Social skills are defined by what society you're part of. The well-dressed, smooth-talking types who are usually what we think of as "socially skilled" are just as out of place among a bunch of geeks as geeks are in other settings.
I don't agree that being comfortable in geek company makes you socially skilled. Socially skilled people are those who can get along very well with a random person. $RANDOM_JOE is far more likely to be a non-geek than a geek.
"It's okay to get some exercise, take a shower, and put on clean clothes!"
None of which has much to do with social skills. We're talking about how easily you interact with other people. Take me for instance: I do all the things you mentioned. Heck, I even have pointy hair. However, I have great difficulty behaving in society as I'm expected to. I find most social mores to be ridiculous. See the link in my sig, it starts with: "If you're the kind of person that hates being invited to parties...". And I mean it. I think lack of social skills is a rather fundamental trait/problem, one that can't be overcome just by being a little less lazy. From my limited observation, being socially skilled involves things like "small talk", and smiling like a retard every once in a while, things which I abhor. I often find myself forgetting what's the thing to say when someone says thank you. And if you accost me and ask me a question, particularly when I'm coding, I might look at your face and stare blankly for 15 seconds while I disentangle my train of thought, which you might find unnerving. And I would get totally frustrated if someone I'm waiting for spends half an hour primping themself. So you see, my social skills are pathetic. I'm sure other geeks also share some of these traits. And its not something you can change without giving up a fundamental part of what you are.
Hehe, we are talking at cross-purposes. Of course I know and respect Lessig. But the guy that I'm talking about is the author of the first link in the story, who critisizes Lessig's proposal, which is the second link.
What he proposes is the best way to kill e-mail.
I can think of several problems right away:
The spam problem currently exists mainly because we can't track down spammers. Until you solve that, implementing an e-mail tax will never get off the ground.
What about open relays? Of course its stupid and irresponsible to have one, but now you could now find yourself being taxed thousands of dollars for doing so?
What about an worm/trojan sending out bulk e-mail? Punishing the victim is a great idea.
How do you deal with mail across national boundaries? I wonder if he has thought about the world about the USA.
What about mailing lists? How do you propose to tax them? They take up more bandwidth than a single e-mail but less than n individual emails. Defining all these would lead to such a messy overregulated internet that it will lose all trace of what it was like formerly.
This guy has no idea of the technicalities of the internet.
Look at this statement:
The simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax. This requires smashing some myths. A decade ago, Americans were gulled by politicians of both parties into believing that taxing the internet exceeded the government's capability. When that proved to be manifestly untrue, they were told that a tax would be an affront to some mythic libertarian "spirit of the internet".
Mythic, eh? Has this troll heard of usenet? This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.
Re:When you think about it...
on
Searching Sound
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not sure.
What's new about this technology is that it does searches without transcription, but instead works at the phoneme level. This doesn't mean that the results are more accurate than if transcription and indexing are used. Its just that the new technique has applications in some cases that can't be handled by the conventional method, like when your model is inadequate, and you would lose information by converting phonemes into lexical form.
Its not clear how this sort of thing would be useful for the military. My guess is that for the purpose of espionage it would be much better to have the recording converted to text first.
Actually, in the 70s AI people built LISP machines (which executed lisp in hardware). I wonder if its possible to get a stripped down emacs with its core reimplemented in lisp to run directly on one of those.
Back in the days of Windows 98, when rebooting every couple of hours was the norm, it would have made a lot of sense for M$ to introduce a journaling FS, so that users don't lose data all the time. But now that Windows users too have pretty decent uptimes, I wonder if it is such a big deal, since journaling has a performance penalty.
but I'd also like to see more desktop hardware that doesn't aim for compatibility with Intel
That's almost out of the question (I'm assuming you mean instruction set compatibility). The entry barrier is enormous. Will Joe Schmoe buy hardware that won't let him run a vast majority of the programs he downloads off the 'net (which are typically produced by single* penniless developers who can't afford to build on anything but their own machine)?
Everything that you've said is on the must be prefaced with It is commonly believed in my circles in block letters.
Certainly, if you like. But I must also mention that my field is cryptography research.
WTF is a 'brute force for public key encryption' ? Did you ever heard that assymetric key recovery is essentially a factoring challenge,
Of course. But I was using bruteforce in a weaker sense, to mean that they can't crack it merely by throwing computing cycles at it (as the original poster meant), without the benefit of some attack/algorithm unknown to the rest of the world.
The DES/NSA statement is simply hillarious.
Then go ahead and laugh. But make sure you've read the relevant literature, like the recent attacks on AES and how far they are from succeeding in practice. I'll say it again if you want: unless the NSA have developed a different attack on AES or a new factoring algorithm, they can't crack anything that you and I can't.
And, dude, pubke encryption is not 'the only one that allows authentication'. It is in fact used for this purpose in some architectures, but there are plenty authentication schemes that do just fine and rely on other cyrptographic means.
Sure, but none that can be used when strangers meet for the first time.
Next time before you flame someone, please try to understand what they are saying, or the laugh might be on you.
RMS has a detailed analysis of why the BSD advertising clause was a very bad idea in practice.
Speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn't want to slap such a clause to anything I wrote. First, I think the egoboo factor is totally overstated. For instance, I wrote a small vocab building app called gretools. I wrote it to scratch a personal itch: to help me with my gre preparation. Ego satisfaction had nothing to do with it. I released it only as an afterthought. Second, what's the point of having J. Random user being being forced to see your name? If you want to build a reputation as a programmer, you would want to build up that reputation with other programmers, which is what you get currenty because your name is in the source. In suspect, most users could consider it as unwanted ads/annoyance. We're trying to get people to use OSS by removing annoyances (like popup blocking), introducing our own forms of annoyance is self defeating. Third, Reiser specifically wants political statements irremovable and visible to users. This is bad. Being free means creating software without trying to impose your idealogy on others. There are practical problems too. You are unnecessarily limiting your user base. If, for instance, your political message included praise for the Falun
Gong, it could well lead to any distro that includes your package being banned in the PRC, because you made your statement irremovable. I wonder how many programmers would choose to adopt such a license. Fourth, OSS companies are trying hard to stay afloat and make some money. The better these companies survive, the better your chances of becoming/staying gainfully employed coding Free software. Give them a chance. Don't view them as capitalist evil and impede them from establishing a brand.
That's just my opinion. You are free to pick your license.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree that being comfortable in geek company makes you socially skilled. Socially skilled people are those who can get along very well with a random person. $RANDOM_JOE is far more likely to be a non-geek than a geek.
"It's okay to get some exercise, take a shower, and put on clean clothes!"
None of which has much to do with social skills. We're talking about how easily you interact with other people. Take me for instance: I do all the things you mentioned. Heck, I even have pointy hair. However, I have great difficulty behaving in society as I'm expected to. I find most social mores to be ridiculous. See the link in my sig, it starts with: "If you're the kind of person that hates being invited to parties...". And I mean it. I think lack of social skills is a rather fundamental trait/problem, one that can't be overcome just by being a little less lazy. From my limited observation, being socially skilled involves things like "small talk", and smiling like a retard every once in a while, things which I abhor. I often find myself forgetting what's the thing to say when someone says thank you. And if you accost me and ask me a question, particularly when I'm coding, I might look at your face and stare blankly for 15 seconds while I disentangle my train of thought, which you might find unnerving. And I would get totally frustrated if someone I'm waiting for spends half an hour primping themself. So you see, my social skills are pathetic. I'm sure other geeks also share some of these traits. And its not something you can change without giving up a fundamental part of what you are.
Am I the only one who finds the term "social software" terribly ironic, considering the social skills of the people who write software? :-)
My guess: 10 minutes from the start of the slashdotting :)
1. Providing RHCE certfication exams, and certs.
Which is great, because IT graduates here are crazy about things like that.
Poor or no mirrors for downloading distros.
Doesn't make much of a difference, considering the bandwidth situation and that the primary method of distribution is CDs.
Little or no support offerings for their products.
Well, people don't even pay MS (though that's changing recently), how do you expect them to pay RH??
Few relationshipd with h/w vendors that matter in Asia.
This is the thing that matters most. Which is why I'm very happy about this move.
In that case I must say that Microsoft has been fairly successful: the economy of several Asian countries is primarily agricultural...
Well, didn't you know that all hackers worth the name write their own shells?
Hehe, we are talking at cross-purposes. Of course I know and respect Lessig. But the guy that I'm talking about is the author of the first link in the story, who critisizes Lessig's proposal, which is the second link.
And the optimal packet size will probably be of the order of gigabytes!
We'll need protocols that absolutely minimize the number of rounds over all other considerations.
And I wonder if your downloads will be slightly slower or faster depending on the red shift or blue shift of the server :-)
Did you leave out the 'E' at the end?
I didn't want to do that. Original post was a joke about booting directly into emacs, so I was wondering if it was a (theoretical) possibility.
Hmm.. phonemes just tell you what the sound is, they contain no information about the voice.
-
The spam problem currently exists mainly because we can't track down spammers. Until you solve that, implementing an e-mail tax will never get off the ground.
-
What about open relays? Of course its stupid and irresponsible to have one, but now you could now find yourself being taxed thousands of dollars for doing so?
-
What about an worm/trojan sending out bulk e-mail? Punishing the victim is a great idea.
-
How do you deal with mail across national boundaries? I wonder if he has thought about the world about the USA.
-
What about mailing lists? How do you propose to tax them? They take up more bandwidth than a single e-mail but less than n individual emails. Defining all these would lead to such a messy overregulated internet that it will lose all trace of what it was like formerly.
This guy has no idea of the technicalities of the internet.Look at this statement:
Mythic, eh? Has this troll heard of usenet? This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.What's new about this technology is that it does searches without transcription, but instead works at the phoneme level. This doesn't mean that the results are more accurate than if transcription and indexing are used. Its just that the new technique has applications in some cases that can't be handled by the conventional method, like when your model is inadequate, and you would lose information by converting phonemes into lexical form.
Its not clear how this sort of thing would be useful for the military. My guess is that for the purpose of espionage it would be much better to have the recording converted to text first.
Actually, in the 70s AI people built LISP machines (which executed lisp in hardware). I wonder if its possible to get a stripped down emacs with its core reimplemented in lisp to run directly on one of those.
You can easily run X on a 333 Mhz machine.
I use a PII 333 as my server and desktop, and I have very little incentive to upgrade.
If you want to give an example of a bitty box you can't run X on, pick something lower down in the pecking order.
The only thing he found wanting in emacs was a good text editor :)
Back in the days of Windows 98, when rebooting every couple of hours was the norm, it would have made a lot of sense for M$ to introduce a journaling FS, so that users don't lose data all the time. But now that Windows users too have pretty decent uptimes, I wonder if it is such a big deal, since journaling has a performance penalty.
That's almost out of the question (I'm assuming you mean instruction set compatibility). The entry barrier is enormous. Will Joe Schmoe buy hardware that won't let him run a vast majority of the programs he downloads off the 'net (which are typically produced by single* penniless developers who can't afford to build on anything but their own machine)?
*single in the sense of being the only developer
Certainly, if you like. But I must also mention that my field is cryptography research.
WTF is a 'brute force for public key encryption' ? Did you ever heard that assymetric key recovery is essentially a factoring challenge,
Of course. But I was using bruteforce in a weaker sense, to mean that they can't crack it merely by throwing computing cycles at it (as the original poster meant), without the benefit of some attack/algorithm unknown to the rest of the world.
The DES/NSA statement is simply hillarious.
Then go ahead and laugh. But make sure you've read the relevant literature, like the recent attacks on AES and how far they are from succeeding in practice. I'll say it again if you want: unless the NSA have developed a different attack on AES or a new factoring algorithm, they can't crack anything that you and I can't.
And, dude, pubke encryption is not 'the only one that allows authentication'. It is in fact used for this purpose in some architectures, but there are plenty authentication schemes that do just fine and rely on other cyrptographic means.
Sure, but none that can be used when strangers meet for the first time.
Next time before you flame someone, please try to understand what they are saying, or the laugh might be on you.
[Bye, going to bed.]
Lets see more of those! I hope the reward applies irrespective of whether you bring in the spammers dead or alive :-)
Brilliant, brilliant! Mod that up. It's also a nice way of responding to people who insist you say "Gnu/Linux".
Have things gotten so bad that people have to be explicitly directed to read the article??
Suggestive is an understatement :) Lyrics here
Speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn't want to slap such a clause to anything I wrote. First, I think the egoboo factor is totally overstated. For instance, I wrote a small vocab building app called gretools. I wrote it to scratch a personal itch: to help me with my gre preparation. Ego satisfaction had nothing to do with it. I released it only as an afterthought. Second, what's the point of having J. Random user being being forced to see your name? If you want to build a reputation as a programmer, you would want to build up that reputation with other programmers, which is what you get currenty because your name is in the source. In suspect, most users could consider it as unwanted ads/annoyance. We're trying to get people to use OSS by removing annoyances (like popup blocking), introducing our own forms of annoyance is self defeating. Third, Reiser specifically wants political statements irremovable and visible to users. This is bad. Being free means creating software without trying to impose your idealogy on others. There are practical problems too. You are unnecessarily limiting your user base. If, for instance, your political message included praise for the Falun Gong, it could well lead to any distro that includes your package being banned in the PRC, because you made your statement irremovable. I wonder how many programmers would choose to adopt such a license. Fourth, OSS companies are trying hard to stay afloat and make some money. The better these companies survive, the better your chances of becoming/staying gainfully employed coding Free software. Give them a chance. Don't view them as capitalist evil and impede them from establishing a brand.
That's just my opinion. You are free to pick your license.
If Barbie girl was one of your childhood favorites (which I doubt :-) but even if it wasn't, you are likely to enjoy this parody.