"This is a generalization: if you grew up in a mostly black neighborhood, I don't doubt that the word honkey could carry the threat of violence in certain situations."
Nope, but I know what it is like to be called a, "cracker". As in, "If you look at me, I'll cut your head of you mother fucking cracker. Look at me cracker, I said look at me so I can cut your mother fucking cracker head off!"
I grew up in a small, southern town that was roughly 60% black and 40% white and hearing cracker often implied the threat of intimidation and violence.
"I have never even heard an anecdote about an employer who refused to hire Germans or Italians, unless it was retold from the 1930s."
I'm guessing you have never seen a lone German walk into a bar filled with Russian before.
The kid was born in Berlin but spent the rest of his life in a rural town in the American south. He had no idea that there was any kind of animosity in this day and age. I mean the was was over a half century ago. There was quite a bit of unpleasantness and their words were far worse than kraut.
I guess I'd have to go with the MS review process. Break everything up into groups of 10. Whoever makes less than 2% on the yearly "loyalty review" dies. Not that we will tell you how we check for loyalty, but one of you will be found on the floor every 12 months with a bullet in the back of their head. 11% people are fastracked to early "retirement". It was your own damn fault for signing the work prison contract instead of automatically going to "rape-you-in-the-ass" prison.
You should look at the requirements for working for the NSA. On one hand a certain amount of curiosity and knowledge is required and on the other you need a devotion to rules that lies somewhere between Boy Scout and Nazi. How they fill positions without assuming that every applicant is lying through their teeth is beyond me.
How many people had more than one PC in their home in '03? Sure we now have 3 or 4 netbooks laying around the house, a couple iPod touches, a few old laptops and 3 half-dead PCs in the back room, but 52 year old, rural moms had (and probably still have) the one PC sitting sitting in the den, plugged directly into their dsl modem. Most people view routers as a way to get more than one device onto the internet, not a device that controls the flow of traffic.
I'm having similar questions as some of the other posters. I've consciously avoided work that requires signing an NDA, but I'm probably losing opportunities with this strategy. The whole thing sounds like a catch-22. Almost everyone I know except myself isn't even allowed to write their own software, let alone show anyone software the work they have done. Their companies claim complete ownership, even if it is just a 'hello world'. Granted this really isn't a big deal as far as having software to show, but it does cause someone to undermine their own credibility. It almost reminds me on the old "unix taint" you hear old AT&T guys talk about, though considerably less intrusive.
The real problem with replacements for the mouse, is that the mouse already tackles problems that our filthy meatbag bodies create.
We create an awful lot of moisture, sweat, oil, whatever and we carry around a lot of dirt on our hands. Even if you just washed your them, try rubbing them together and something with either fall off or gather into a little dark smudge. Hell, with all of the dead skin falling off our hands, they might as well be made of dirt. That stuff no matter how little, builds up fast. The mouse addresses the problem, by making sure that you never actually touch the surface area of your pointing device, but instead you hold this big plastic block, while your touchscreen bypasses the whole issues, but getting wiped off every time you put it into your pocket or holder. The touchpad (or surface of your desk) don't have either benefit. Crap just builds up and with it heat from friction.
You hit the nail on the head. This is just largely another, "iPhone/iPad will change everything" article. Too bad The Atlantic is so damned late; even the editors of Time know the story is old.
As far back as the '80s, when Apple launched the desktop-publishing revolution, the company has always made the case that the bourgeois comforts of an artfully constructed end-to-end solution, despite its limits, were superior to the freedom and danger of the digital badlands.
Though plenty of people here are being labeled as curmudgeons for listing times in their lives where they were forced to be creative, I think they may have something. Over the years it has gotten a lot easier for us and as the old saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention". We need problems in order to be creative, especially interesting problems. The example that keeps popping up in my mind is the shade tree mechanic. Your trained and bonded mechanic has most of the necessary tools as his or her disposal, as well as resources and references. The old fashioned shade tree doesn't always have that privilege, so he/she has to get creative in order to survive. No computer for diagnostics? Hack one together. It may take years, but all we have is time. No lift? Well, we have some scrap rail, chains and an old truck that we can't afford to put tires on, or even better we'll dig a trench lay this concrete pipe to where we will place our vehicles and tunnel our way. Why not? We can't find this part? Screw it, we'll make something work.
Though I'm sure I'll get it from an artist, creativity is something we can inspire, but without need or want, it is often an unnecessary waste of time and resources.
We can pass out guns that fire bullets and guns that pop out little flags out that say, "bang". Why not mix them up? It is more convenient for people who want to buy products with triggers.
Things I didn't bother thinking about until I bought a house:
The sad part of home ownership is that unless you paid cash you have a mortgage payment to make. If your property is devalued, you not only lose value (in the 'lost money on paper' sense), but if you say, lose your job and have to move elsewhere for gainful employment, you are now saddled with a huge debt or at least lose a lot of the equity you have accumulated (and then you might as well have been renting for the last 10-15 years).
This is why your neighbors get pissed when you build an eye sore. It isn't because they despise your rights as an individual (though there are some neighbors who get an obvious power trip off of it and some home owners associations who make fascist look reasonable), but because they want to defend their right to not have their $120K home become a $40K shack because you decided to "build" a stack of rusting shipping containers.
So in the end, yes, as messed up as it is, it is as much their business as they can legally make it and why I made sure not to live within a mile of another human being.
By people I mean the 17-24 year old testosterone market. The ultimate irony being that 40 year old mothers seem to take more pleasure from those cars than any other group.:O
The whole late 60s-early 70s, aggressive muscle car thing came from a time when 17-24 year olds had a greater disposable income (fewer taxes, cheap fuel, higher wages). If you don't believe me, ask someone who grew up in that era how they paid for college and how little debt they had when they finished. It really wasn't a fad in the sense that those cars weren't fashionable in the 80s and 90s (given that the Mustang has been going on an off production for forever), people simply couldn't afford them by then.
I hate to jump on the GIMP hate wagon, but I've found the UI particularly frustrating; not even the UI so much, but the utter lack of any sense of work flow. I appreciate the work that has been put into it, there is a lot of great stuff there, but so often I feel like I'm using a set of nifty command line tools bound together in glade instead of a single, cohesive program.
Take something like Blender. People complain about the UI, but after spending a week or so with it and getting the key commands down pat, you are up and running, like any other mature piece of software. I can walk away from it for weeks or months and it is just as easy to use, because there is a stable work flow there. I've never had that luck with GIMP. I always find myself Googling something silly like "draw line in gimp" or "map image in gimp" or "create bump map in gimp".
To make matters worse, whatever I find in online tutorials is often obsolete after a few versions because a particular utility is now under an obscure scripts list instead of being grouped with similar utilities. I almost feel like someone is trying to fuck with me and that is really sad, because it could go from being really useful pieces of software to a really great piece of software.
Given that the *AAs have attempted to manipulate the Swedish legal system, I'd say that this has less to do with the right to piracy than getting pissed that a set of wealthy, largely foreign, entertainment cartels have tried to shanghai their courts and politicians.
It makes you wonder how different things in the US would be if our government had any real concept, let alone the threat of no-confidence.
We also did this when I was in High School/Jr. High. Fun stuff, providing you didn't stick it in a mailbox and land a felony conviction. The kids who lived on farms had the real fun though.
Last year a couple kids at the local college made a few works bombs. The bomb squad was immediately called in and the accused were expelled the same day.
One is facing a felony conviction. Being black and on a scholarship, his life is virtually over. They'll send him to prison, he'll serve a short stint because he really didn't do anything wrong, get out on parole and stay on probation for 7 or 8 years because the state enjoys getting their $70 a month. If he is lucky he will work a menial job for the rest of his miserable life because defending or complaining about our treatment of felons is equated to giving child molesters bags of lollipops and driving them to the city park.
Even if I get ripped apart by wild dogs I can't help but hope we all get whats coming to us.
This isn't a new phenomena with MS; they have been doing it for forever. So I wouldn't say they are chasing Apple, just their own tail. If tamagotchis suddenly made a huge come back and everyone and their brother spent hours playing with it, MS would be obligated to create their own. Not attempting would be, by MS's measure, viewed as a failure (or at least not getting a few patents in that field would be a failure).
Still, if MS wants to have any real standing in the future, they will have to do as you suggested, get a dictator.
I think the word you are looking for is meritocracy. Not a bad idea in motive, but it doesn't fulfill the political needs of a society. It would last about a long as it takes a man with a gun to gather a crowd and shout: Those pointy heads think they are smarter than you!
Slashdot Mirror
"This is a generalization: if you grew up in a mostly black neighborhood, I don't doubt that the word honkey could carry the threat of violence in certain situations."
Nope, but I know what it is like to be called a, "cracker". As in, "If you look at me, I'll cut your head of you mother fucking cracker. Look at me cracker, I said look at me so I can cut your mother fucking cracker head off!"
I grew up in a small, southern town that was roughly 60% black and 40% white and hearing cracker often implied the threat of intimidation and violence.
"I have never even heard an anecdote about an employer who refused to hire Germans or Italians, unless it was retold from the 1930s."
I'm guessing you have never seen a lone German walk into a bar filled with Russian before.
The kid was born in Berlin but spent the rest of his life in a rural town in the American south. He had no idea that there was any kind of animosity in this day and age. I mean the was was over a half century ago. There was quite a bit of unpleasantness and their words were far worse than kraut.
Yep, bittorrent has really been hurting their business. Damn Pirates.
Or was I thinking Roman Decimation? Bah, same difference.
I guess I'd have to go with the MS review process. Break everything up into groups of 10. Whoever makes less than 2% on the yearly "loyalty review" dies. Not that we will tell you how we check for loyalty, but one of you will be found on the floor every 12 months with a bullet in the back of their head. 11% people are fastracked to early "retirement". It was your own damn fault for signing the work prison contract instead of automatically going to "rape-you-in-the-ass" prison.
You should look at the requirements for working for the NSA. On one hand a certain amount of curiosity and knowledge is required and on the other you need a devotion to rules that lies somewhere between Boy Scout and Nazi. How they fill positions without assuming that every applicant is lying through their teeth is beyond me.
How many people had more than one PC in their home in '03? Sure we now have 3 or 4 netbooks laying around the house, a couple iPod touches, a few old laptops and 3 half-dead PCs in the back room, but 52 year old, rural moms had (and probably still have) the one PC sitting sitting in the den, plugged directly into their dsl modem. Most people view routers as a way to get more than one device onto the internet, not a device that controls the flow of traffic.
I'm having similar questions as some of the other posters. I've consciously avoided work that requires signing an NDA, but I'm probably losing opportunities with this strategy. The whole thing sounds like a catch-22. Almost everyone I know except myself isn't even allowed to write their own software, let alone show anyone software the work they have done. Their companies claim complete ownership, even if it is just a 'hello world'. Granted this really isn't a big deal as far as having software to show, but it does cause someone to undermine their own credibility. It almost reminds me on the old "unix taint" you hear old AT&T guys talk about, though considerably less intrusive.
This leaves out the obvious question, "Will all Natal owners in Australia automatically be brought up on child molestation charges?"
You left out the part about several species Of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict.
The real problem with replacements for the mouse, is that the mouse already tackles problems that our filthy meatbag bodies create.
We create an awful lot of moisture, sweat, oil, whatever and we carry around a lot of dirt on our hands. Even if you just washed your them, try rubbing them together and something with either fall off or gather into a little dark smudge. Hell, with all of the dead skin falling off our hands, they might as well be made of dirt. That stuff no matter how little, builds up fast. The mouse addresses the problem, by making sure that you never actually touch the surface area of your pointing device, but instead you hold this big plastic block, while your touchscreen bypasses the whole issues, but getting wiped off every time you put it into your pocket or holder. The touchpad (or surface of your desk) don't have either benefit. Crap just builds up and with it heat from friction.
OK, saying EWorld was rude.
You hit the nail on the head. This is just largely another, "iPhone/iPad will change everything" article. Too bad The Atlantic is so damned late; even the editors of Time know the story is old.
As far back as the '80s, when Apple launched the desktop-publishing revolution, the company has always made the case that the bourgeois comforts of an artfully constructed end-to-end solution, despite its limits, were superior to the freedom and danger of the digital badlands.
Tee-hee, EWorld.
Though plenty of people here are being labeled as curmudgeons for listing times in their lives where they were forced to be creative, I think they may have something. Over the years it has gotten a lot easier for us and as the old saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention". We need problems in order to be creative, especially interesting problems. The example that keeps popping up in my mind is the shade tree mechanic. Your trained and bonded mechanic has most of the necessary tools as his or her disposal, as well as resources and references. The old fashioned shade tree doesn't always have that privilege, so he/she has to get creative in order to survive. No computer for diagnostics? Hack one together. It may take years, but all we have is time. No lift? Well, we have some scrap rail, chains and an old truck that we can't afford to put tires on, or even better we'll dig a trench lay this concrete pipe to where we will place our vehicles and tunnel our way. Why not? We can't find this part? Screw it, we'll make something work.
Though I'm sure I'll get it from an artist, creativity is something we can inspire, but without need or want, it is often an unnecessary waste of time and resources.
We can pass out guns that fire bullets and guns that pop out little flags out that say, "bang". Why not mix them up? It is more convenient for people who want to buy products with triggers.
Things I didn't bother thinking about until I bought a house:
The sad part of home ownership is that unless you paid cash you have a mortgage payment to make. If your property is devalued, you not only lose value (in the 'lost money on paper' sense), but if you say, lose your job and have to move elsewhere for gainful employment, you are now saddled with a huge debt or at least lose a lot of the equity you have accumulated (and then you might as well have been renting for the last 10-15 years).
This is why your neighbors get pissed when you build an eye sore. It isn't because they despise your rights as an individual (though there are some neighbors who get an obvious power trip off of it and some home owners associations who make fascist look reasonable), but because they want to defend their right to not have their $120K home become a $40K shack because you decided to "build" a stack of rusting shipping containers.
So in the end, yes, as messed up as it is, it is as much their business as they can legally make it and why I made sure not to live within a mile of another human being.
I can think of nothing that should drain an artists creativity more than knocking on doors at 8AM on a Saturday.
By people I mean the 17-24 year old testosterone market. The ultimate irony being that 40 year old mothers seem to take more pleasure from those cars than any other group. :O
The whole late 60s-early 70s, aggressive muscle car thing came from a time when 17-24 year olds had a greater disposable income (fewer taxes, cheap fuel, higher wages). If you don't believe me, ask someone who grew up in that era how they paid for college and how little debt they had when they finished. It really wasn't a fad in the sense that those cars weren't fashionable in the 80s and 90s (given that the Mustang has been going on an off production for forever), people simply couldn't afford them by then.
I hate to jump on the GIMP hate wagon, but I've found the UI particularly frustrating; not even the UI so much, but the utter lack of any sense of work flow. I appreciate the work that has been put into it, there is a lot of great stuff there, but so often I feel like I'm using a set of nifty command line tools bound together in glade instead of a single, cohesive program.
Take something like Blender. People complain about the UI, but after spending a week or so with it and getting the key commands down pat, you are up and running, like any other mature piece of software. I can walk away from it for weeks or months and it is just as easy to use, because there is a stable work flow there. I've never had that luck with GIMP. I always find myself Googling something silly like "draw line in gimp" or "map image in gimp" or "create bump map in gimp".
To make matters worse, whatever I find in online tutorials is often obsolete after a few versions because a particular utility is now under an obscure scripts list instead of being grouped with similar utilities. I almost feel like someone is trying to fuck with me and that is really sad, because it could go from being really useful pieces of software to a really great piece of software.
Given that the *AAs have attempted to manipulate the Swedish legal system, I'd say that this has less to do with the right to piracy than getting pissed that a set of wealthy, largely foreign, entertainment cartels have tried to shanghai their courts and politicians.
It makes you wonder how different things in the US would be if our government had any real concept, let alone the threat of no-confidence.
That's why you say, screw both ideas and put a bird in the air.
We also did this when I was in High School/Jr. High. Fun stuff, providing you didn't stick it in a mailbox and land a felony conviction. The kids who lived on farms had the real fun though.
Last year a couple kids at the local college made a few works bombs. The bomb squad was immediately called in and the accused were expelled the same day.
One is facing a felony conviction. Being black and on a scholarship, his life is virtually over. They'll send him to prison, he'll serve a short stint because he really didn't do anything wrong, get out on parole and stay on probation for 7 or 8 years because the state enjoys getting their $70 a month. If he is lucky he will work a menial job for the rest of his miserable life because defending or complaining about our treatment of felons is equated to giving child molesters bags of lollipops and driving them to the city park.
Even if I get ripped apart by wild dogs I can't help but hope we all get whats coming to us.
This isn't a new phenomena with MS; they have been doing it for forever. So I wouldn't say they are chasing Apple, just their own tail. If tamagotchis suddenly made a huge come back and everyone and their brother spent hours playing with it, MS would be obligated to create their own. Not attempting would be, by MS's measure, viewed as a failure (or at least not getting a few patents in that field would be a failure).
Still, if MS wants to have any real standing in the future, they will have to do as you suggested, get a dictator.
I think the word you are looking for is meritocracy. Not a bad idea in motive, but it doesn't fulfill the political needs of a society. It would last about a long as it takes a man with a gun to gather a crowd and shout: Those pointy heads think they are smarter than you!