ignorance of the gender neutral definitions of 'he' has been a particular annoyance for me. i gave the following response to a girl who once complained about how "sexist" the english language is:
curious about it, i once opened a dictionary and looked up two words: 'he' and 'man.' in both cases, i found that exactly half the definitions were gender specific and half were gender neutral.
if i were to say, "a doctor should be able to prescribe any drug he wishes" that makes no implication about the gender of the doctor. it is not sexist. to replace "he" with "he or she" is unnecessary because the context makes it obvious that gender neutrality is intended (besides, then we would fight about whether it should be "he or she" or "she or he"). to replace it with "she" (as i've seen done to show politically correctness) is also incorrect since some doctors are men. to replace it with "they" is simply grammatically incorrect, since "doctor" is singular.
after thinking about all of this, i started to wonder--why do men have to share our words, while women get their own? "woman" and "she" belong completely to women, but "man" and "he" have to be shared in some contexts. don't men deserve a pronoun of their own?
not only do men have to share their words, but women's words are bigger. "she" is 50% longer than "he." "woman" is 66% longer and has twice as many syllables as "man."
so, it is true that the language is sexist against men. however, as a man i'm okay with that. i understand that a language is just a standard and sexism is not implied by someone simply following the standard. i'm okay with sharing words like "congressmen" with women, rather than forcing them to invent a new word, "congressperson," just to make me feel better about having a word to myself.
...although the above speech shut her up in that instance, i think i made an enemy for life.
"The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" by Mike Wilson was actually relesed several years ago and was released on paperback on November 11 (which is what came up on Amazon). so, it's looking like a little less of a conspiracy.
i went over to amazon to check out this book and it recommended another about larry, first edition release november 11 ("The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" by Mike Wilson). it was available cheaply so i selected the two and proceeded to checkout, when amazon presented me with a whole page of recommendation and i saw another ("Everyone Else Must Fail : The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison" by Karen Southwick) ALSO with the release date of november 11. including the one referenced in the article (released october 1), that makes three books about larry ellison released within a peariod of 6 weeks.
anyone know what's going one? are there more books? is this some kind of strange marketing campaign? all three of them are by different publishers, yet two release on the same day!
i looked up this book on amazon and it recommended another, the title of which litterally is "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison"
The ALCU is about advancing left wing ideology, not about protecting civil liberties. If the right to protect my house, my family, and my own life is not a civil liberty, then what is? That is the most basic human right of them all and the "American Civil Liberties Union" implicidly claims that I forfeit my right to life if some crackhead comes in my house at night looking for drug money. They should be ashamed to call themselves by that name.
"We have already evolved so much, our actions would be incomprehensible to a human from a thousand years ago, it's the evolution revolution. Tomorrow we speed up the process, all sectors, all species. Only the strong shall evolve."
okay, let's look at three numbers (i'll borrow two of them from your post)...
- in 2000, the top 1% paid 37.42% of federal income taxes (source) - in 2001, the top 1% received 42% of the tax cuts - in 2003, the top 1% received 29.1% of the tax cuts
so, in 2001 the top 1% did recieve 4.58% more than their share of the tax cut, but the bottom 99% received 8.32% more than their share in 2003. i can't comment on the top 0.13% because i don't know how much they pay. my point is that the tax cuts are roughly proportionate according to your numbers.
the phrase "tax cuts for the rich" it tossed around to create envy and hatred between classes. it is inherently biased when you leave out how much the the rich are actually paying in federal taxes.
how does the typical MCSE skill set map to what will be needed to cope with an environment in which perhaps 20% of the servers and 80% of the desktops run Linux while the remainder continue to run Microsoft suites?
Okay, I'm a developer and not an IT guy, but this does not make sense to me. Why would a company run 80% of their desktops with Linux and 80% of their servers with Windows?
Pet Peeve #1: The feeling that someone, somewhere may have more money and nicer things than you do.
Could someone on the SUV bashing side explain why they get singled out so much among the fuel inefficient vehicles? It seems like trucks are okay, but as soon as you add a couple more seats for your family in place of the truck bed, they're now pure evil.
It looks to me like the anti-SUV crowd are the ones whining. Why can't you just be happy with what you have and leave them alone? Why do you need to attack people so strongly for selecting a particular type of vehicle you don't like? I suppose Ford people and GM people attack eachother with similar verbage, but I don't understand that either.
How much hatred is there in this exchange: "Ask Slashdot: Should I buy an electric or hybrid car?" "SUVs suck!"
I don't think the writer is deciding between a hybrid/electric and an SUV. Why would SUVs come up at all?
i caught that the moment i hit submit...so much for being taken seriously:(
oops...slashdot requires me to wait 2 minutes between posts...waiting...waiting...go
Releave economic pressure--don't just block leaks
on
No Americans Need Apply
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We'll see much, much more job flight in the short term until the brakes are applied to this savage anti-social approach.
what brakes? the reason all this is happening is that the american economy is overinflated. inside the united states are high wages and high cost, with much of the rest of the world as a relative vacuum.
don't give me the corporate greed hatespeak--you can view the income statements and balance sheets yourself for the largest corportations. things are expensive in the united states because production costs are high. production costs are high because workers demand more money. workers demand more money because cost of living is high (notice i'm not using "greedy worker" hatespeak). cost of living is high because things are expensive. the cycle goes on and pressure grows.
this cycle is protected such policies as taxing imports, fixing high prices on agriculture, and creating barriers to accessing foreign labor. these policies don't help ameri
by putting the "brakes" on, all you're doing is keeping the pressure in. i'm not saying we need to rip open the floodgates (in fact, i think that would be very dangerous), but the solution is not to just keep plugging holes. what happens when the average american is making 100 times as much as the average indian without an improved standard of living from where americans are now? what about 200 times?
you can't let the pressure grow forever. we will size up eventually, either now in a controlled manner by choice, or later in a dangerous and chaotic manner by force (when nobody else in the world will pay so much for our labor or goods, but we still want imports from them).
pardon me for ending this post with bitching, but i'm getting really tired of politicians who propose lots of great things for america when they are really just passing the cost to the next generation. it sounds great at first to protect the american workers in these ways, but america must pay in the end.
maybe i'm just skimming too quickly, but when they say "it runs cheaper with windows," i don't see a discussion about how WELL it runs. what about uptime, security, and performance benchmarks?
i suppose it's also cheaper to run *a* database with ms-access rather than oracle--all you need to do is ignore performance!
Another memorable EULA quote: I'm forbidden to use Visual Studio tools to make any word processing or spreadsheet application, unless it's a small part of a larger application.
I googled around for this clause in context and only found it relating to components that MS was giving away for free. For example, if MS gives away some sample code, they don't want to see it showing up in a competing word processor. That doesn't mean you can't make a competing word processor with Visual C++.
Even though McDonalds gives away katchup packets, I'm sure they'd object to Burger King taking them to avoid paying for katchup on the burgers they sell. Fair is fair.
If someone can post a link to this clause in a broader context, let me know. About a year ago, I started keeping an MS EULA collection and would love to add this snippet.
...oh, and they're still huge assholes for trying to forbid benchmarks.
"hmmm"
[click]
(popup) "you did NOT want to click there--trust me"
that could be a life-saver, but it had better has hell work right. i don't want clippy randomly popping up with:
"it appears you are trying to view morbidly obese gay midget S & M. perhaps you would like to view these images..."
"GAAAA!!!! Undo! Undo!"
...and it had better separate users... "um...timmy...why don't you use mom's computer for your school report...dad's is...um...yeah, use mom's"
one of the candidates happens to be a geek so slashdoters had some fun and asked some geek questions. i would not like it if slashdot gave one candidate the opportunity to make a political ad about core issues on this site while denying others--that's unfair and offtopic. they had some innocent fun with a geek candidate. enjoy it or skip the article.
you can get information about the standard 'core issues' from her website. if it's not on the website, she probably would have avoided the question anyway.
HP's are purchased mainly by students--especially engineering students. Many engineering classes are extremely calculator-intensive (eg circuits, mechanics of solids, linear algebra). This will sound silly to someone who hasn't been through it, but an engineering student MASTERS his calculator (not every function, but becoming very fast with the parts he needs). The HP graphing calculators are VERY tough to beat in the speed with which a proficient user can crunch through numbers. If you're paying $80k for an engineering degree, you want a dedicated piece of hardware for the task--and you DON'T want to be messing around with a stylus when the prof says "2 minutes left."
For most users, I agree with you. However, these calculators aren't for "most users" to begin with.
Having attended (and completed) an engineering college, TI vs. HP was a topic of moderately fierce debate (akin to VI vs. Emacs). Overall, mechanical engineering students preferred TI while Electrical and Computer Engineering students preferred HP. I think a lot of it had to do with the HP's great interface for handling complex numbers (which Electrical/Computer Engineering students need to do lots of), but the HP's had much more of a learning curve. You had to learn how to 'think' in HP, which was not always comfortable at first, but I would stack up my ability to crunch through calculations with an HP to anyone with a TI.
VI vs. Emacs probably isn't a fair comparison. It's more like VI vs. MS Notepad. Ever try to convince a Windows diehard why VI is better than notepad? That's what it's like trying to convert at TI user to HP.
what does this have to do with freedom? the taxpayers are supplying free computers for people to use!
i defy anyone to defend the opinion that the constitution requires us to put computers in our libraries. for that matter, i defy anyone to defend the opinion that it's a violation of our freedom to have no libraries at all. i'm not saying libraries are a bad idea--just saying they're not a human right.
put another way, how can it be that:
no violation of freedom (if there were no library computers) + a new freedom (access to some websites on library computers) = a violation of freedom?
it's like saying "x + 1 is less than x"
just for fun, what would happen of we treated the second amendment like the first? the constitution says we have a right to speech and we have a right to guns. if you assert the implication that we must buy speech for those who can not afford it, then we also need to buy guns for those who can not afford them. the laws requiring filters would correspond to laws forbidding the most dangerous of firearms in this federal program (let's say, all fully automatic weapons). that's not to say people would not have access to these weapons--just that they would not be freely available under this program. now, what would you think of the nra if they cried out that this restriction was a violation of the second amendment?
i don't know about you, but at that point i would say that the nra is no longer about the second amendment, but rather about pushing an agenda of "more guns! more guns! more guns!" regardless of the constitution. the extreme "anti-censorship" crowd is like that. when what they want is to force the national endowment for the arts to buy things that most people find offensive, or silence students from speaking religious views in school, or make porn available in libraries, it's no longer about the first amendment, is it? who is really "implementing their views" on whom?
Slashdot Mirror
ignorance of the gender neutral definitions of 'he' has been a particular annoyance for me. i gave the following response to a girl who once complained about how "sexist" the english language is:
curious about it, i once opened a dictionary and looked up two words: 'he' and 'man.' in both cases, i found that exactly half the definitions were gender specific and half were gender neutral.
if i were to say, "a doctor should be able to prescribe any drug he wishes" that makes no implication about the gender of the doctor. it is not sexist. to replace "he" with "he or she" is unnecessary because the context makes it obvious that gender neutrality is intended (besides, then we would fight about whether it should be "he or she" or "she or he"). to replace it with "she" (as i've seen done to show politically correctness) is also incorrect since some doctors are men. to replace it with "they" is simply grammatically incorrect, since "doctor" is singular.
after thinking about all of this, i started to wonder--why do men have to share our words, while women get their own? "woman" and "she" belong completely to women, but "man" and "he" have to be shared in some contexts. don't men deserve a pronoun of their own?
not only do men have to share their words, but women's words are bigger. "she" is 50% longer than "he." "woman" is 66% longer and has twice as many syllables as "man."
so, it is true that the language is sexist against men. however, as a man i'm okay with that. i understand that a language is just a standard and sexism is not implied by someone simply following the standard. i'm okay with sharing words like "congressmen" with women, rather than forcing them to invent a new word, "congressperson," just to make me feel better about having a word to myself.
...although the above speech shut her up in that instance, i think i made an enemy for life.
"The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" by Mike Wilson was actually relesed several years ago and was released on paperback on November 11 (which is what came up on Amazon). so, it's looking like a little less of a conspiracy.
i went over to amazon to check out this book and it recommended another about larry, first edition release november 11 ("The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" by Mike Wilson). it was available cheaply so i selected the two and proceeded to checkout, when amazon presented me with a whole page of recommendation and i saw another ("Everyone Else Must Fail : The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison" by Karen Southwick) ALSO with the release date of november 11. including the one referenced in the article (released october 1), that makes three books about larry ellison released within a peariod of 6 weeks.
anyone know what's going one? are there more books? is this some kind of strange marketing campaign? all three of them are by different publishers, yet two release on the same day!
i looked up this book on amazon and it recommended another, the title of which litterally is "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison"
The ALCU is about advancing left wing ideology, not about protecting civil liberties. If the right to protect my house, my family, and my own life is not a civil liberty, then what is? That is the most basic human right of them all and the "American Civil Liberties Union" implicidly claims that I forfeit my right to life if some crackhead comes in my house at night looking for drug money. They should be ashamed to call themselves by that name.
"why aren't you at work?"
"they said if i come in late one more time i'm fired. i can't take that chance!"
"We have already evolved so much, our actions would be incomprehensible to a human from a thousand years ago, it's the evolution revolution. Tomorrow we speed up the process, all sectors, all species. Only the strong shall evolve."
--Trevor Goodchild
okay, let's look at three numbers (i'll borrow two of them from your post)...
- in 2000, the top 1% paid 37.42% of federal income taxes (source)
- in 2001, the top 1% received 42% of the tax cuts
- in 2003, the top 1% received 29.1% of the tax cuts
so, in 2001 the top 1% did recieve 4.58% more than their share of the tax cut, but the bottom 99% received 8.32% more than their share in 2003. i can't comment on the top 0.13% because i don't know how much they pay. my point is that the tax cuts are roughly proportionate according to your numbers.
the phrase "tax cuts for the rich" it tossed around to create envy and hatred between classes. it is inherently biased when you leave out how much the the rich are actually paying in federal taxes.
how does the typical MCSE skill set map to what will be needed to cope with an environment in which perhaps 20% of the servers and 80% of the desktops run Linux while the remainder continue to run Microsoft suites?
Okay, I'm a developer and not an IT guy, but this does not make sense to me. Why would a company run 80% of their desktops with Linux and 80% of their servers with Windows?
Am I just missing the whole point of the article?
Let me guess then...
Pet Peeve #1: The feeling that someone, somewhere may have more money and nicer things than you do.
Could someone on the SUV bashing side explain why they get singled out so much among the fuel inefficient vehicles? It seems like trucks are okay, but as soon as you add a couple more seats for your family in place of the truck bed, they're now pure evil.
It looks to me like the anti-SUV crowd are the ones whining. Why can't you just be happy with what you have and leave them alone? Why do you need to attack people so strongly for selecting a particular type of vehicle you don't like? I suppose Ford people and GM people attack eachother with similar verbage, but I don't understand that either.
How much hatred is there in this exchange:
"Ask Slashdot: Should I buy an electric or hybrid car?"
"SUVs suck!"
I don't think the writer is deciding between a hybrid/electric and an SUV. Why would SUVs come up at all?
Trunk space? you couldn't even the tell battery pack was there if it wasn't pointed out to you. Plenty of space for normal people.
t tp://www.choppingblock.org/d/20030430.html
Nice feature for your typical serial killer.
http://www.choppingblock.org/d/20030702.html
h
If an N-Gage locomotive is four inches long, a cell phone at that scale must be on the order of microns. ::ducks::
i caught that the moment i hit submit...so much for being taken seriously :(
oops...slashdot requires me to wait 2 minutes between posts...waiting...waiting...go
We'll see much, much more job flight in the short term until the brakes are applied to this savage anti-social approach.
what brakes? the reason all this is happening is that the american economy is overinflated. inside the united states are high wages and high cost, with much of the rest of the world as a relative vacuum.
don't give me the corporate greed hatespeak--you can view the income statements and balance sheets yourself for the largest corportations. things are expensive in the united states because production costs are high. production costs are high because workers demand more money. workers demand more money because cost of living is high (notice i'm not using "greedy worker" hatespeak). cost of living is high because things are expensive. the cycle goes on and pressure grows.
this cycle is protected such policies as taxing imports, fixing high prices on agriculture, and creating barriers to accessing foreign labor. these policies don't help ameri
by putting the "brakes" on, all you're doing is keeping the pressure in. i'm not saying we need to rip open the floodgates (in fact, i think that would be very dangerous), but the solution is not to just keep plugging holes. what happens when the average american is making 100 times as much as the average indian without an improved standard of living from where americans are now? what about 200 times?
you can't let the pressure grow forever. we will size up eventually, either now in a controlled manner by choice, or later in a dangerous and chaotic manner by force (when nobody else in the world will pay so much for our labor or goods, but we still want imports from them).
pardon me for ending this post with bitching, but i'm getting really tired of politicians who propose lots of great things for america when they are really just passing the cost to the next generation. it sounds great at first to protect the american workers in these ways, but america must pay in the end.
maybe i'm just skimming too quickly, but when they say "it runs cheaper with windows," i don't see a discussion about how WELL it runs. what about uptime, security, and performance benchmarks?
i suppose it's also cheaper to run *a* database with ms-access rather than oracle--all you need to do is ignore performance!
what about photoshop benchmarks?
::ducks::
parse error on line 1 near "sporf!"
Another memorable EULA quote: I'm forbidden to use Visual Studio tools to make any word processing or spreadsheet application, unless it's a small part of a larger application.
...oh, and they're still huge assholes for trying to forbid benchmarks.
I googled around for this clause in context and only found it relating to components that MS was giving away for free. For example, if MS gives away some sample code, they don't want to see it showing up in a competing word processor. That doesn't mean you can't make a competing word processor with Visual C++.
Even though McDonalds gives away katchup packets, I'm sure they'd object to Burger King taking them to avoid paying for katchup on the burgers they sell. Fair is fair.
If someone can post a link to this clause in a broader context, let me know. About a year ago, I started keeping an MS EULA collection and would love to add this snippet.
"hmmm"
...and it had better separate users... "um...timmy...why don't you use mom's computer for your school report...dad's is...um...yeah, use mom's"
[click]
(popup) "you did NOT want to click there--trust me"
that could be a life-saver, but it had better has hell work right. i don't want clippy randomly popping up with:
"it appears you are trying to view morbidly obese gay midget S & M. perhaps you would like to view these images..."
"GAAAA!!!! Undo! Undo!"
technology does have its ugly side.
one of the candidates happens to be a geek so slashdoters had some fun and asked some geek questions. i would not like it if slashdot gave one candidate the opportunity to make a political ad about core issues on this site while denying others--that's unfair and offtopic. they had some innocent fun with a geek candidate. enjoy it or skip the article.
you can get information about the standard 'core issues' from her website. if it's not on the website, she probably would have avoided the question anyway.
The stamp is now $2.47
Make sure to go out and buy special $2.10 stamps to use with your existing $0.37 ones.
HP's are purchased mainly by students--especially engineering students. Many engineering classes are extremely calculator-intensive (eg circuits, mechanics of solids, linear algebra). This will sound silly to someone who hasn't been through it, but an engineering student MASTERS his calculator (not every function, but becoming very fast with the parts he needs). The HP graphing calculators are VERY tough to beat in the speed with which a proficient user can crunch through numbers. If you're paying $80k for an engineering degree, you want a dedicated piece of hardware for the task--and you DON'T want to be messing around with a stylus when the prof says "2 minutes left."
For most users, I agree with you. However, these calculators aren't for "most users" to begin with.
Having attended (and completed) an engineering college, TI vs. HP was a topic of moderately fierce debate (akin to VI vs. Emacs). Overall, mechanical engineering students preferred TI while Electrical and Computer Engineering students preferred HP. I think a lot of it had to do with the HP's great interface for handling complex numbers (which Electrical/Computer Engineering students need to do lots of), but the HP's had much more of a learning curve. You had to learn how to 'think' in HP, which was not always comfortable at first, but I would stack up my ability to crunch through calculations with an HP to anyone with a TI.
VI vs. Emacs probably isn't a fair comparison. It's more like VI vs. MS Notepad. Ever try to convince a Windows diehard why VI is better than notepad? That's what it's like trying to convert at TI user to HP.
yeah--and old gets jokes
what does this have to do with freedom? the taxpayers are supplying free computers for people to use!
i defy anyone to defend the opinion that the constitution requires us to put computers in our libraries. for that matter, i defy anyone to defend the opinion that it's a violation of our freedom to have no libraries at all. i'm not saying libraries are a bad idea--just saying they're not a human right.
put another way, how can it be that:
no violation of freedom (if there were no library computers)
+ a new freedom (access to some websites on library computers)
= a violation of freedom?
it's like saying "x + 1 is less than x"
just for fun, what would happen of we treated the second amendment like the first? the constitution says we have a right to speech and we have a right to guns. if you assert the implication that we must buy speech for those who can not afford it, then we also need to buy guns for those who can not afford them. the laws requiring filters would correspond to laws forbidding the most dangerous of firearms in this federal program (let's say, all fully automatic weapons). that's not to say people would not have access to these weapons--just that they would not be freely available under this program. now, what would you think of the nra if they cried out that this restriction was a violation of the second amendment?
i don't know about you, but at that point i would say that the nra is no longer about the second amendment, but rather about pushing an agenda of "more guns! more guns! more guns!" regardless of the constitution. the extreme "anti-censorship" crowd is like that. when what they want is to force the national endowment for the arts to buy things that most people find offensive, or silence students from speaking religious views in school, or make porn available in libraries, it's no longer about the first amendment, is it? who is really "implementing their views" on whom?