Dealing with unjust laws is what the courts are for.
At least in the US, that is 100% wrong. Courts are for interpreting laws and dealing with conflicts, real and apparent, between various layers of the law.
Dealing with unjust laws is explicitly not part of their remit. A relevant example to this case: someone growing or selling medical marijuana, even when they have a municipal license and are paying all their taxes, may not mention the medical nature of their selling in federal court, because the law in question doesn't excuse that.
Dealing with unjust laws is the responsibility of the citizenry. And, supposedly, the politicians, but I think they've forgotten.
Excuse a non American dude here, but if growing pot within the boundaries you describe is legal according to the state, how can it be illegal nationally? [...]Which one of the systems has precedence?
Functionally, neither.
I think state, county, and local police all are deputized by the state, and so, AFAIK, enforce state or local law. Federal police of various sorts (e.g., FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, US Postal Inspectors, ICE, and even, and I am not making this up, the Amtrak Police) enforce federal law.
I live in San Francisco, where we allow medical marijuana sales and where the city licenses various operations to grow that marijuana. The Bush-era Feds don't like this, and so will occasionally raid large-scale dispensaries and growers under federal law, showing exactly how much they really believe the standard conservative lines about states' rights, trusting the citizens, and minimal government interference.
At one point, our city council was talking about having the city grow the pot itself, to see if the Feds had the cojones to come and arrest our mayor, but I think that blew over.
Interestingly, the local government is pretty relaxed about who gets access to medical marijuana, partly because we don't care much, and partly because they don't want a lot of records around for the DEA to seize. So by sending the occasional grower or seller to prison for years, the federal government isn't reducing the supply at all, but they have made it a lot easier for people without any real medical issue to buy pot quasi-legally.
Not that it matters a ton; I pretty regularly see people smoking marijuana in open-air bars or at public events in the park where people are drinking.
IntelliJ IDEA has three kinds of in-editor change tracking.
Assuming the original poster is keeping these files in some version control system (which he sure should be) then it will highlight changes both in the left window gutter and in the scroll bar. That way you can tell exactly what you've touched.
A second is a nice integration of the "blame" or "annotate" function, where in the left gutter it will mark each line with who made the last change and when.
A third is that it has its own internal version control system that's more granular than checking in. So as you're working, you can look back at what you've been up to. Think of it kind of like a shell's command line history, but for editors.
For working on code, I love all of these features.
If she was anything like I am she derived a great deal of satisfaction in helping people and even greater heartache when she could not.
Yes, that would make it a personal motivation. That all motivations are personal at some point in the causal chain is a tautological observation. By definition, all individual actions can be linked to personal motivations.
However, given the full spectrum of human motivations, you can rank them on a spectrum of selfish to selfless. Claiming that all motivations are selfish because they can be seen as personal is absurd, a misleading trick of words. I've seen Randites pull this trick for 20 years, and it is getting old.
Email spammers are inherently and universally sociopaths.
This is probably true for the people who start and run high-volume spamming rings. But I think it's important to remember that there are quite a number of ordinary people who get caught up in these things.
One of the weird things about large corporations is that they can disconnect us from the consequences of our actions. People say, "Oh, it's just a job," and thereby absolve themselves of any responsibility. When I think about it, it scares the hell out of me.
Take our current financial crisis. There are an ocean of mortgage brokers, real estate agents, bankers, politicians, financial traders, and investors who helped make this happen, who drew paychecks while setting the rest of us up to take the fall. How many of them feel responsible? As far as I can tell, almost none of them.
What he is saying is everything we do is driven from a selfish motivation. Firefighters derive a sense of satisfaction from protecting people and that is why they do it.
This is a rhetorical trick that has always annoyed me. By definition, all motivation for action is at some point internal. To say that all motivations are therefore equally selfish is idiotic.
Let's assume that:
Attila the Hun liked killing people.
Torquemada liked torturing people.
Mother Teresa liked helping people.
Gandhi liked making the world more just.
That they are all personal motivations is undeniable. Calling them equally selfish, and saying that therefore people are equally selfish is a trick where you confuse two different meanings of selfish.
We are born with a capacity for compassion, in the same way we are born with a capacity to run. Whether we choose to develop those capacities is up to us.
I fail to see the connection between being a spammer and being a murder-suicide in the making. Basically, we're all self-centered.
Making one's living through large-scale fraud isn't even a vaguely normal amount of self-centeredness. You have to be pretty fucked up. Which sort of fucked up, I dunno, but if he's sufficiently narcissistic, he may have a very limited empathy for other people. My layman's understanding is that narcissists can see family members more as extensions of themselves than true individuals. Perhaps he saw killing his family as just part of the job of ending it all, not realizing that they would feel otherwise.
Of course, we'll never really know, so I'm just speculating, but it seems plausible to me.
Do I care about your wellbeing? Not really. Do you care about mine?
Yeah, I do. Maybe it's corny, but I care about my fellow humans. I care about my family, my city, my nation, my world. I also care about myself, but that's definitely not the only thing I care about.
if only he had used canadian antidepressants! I am sure I could find the mail somewhere which had extremely good rates from a company called International Pharmacy.
I was so determined not to laugh. No matter how awful the participant was, a murder/suicide like this is nothing but a tragedy. But damm, that's funny.
It's neat that not only can they declare a law unconstitutional, but they can write their own as well ("the law now says gays can marry!", and order the local governments to execute it!
What would you propose happen otherwise?
The law limiting marriage to heterosexuals was declared unconstitutional. Either they say, "Everybody can marry," or they say, "Nobody can marry until a new law is passed." The first one seems much more sensible to me.
It's important to note that they explicitly did not want to set policy:
It also is important to understand at the outset that our task in this proceeding is not to decide whether we believe, as a matter of policy, that the officially recognized relationship of a same-sex couple should be designated a marriage rather than a domestic partnership (or some other term), but instead only to determine whether the difference in the official names of the relationships violates the California Constitution. [...] Whatever our views as individuals with regard to this question as a matter of policy, we recognize as judges and as a court our responsibility to limit our consideration of the question to a determination of the constitutional validity of the current legislative provisions.
Except you forgot the part about "willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment". The SF Mayor did NOT accept any penalty.
Sorry, I guess I gave you too much credit for the ability to think beyond the literal meaning.
Yes, he never went to prison. However, that doesn't change the meat of MLK's point: refusal to follow (or in Newsom's case, enforce) an unjust law in order to promote reform isn't a sign of contempt for the law; it's a sign of respect. If he had done in in the face of a prison threat, that might make him braver, but it wouldn't make him any more right.
One of his precious illegal aliens that he gives sanctuary to just murdered a man and his two sons because their car was in his way. Fuck Newsom. Fuck him to hell.
This is ridiculous. Yes, the cops screwed up by letting a violent criminal go. But that has nothing to do with a good sanctuary policy, which improves public safety.
The main thing cops need is information. What crimes are happening. Who's committing them. Where to find them. If people are afraid to talk to the cops, then cops don't get the information they need. If you want to fight crime among illegal aliens, and especially if you want to go after gangs like MS-13, you need the illegal aliens to be willing to talk to the cops.
As a San Francisco resident, I know there are a variety of illegal aliens here, and that nothing the city government does will change that. I want those people to feel safe taking their kids to the doctor. I want them to feel safe letting their kids go to school. And I especially want them to feel safe calling the cops. The immigrant gangs spend most of their time around other immigrants, legal and illegal.
Only if immigrants feel comfortable talking to the police without fear that they or their friends will get deported will we have a chance of beating the gangs.
Reading a lot of comments about him being a nut job. My question is - what if he isn't? Is it possible that as a administrator of a SAN/Network [...]
Wait, you lost me there.
As a recovering sysadmin who ran a Cisco network covering 8 time zones myself, I feel comfortable saying that admins of my acquaintance range from a little crazy to a lot crazy.
You have to be at least somewhat obsessive to worry about all those niggling details and tiny inconsistencies that can bring things crashing down. A big helping of paranoia is entirely necessary to stay two steps ahead of anybody wanting to break into your network. And it's hard to say you have a good sense of proportion if you're really going to spend your nights and weekends maintaining gear used by chumps who don't care and don't thank you while working under clueless dolts who don't have the foggiest notion of what you do.
I still have plenty of friends who do that sort of work, so I speak with respect and love here. But when people ask me why I refuse to do sysadmin or network admin work anymore, my ha-ha-but-serious answer is, "I got better."
Martin Luther King once said, "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
It was also a law that the California Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional, so it seems like in retrospect it was a pretty good call.
I guess Newsom is an MCSE/CCNA and therefore is trusted.
It's actually Newsom's perfect hair that generates a trust enhancement field. Terry Childs saw through this, but recognized the hair as a superintelligent alien symbiont that is on our planet to save us from ourselves, so he gave the passwords directly to the hair.
Where I come from, jokes are either "funny" or "not funny", not trolls or attempts at being an asshole.
Coming in out of the blue and, based on knowing exactly nothing, suggesting that a friend of mine is an underachiever who didn't do any work but has given herself a fancy title to sound better is indeed being an asshole.
If it had been particularly funny, or a mildly funny joke that I hadn't heard before, or even a mildly funny joke that had some truth behind it, you could be a forgivably funny asshole. That's fine; I have plenty of friends like that. But it's a lame, obvious, insulting, and entirely ignorant joke. And that is why you're just an asshole.
There isn't much straight HTML to speak of, unless you are talking about the HTML that the Javascript spits out.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's why I said, "their rendering components generated".
If you want to use GWT effectively, take some time to learn Javascript.
GWT seems mainly to be useful for people who know a lot of Java but not much lot of JavaScript. Now that I have taken the time to learn JavaScript better, I'm inclined just to skip GWT and write the JavaScript directly, so that I don't have to deal with their whole infrastructure.
I spent a month using it to build something in April 2007, and it was a big ol' pain. Getting something that roughly worked wasn't too bad, but there were a number of bugs and quirks that cost me time and headache.
Also, their rendering components generated an awful lot of hard to manage HTML and CSS. There were several display issues I never got quite right, and when I asked a front-end whiz to help me out, he had some very unkind things to say about the generated code.
My end impression was that it was about 0.7 in quality, needed a lot of polishing, and was really only useful for Java people who didn't want to understand what was actually going on in the browser. Were I to do that project over again, I'd instead just use something like JQuery, and learn how to do JavaScript properly, rather than hoping a framework would save me from my ignorance.
It's not up to an editor to determine artistic choices.
It's up to the editor to represent the reader, and to a lesser extent the publisher and the author's saner moments. My impression, and that of others, is that he's run his editors ragged. "Too fucking long" can be an artistic choice, but for most authors it's just a sign that they picked an editor weaker than them.
Some people appreciate it, you obviously don't.
Yes, that's exactly why I've read everything he's written, bar the last volume of the Baroque cycle.
I'm flattered by your comments, but I'm afraid I'm not even remotely qualified to present at a conference, particularly not one on Agile ideas. I wish you luck, though. It's a bit far from the UK to come for a visit, so have a beer for me while you're there.:-)
I understand, but you should definitely think about it.
Almost all of the presenters are people working in the field; few are full-time "experts". And by definition, the "Questioning Agile" is meant to draw in outside views. If you're already mentoring junior developers and can present to 20-30 people, then I'm sure you're as qualified as the average presenter. The rest is preparation, and the year until Agile 2009 gives you plenty of time to develop your thesis, to collect evidence of the problem, and to deliver a couple of practice talks to local user groups or other interested parties.
But I'm serious that we're always looking for outside views. the Agile 2008 closing keynote is by Alan Cooper, who for years publicly maintained that we were all dangerous lunatics, inimical to good software development everywhere. He's now moderated his position a little, but I know he's coming to challenge a variety of our notions, and I'm looking forward to it.
And yes, I'll definitely hoist a beer in your lack of name.:-)
One thing that comes to mind is that most of the agile leaders I've met are pretty sharp, and the technical ones are generally top notch, with many years of experience. The initial audience they were addressing is people like them, so a lot of the literature is could well be poorly tuned for the fresh-out-of-college set.
Will you be at Agile 2008? If so, drop me an email and we'll meet up for a beer.
Regardless, you should present on this very topic at Agile 2009. We specifically want critical feedback, and have a Questioning Agile track that might be a good place. There's also a Learning and Education track that might be a good candidate. I'm involved in one of the other tracks, and I'd be glad to help advocate for a presentation that is along the lines of your comments here, especially if you do enough research to demonstrate the problem. E.g., by showing some interviews of overly dogmatic newbies.
Slashdot Mirror
Dealing with unjust laws is what the courts are for.
At least in the US, that is 100% wrong. Courts are for interpreting laws and dealing with conflicts, real and apparent, between various layers of the law.
Dealing with unjust laws is explicitly not part of their remit. A relevant example to this case: someone growing or selling medical marijuana, even when they have a municipal license and are paying all their taxes, may not mention the medical nature of their selling in federal court, because the law in question doesn't excuse that.
Dealing with unjust laws is the responsibility of the citizenry. And, supposedly, the politicians, but I think they've forgotten.
Excuse a non American dude here, but if growing pot within the boundaries you describe is legal according to the state, how can it be illegal nationally? [...]Which one of the systems has precedence?
Functionally, neither.
I think state, county, and local police all are deputized by the state, and so, AFAIK, enforce state or local law. Federal police of various sorts (e.g., FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, US Postal Inspectors, ICE, and even, and I am not making this up, the Amtrak Police) enforce federal law.
I live in San Francisco, where we allow medical marijuana sales and where the city licenses various operations to grow that marijuana. The Bush-era Feds don't like this, and so will occasionally raid large-scale dispensaries and growers under federal law, showing exactly how much they really believe the standard conservative lines about states' rights, trusting the citizens, and minimal government interference.
At one point, our city council was talking about having the city grow the pot itself, to see if the Feds had the cojones to come and arrest our mayor, but I think that blew over.
Interestingly, the local government is pretty relaxed about who gets access to medical marijuana, partly because we don't care much, and partly because they don't want a lot of records around for the DEA to seize. So by sending the occasional grower or seller to prison for years, the federal government isn't reducing the supply at all, but they have made it a lot easier for people without any real medical issue to buy pot quasi-legally.
Not that it matters a ton; I pretty regularly see people smoking marijuana in open-air bars or at public events in the park where people are drinking.
You don't solve that by changing editors.
Well, perhaps you can.
IntelliJ IDEA has three kinds of in-editor change tracking.
Assuming the original poster is keeping these files in some version control system (which he sure should be) then it will highlight changes both in the left window gutter and in the scroll bar. That way you can tell exactly what you've touched.
A second is a nice integration of the "blame" or "annotate" function, where in the left gutter it will mark each line with who made the last change and when.
A third is that it has its own internal version control system that's more granular than checking in. So as you're working, you can look back at what you've been up to. Think of it kind of like a shell's command line history, but for editors.
For working on code, I love all of these features.
You have entirely missed my point.
If she was anything like I am she derived a great deal of satisfaction in helping people and even greater heartache when she could not.
Yes, that would make it a personal motivation. That all motivations are personal at some point in the causal chain is a tautological observation. By definition, all individual actions can be linked to personal motivations.
However, given the full spectrum of human motivations, you can rank them on a spectrum of selfish to selfless. Claiming that all motivations are selfish because they can be seen as personal is absurd, a misleading trick of words. I've seen Randites pull this trick for 20 years, and it is getting old.
Just once, I'd like to see these murder-suicide perpetrators do The Right Thing (TM) and *start* with the suicide!
How do you know most of them aren't doing that already?
Apparently a mod couldn't tell that was a joke, so just to beat this to death: I'm kidding.
For example, I'm a white guy and my girlfriend is African. I have to wear sunblock ... she doesn't. Is that a racist comment?
Your girlfriend? She's not property, you patriarchal phallocentric sexist pig!
Email spammers are inherently and universally sociopaths.
This is probably true for the people who start and run high-volume spamming rings. But I think it's important to remember that there are quite a number of ordinary people who get caught up in these things.
One of the weird things about large corporations is that they can disconnect us from the consequences of our actions. People say, "Oh, it's just a job," and thereby absolve themselves of any responsibility. When I think about it, it scares the hell out of me.
Take our current financial crisis. There are an ocean of mortgage brokers, real estate agents, bankers, politicians, financial traders, and investors who helped make this happen, who drew paychecks while setting the rest of us up to take the fall. How many of them feel responsible? As far as I can tell, almost none of them.
What he is saying is everything we do is driven from a selfish motivation. Firefighters derive a sense of satisfaction from protecting people and that is why they do it.
This is a rhetorical trick that has always annoyed me. By definition, all motivation for action is at some point internal. To say that all motivations are therefore equally selfish is idiotic.
Let's assume that:
That they are all personal motivations is undeniable. Calling them equally selfish, and saying that therefore people are equally selfish is a trick where you confuse two different meanings of selfish.
We are born with a capacity for compassion, in the same way we are born with a capacity to run. Whether we choose to develop those capacities is up to us.
I fail to see the connection between being a spammer and being a murder-suicide in the making. Basically, we're all self-centered.
Making one's living through large-scale fraud isn't even a vaguely normal amount of self-centeredness. You have to be pretty fucked up. Which sort of fucked up, I dunno, but if he's sufficiently narcissistic, he may have a very limited empathy for other people. My layman's understanding is that narcissists can see family members more as extensions of themselves than true individuals. Perhaps he saw killing his family as just part of the job of ending it all, not realizing that they would feel otherwise.
Of course, we'll never really know, so I'm just speculating, but it seems plausible to me.
Do I care about your wellbeing? Not really. Do you care about mine?
Yeah, I do. Maybe it's corny, but I care about my fellow humans. I care about my family, my city, my nation, my world. I also care about myself, but that's definitely not the only thing I care about.
if only he had used canadian antidepressants! I am sure I could find the mail somewhere which had extremely good rates from a company called International Pharmacy.
I was so determined not to laugh. No matter how awful the participant was, a murder/suicide like this is nothing but a tragedy. But damm, that's funny.
It's neat that not only can they declare a law unconstitutional, but they can write their own as well ("the law now says gays can marry!", and order the local governments to execute it!
What would you propose happen otherwise?
The law limiting marriage to heterosexuals was declared unconstitutional. Either they say, "Everybody can marry," or they say, "Nobody can marry until a new law is passed." The first one seems much more sensible to me.
It's important to note that they explicitly did not want to set policy:
As far as I can tell, that's what they did.
Except you forgot the part about "willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment". The SF Mayor did NOT accept any penalty.
Sorry, I guess I gave you too much credit for the ability to think beyond the literal meaning.
Yes, he never went to prison. However, that doesn't change the meat of MLK's point: refusal to follow (or in Newsom's case, enforce) an unjust law in order to promote reform isn't a sign of contempt for the law; it's a sign of respect. If he had done in in the face of a prison threat, that might make him braver, but it wouldn't make him any more right.
One of his precious illegal aliens that he gives sanctuary to just murdered a man and his two sons because their car was in his way. Fuck Newsom. Fuck him to hell.
This is ridiculous. Yes, the cops screwed up by letting a violent criminal go. But that has nothing to do with a good sanctuary policy, which improves public safety.
The main thing cops need is information. What crimes are happening. Who's committing them. Where to find them. If people are afraid to talk to the cops, then cops don't get the information they need. If you want to fight crime among illegal aliens, and especially if you want to go after gangs like MS-13, you need the illegal aliens to be willing to talk to the cops.
As a San Francisco resident, I know there are a variety of illegal aliens here, and that nothing the city government does will change that. I want those people to feel safe taking their kids to the doctor. I want them to feel safe letting their kids go to school. And I especially want them to feel safe calling the cops. The immigrant gangs spend most of their time around other immigrants, legal and illegal.
Only if immigrants feel comfortable talking to the police without fear that they or their friends will get deported will we have a chance of beating the gangs.
Reading a lot of comments about him being a nut job. My question is - what if he isn't? Is it possible that as a administrator of a SAN/Network [...]
Wait, you lost me there.
As a recovering sysadmin who ran a Cisco network covering 8 time zones myself, I feel comfortable saying that admins of my acquaintance range from a little crazy to a lot crazy.
You have to be at least somewhat obsessive to worry about all those niggling details and tiny inconsistencies that can bring things crashing down. A big helping of paranoia is entirely necessary to stay two steps ahead of anybody wanting to break into your network. And it's hard to say you have a good sense of proportion if you're really going to spend your nights and weekends maintaining gear used by chumps who don't care and don't thank you while working under clueless dolts who don't have the foggiest notion of what you do.
I still have plenty of friends who do that sort of work, so I speak with respect and love here. But when people ask me why I refuse to do sysadmin or network admin work anymore, my ha-ha-but-serious answer is, "I got better."
I thought that becoming indispensable meant I was a valuable employee, and I had job security.
When I was similarly obsessed with handling every problem myself, a friend said to me, "The graveyards are full of indispensable people."
Martin Luther King once said, "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
It was also a law that the California Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional, so it seems like in retrospect it was a pretty good call.
I guess Newsom is an MCSE/CCNA and therefore is trusted.
It's actually Newsom's perfect hair that generates a trust enhancement field. Terry Childs saw through this, but recognized the hair as a superintelligent alien symbiont that is on our planet to save us from ourselves, so he gave the passwords directly to the hair.
Where I come from, jokes are either "funny" or "not funny", not trolls or attempts at being an asshole.
Coming in out of the blue and, based on knowing exactly nothing, suggesting that a friend of mine is an underachiever who didn't do any work but has given herself a fancy title to sound better is indeed being an asshole.
If it had been particularly funny, or a mildly funny joke that I hadn't heard before, or even a mildly funny joke that had some truth behind it, you could be a forgivably funny asshole. That's fine; I have plenty of friends like that. But it's a lame, obvious, insulting, and entirely ignorant joke. And that is why you're just an asshole.
There isn't much straight HTML to speak of, unless you are talking about the HTML that the Javascript spits out.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's why I said, "their rendering components generated".
If you want to use GWT effectively, take some time to learn Javascript.
GWT seems mainly to be useful for people who know a lot of Java but not much lot of JavaScript. Now that I have taken the time to learn JavaScript better, I'm inclined just to skip GWT and write the JavaScript directly, so that I don't have to deal with their whole infrastructure.
I think you're thinking of Google App Engine rather than Google Web Toolkit.
I spent a month using it to build something in April 2007, and it was a big ol' pain. Getting something that roughly worked wasn't too bad, but there were a number of bugs and quirks that cost me time and headache.
Also, their rendering components generated an awful lot of hard to manage HTML and CSS. There were several display issues I never got quite right, and when I asked a front-end whiz to help me out, he had some very unkind things to say about the generated code.
My end impression was that it was about 0.7 in quality, needed a lot of polishing, and was really only useful for Java people who didn't want to understand what was actually going on in the browser. Were I to do that project over again, I'd instead just use something like JQuery, and learn how to do JavaScript properly, rather than hoping a framework would save me from my ignorance.
It's not up to an editor to determine artistic choices.
It's up to the editor to represent the reader, and to a lesser extent the publisher and the author's saner moments. My impression, and that of others, is that he's run his editors ragged. "Too fucking long" can be an artistic choice, but for most authors it's just a sign that they picked an editor weaker than them.
Some people appreciate it, you obviously don't.
Yes, that's exactly why I've read everything he's written, bar the last volume of the Baroque cycle.
I'm flattered by your comments, but I'm afraid I'm not even remotely qualified to present at a conference, particularly not one on Agile ideas. I wish you luck, though. It's a bit far from the UK to come for a visit, so have a beer for me while you're there. :-)
I understand, but you should definitely think about it.
Almost all of the presenters are people working in the field; few are full-time "experts". And by definition, the "Questioning Agile" is meant to draw in outside views. If you're already mentoring junior developers and can present to 20-30 people, then I'm sure you're as qualified as the average presenter. The rest is preparation, and the year until Agile 2009 gives you plenty of time to develop your thesis, to collect evidence of the problem, and to deliver a couple of practice talks to local user groups or other interested parties.
Don't forget there are also a variety of European Agile get-togethers, from the London Extreme Tuesday Club to the large annual conference. You can keep an eye out for ones in your area on the Agile Alliance events page.
But I'm serious that we're always looking for outside views. the Agile 2008 closing keynote is by Alan Cooper, who for years publicly maintained that we were all dangerous lunatics, inimical to good software development everywhere. He's now moderated his position a little, but I know he's coming to challenge a variety of our notions, and I'm looking forward to it.
And yes, I'll definitely hoist a beer in your lack of name. :-)
Interesting!
One thing that comes to mind is that most of the agile leaders I've met are pretty sharp, and the technical ones are generally top notch, with many years of experience. The initial audience they were addressing is people like them, so a lot of the literature is could well be poorly tuned for the fresh-out-of-college set.
Will you be at Agile 2008? If so, drop me an email and we'll meet up for a beer.
Regardless, you should present on this very topic at Agile 2009. We specifically want critical feedback, and have a Questioning Agile track that might be a good place. There's also a Learning and Education track that might be a good candidate. I'm involved in one of the other tracks, and I'd be glad to help advocate for a presentation that is along the lines of your comments here, especially if you do enough research to demonstrate the problem. E.g., by showing some interviews of overly dogmatic newbies.