them as a means of producing a workable result.
The problem with top-down systems is that if your leader screws up, freezes or dies, you're screwed.
The problem with bottom-up systems is that they have no stopping point, so halfway through their growth curve go from "constructive" to "cancer" status.
This is why natural selection is brilliant: it's a bottom-up system with a decentralized top-down regulator.
There must always be some large, slow-moving body (like a Mammoth, but preferably evil like a corporation or government) which We The People assault to prove our virtue if not virility.
Yesterday, Microsoft and George W. Bush; today, Google and Nancy Pelosi. So it goes.
What about the massive agricultural pollution that results?
Species depletion owing to use of too much land?
Global warming from all the carbon?
Even more, a population freight train we can't stop?
Overpopulation is the original Ponzi scheme: "but people like it, and there's more of them now, so more people like it, so I get paid, and someone else will fix it... sometime in the future when I'm dead, hopefully."
When people get too dogmatic about things for political reasons, real-world usability suffers.
Apple created an identity for its users; as a result, in the 1980s you had Mac users telling Amiga users that Macs were faster -- when an Amiga could emulate a Macintosh faster than the original.
Open source has the same identity crisis. We think it's the right thing to do, so we overlook a myriad of small problems and when someone refuses to use it, write them off -- "he's an MSFT fanboy, or just too lazy."
I'll use a test case: OpenOffice. In addition to requiring a bulky Java install, and being crash-prone, it also had very flawed.doc file handling; yet for those of us in offices,.doc file handling is an essential feature.
I recommended it to a number of clients until the error reports came back. Send a file that doesn't display correctly to a half-dozen people and you've quickly eaten up the time value of Microsoft Office ($300).
Open Source works best with products that are like UNIX: designed for a small, clear-cut, low features set job that is not going to require frequent updates. I don't think it works well for software with huge feature sets designed for professional applications, and that's why so far, that market sector is dominated by closed-source alternatives.
Scientology flooded USENET to keep their documents from being distributed.
However, as someone who believes in freedom, I think we're going to have to extend it to nutty cults. After all, we extend freedom to secular cults who believe 9-11 was an inside job, or that natural selection doesn't exist among humans.
We need to respect that Scientology is a choice, these people aren't morons, and while we (I, at least) disagree with their choice, it's their right.
People have the right to do things we/I think are insane, in other words.
When $99/month becomes the future of (community) college, then you're going to see people competing for the schools that are desirable enough that they can still charge $30K/year like the Ivies do.
Then again, most people coming out of those aren't going into IT... except as managers.
Advocates call the law a necessary control on hate speech in an age where the Internet makes the spread of messages easier and faster. Opponents say it's censorship and has no place in a free society.
Not only are we divided on whether it should be legal, we are divided on what it should be.
The bigger issue here is what we're obscuring the pursuit of truth with all sorts of social pretense. Let's look at the facts and keep emotion (true hate speech) and censorship out of the debate.
Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
Yeah. They're not getting more literate, they're getting more social, and now they do it through text.
At the same time, their skills in critical analysis, understanding complex texts, understanding polycausality, comprehending depth of meaning, and other important things -- if you want a higher civilization -- have gone out the window.
Lunsford knew she'd make headlines and advance her own career, so you get this happy smoke up the fundament story. Ignore it.
Although we all get squeamish about it, it's better to have a supply of donated organs than not. Prisoners being executed have done something horrible and can help repay their debt to society through their organs. Give new life where old was taken, instead of getting all uppity and fearish about the grim task of forcibly taking organs from criminals.
Death and thrash metal (including Slayer) are both incredibly intricate and demanding styles of music.
I agree. Trying to write good underground metal (death metal, thrash, speed metal, black metal -- Slayer is in my lexicon a speed/death hybrid) is not as simple as people want it to be.
I can't speak in a universal context, but if this were my project:
I would partner with an open courseware "course" or professor.
That way, free content would promote the free context I was giving away.
As far as getting the book out there... a website with a PDF, man.
I would make it free, and make it clear that any edits by the user community would constitute a fork -- that way, you're not responsible for the kid who photoshops "Eat Dicks" into the background of Diagram 3.2-7
People are going to want an operating system that can address lots of cheap, necessary RAM.
Further, processor power is cheaper than water at this point.
People are going to adopt Windows 7 for its adaptation to RAM above 4gb and optimized parallel use of multiple cores.
Then again, I don't think Vista was bad. The UAC is what drives most people nuts, unless they had driver issues. It's a nice operating system although a bit big.
I think what most people want is what XP seems to represent: a simple, pared-down, flexible operating system.
Unfortunately, many are not willing to learn as much about their computers as their cars, so they fall prey to all sorts of scams, trojans, etc. and get the Vista UAC as a consequence.
In a database, you often keep track of unique objects by their record numbers.
It's the same way with citizens.
They want a unique identifier for you.
One reason is so that if you scam them, and then delete your account, you can't sign back up and do it again.
But the primary reason is that businesses like to have a clear ID that points to a specific person.
Your government was too lazy to implement a Citizen ID Number plan mainly because people wail when anything like that occurs. So instead, you get a de facto one, and because we couldn't face this need honestly, it's now tied in to your tax returns.
I see no point in whinging about it here. You live in a democracy. Get others motivated to fix this.
What's that you say? Most people are too bloated on TV, free money from the government, video games and bad beer to be active? Well, I guess you'd better tackle that problem first, then.
Reddit groupthink: Although we work day jobs in call centers and as photoshop jockeys, we have figured out The One True Path (a mixture of populist liberalism, lolcats and outrage at anything that might make us leave our W.O.W.-enabled terminals for more than 30 seconds) and consider all of you who have not seen it to be beneath us. Even as we ask you to work with us while we fix this driver issue together.
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Race warfare and class warfare: they never go away. Maybe it's time to stop trying to make everyone get along, because we are radically different.
Diversity doesn't work. Not of religion, not of basic philosophy, not of intelligence, and not of race and ethnicity. Our modern deconstructive society can't see that, but observers of history can. Human beings have not fundamentally changed since the dawn of time.
And the same problems remain, without us learning. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place for solutions. Maybe diversity is one of these failures. Well, things to ponder.
Do I have to register to overthrow the NWO?
Of twentieth-century orchestral/"high art" composers, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, and Strauss were all at least on a par with Bruckner (and better than Wagner), and Shostakovich's symphonies were as important as Beethoven's and at least as good as Schubert's.
I could never agree to this.
The depth of Beethoven and Bruckner is lacking in these rather transparent substitutes you have suggested.
You may think your opinion is witty, and universal, but the majority of classical listeners disagree with you for a simple reason: the newer stuff isn't as good.
(And to the other 'net wit above: of course I'm familiar with the newer stuff. I'd have to be to make the comment I did. Were you trying to imply I lacked knowledge, instead of making a counterargument? Didn't we get over that in middle school?)
Too much porn in the winter months can do that.
But Finland does other things well:
* Beherit
* Demigod
* Belial
* Demilich
* Amorphis
* Sentenced
* Adramelech
I like email.
No one has asked me to join Mafia wars, take a pointless quiz, figure out what five food items represent me, or requested I indulge in some disgusting-sounding activity called "tweeting."
From where I stand, if you're "tweeting" a lot, you need to eat more fiber.
Email is great because it allows complete formalized communication, which gives the greatest clarity.
If I wanted to conduct my life through the palsied pidgin of IM, I'd do it that way. But the results just aren't that great.
Feel free to email me any comments.
Do we have anything as good as Beethoven symphonies yet?
What about even approximating Wagner, or Bruckner?
As we become able to produce more and more quantity, it seems quality declines.
Something to ponder.
Make sure you promote the best and demote or keep static the rest.
Don't look at race, gender, creed, etc. just make sure that your system is fair.
That way, the competent rise, and you don't promote those who are incompetent AND ALSO from a protected group.
You both avoid discrimination, and anti-discrimination that ends up being revenge against the majority.
The OP wanted the same two things I want:
* Reliability
* Open standards
The whole point of the 1980s in computing was that if we created an open standard, we would not be tied in to some corporation or another's business plan involving planned obsolescence and product line lock-in. The whole point of reliability is that you don't end up hucking the thing in the landfill after only a few years of use. Open standards is another form of reliability, ensuring that the printer can stay in use as long as it is physically operating.
The above are good design standards.
What has happened to printers is the process of democratization, which is when consumers demand a cheaper product and get it -- but because that was never a realistic notion, they get a plastic piece of junk with corporate product line lock-in. Until you buy a business-level printer, preferably a network printer, you're going to get one of these cheap pieces of junk.
That's all software
In my view, it's a tendency of all bottom-up systems.
Top-down systems require a central leader and plan; bottom-up systems involve many small entities that do what is convenient for them as a means of producing a workable result.
The problem with top-down systems is that if your leader screws up, freezes or dies, you're screwed.
The problem with bottom-up systems is that they have no stopping point, so halfway through their growth curve go from "constructive" to "cancer" status.
This is why natural selection is brilliant: it's a bottom-up system with a decentralized top-down regulator.
There must always be some large, slow-moving body (like a Mammoth, but preferably evil like a corporation or government) which We The People assault to prove our virtue if not virility.
Yesterday, Microsoft and George W. Bush; today, Google and Nancy Pelosi. So it goes.
There's no way he'd get away with this if there weren't just cause.
Impersonating public figures on the internet causes real-world repercussions.
Try posting "Death Panels slashfic" under the name "Barack Obama" and you'll see what I mean.
Not that I've done this, OF COURSE.
Great, glad for this "green revolution." But:
What about the massive agricultural pollution that results?
Species depletion owing to use of too much land?
Global warming from all the carbon?
Even more, a population freight train we can't stop?
Overpopulation is the original Ponzi scheme: "but people like it, and there's more of them now, so more people like it, so I get paid, and someone else will fix it... sometime in the future when I'm dead, hopefully."
When people get too dogmatic about things for political reasons, real-world usability suffers.
Apple created an identity for its users; as a result, in the 1980s you had Mac users telling Amiga users that Macs were faster -- when an Amiga could emulate a Macintosh faster than the original.
Open source has the same identity crisis. We think it's the right thing to do, so we overlook a myriad of small problems and when someone refuses to use it, write them off -- "he's an MSFT fanboy, or just too lazy."
I'll use a test case: OpenOffice. In addition to requiring a bulky Java install, and being crash-prone, it also had very flawed .doc file handling; yet for those of us in offices, .doc file handling is an essential feature.
I recommended it to a number of clients until the error reports came back. Send a file that doesn't display correctly to a half-dozen people and you've quickly eaten up the time value of Microsoft Office ($300).
Open Source works best with products that are like UNIX: designed for a small, clear-cut, low features set job that is not going to require frequent updates. I don't think it works well for software with huge feature sets designed for professional applications, and that's why so far, that market sector is dominated by closed-source alternatives.
Commence downmodding!
Remember ARSbomb?
Scientology flooded USENET to keep their documents from being distributed.
However, as someone who believes in freedom, I think we're going to have to extend it to nutty cults. After all, we extend freedom to secular cults who believe 9-11 was an inside job, or that natural selection doesn't exist among humans.
We need to respect that Scientology is a choice, these people aren't morons, and while we (I, at least) disagree with their choice, it's their right.
People have the right to do things we/I think are insane, in other words.
And will cost $52,838 to upgrade in another eight months.
When $99/month becomes the future of (community) college, then you're going to see people competing for the schools that are desirable enough that they can still charge $30K/year like the Ivies do.
Then again, most people coming out of those aren't going into IT... except as managers.
Advocates call the law a necessary control on hate speech in an age where the Internet makes the spread of messages easier and faster. Opponents say it's censorship and has no place in a free society.
Not only are we divided on whether it should be legal, we are divided on what it should be.
Is it hate speech to call other races subhumans, but legal to note in a scientific paper that there IQ differences between races, moral evolutionary differences, or even that statistically, crime is not distributed evenly between all groups?
Half of scientists say race doesn't exist, the others keep quiet.
The bigger issue here is what we're obscuring the pursuit of truth with all sorts of social pretense. Let's look at the facts and keep emotion (true hate speech) and censorship out of the debate.
Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
Yeah. They're not getting more literate, they're getting more social, and now they do it through text.
At the same time, their skills in critical analysis, understanding complex texts, understanding polycausality, comprehending depth of meaning, and other important things -- if you want a higher civilization -- have gone out the window.
Lunsford knew she'd make headlines and advance her own career, so you get this happy smoke up the fundament story. Ignore it.
Although we all get squeamish about it, it's better to have a supply of donated organs than not. Prisoners being executed have done something horrible and can help repay their debt to society through their organs. Give new life where old was taken, instead of getting all uppity and fearish about the grim task of forcibly taking organs from criminals.
Death and thrash metal (including Slayer) are both incredibly intricate and demanding styles of music.
I agree. Trying to write good underground metal (death metal, thrash, speed metal, black metal -- Slayer is in my lexicon a speed/death hybrid) is not as simple as people want it to be.
Here's a good definition of how underground metal is similar to classical music in composition and values.
lady
[ citation needed ]
I can't speak in a universal context, but if this were my project:
I would partner with an open courseware "course" or professor.
That way, free content would promote the free context I was giving away.
As far as getting the book out there... a website with a PDF, man.
I would make it free, and make it clear that any edits by the user community would constitute a fork -- that way, you're not responsible for the kid who photoshops "Eat Dicks" into the background of Diagram 3.2-7
People are going to want an operating system that can address lots of cheap, necessary RAM.
Further, processor power is cheaper than water at this point.
People are going to adopt Windows 7 for its adaptation to RAM above 4gb and optimized parallel use of multiple cores.
Then again, I don't think Vista was bad. The UAC is what drives most people nuts, unless they had driver issues. It's a nice operating system although a bit big.
I think what most people want is what XP seems to represent: a simple, pared-down, flexible operating system.
Unfortunately, many are not willing to learn as much about their computers as their cars, so they fall prey to all sorts of scams, trojans, etc. and get the Vista UAC as a consequence.
In a database, you often keep track of unique objects by their record numbers.
It's the same way with citizens.
They want a unique identifier for you.
One reason is so that if you scam them, and then delete your account, you can't sign back up and do it again.
But the primary reason is that businesses like to have a clear ID that points to a specific person.
Your government was too lazy to implement a Citizen ID Number plan mainly because people wail when anything like that occurs. So instead, you get a de facto one, and because we couldn't face this need honestly, it's now tied in to your tax returns.
I see no point in whinging about it here. You live in a democracy. Get others motivated to fix this.
What's that you say? Most people are too bloated on TV, free money from the government, video games and bad beer to be active? Well, I guess you'd better tackle that problem first, then.
Reddit groupthink: Although we work day jobs in call centers and as photoshop jockeys, we have figured out The One True Path (a mixture of populist liberalism, lolcats and outrage at anything that might make us leave our W.O.W.-enabled terminals for more than 30 seconds) and consider all of you who have not seen it to be beneath us. Even as we ask you to work with us while we fix this driver issue together.