For 30 years, physicists have believed that the universe is made up of tiny vibrating dimensional strings which only they are clever enough to understand. A fine idea, except it turns out not even they are clever enough after all. Nevertheless, they persist in this belief because the mathematics is beautiful.
It is incorrect to say "physicists have believed." It would be correct if you were to say "some physicists," or even better, "a small minority of physicists." String theorists certainly put a lot of stock in string theory; but even among that group of physicists, not all of them believe it's right so much as they think it's an idea worth working on. And at any rate, string theorists make up a tiny fraction of the community of physicists. Outside of that community, there's a lot of physicists who think it's hogwash, a lot of physicists who think it's uninteresting as long as it's so far divorced from the experimental realm (including myself), and a lot of physicists who simply don't care one way or the other because their work is in so separate a domain that they don't have a dog in that hunt.
I mention this because the overall premise of your post -- that physics (or, more accurately, physics research) is becoming more and more divorced from experiment -- is not borne out by my experience as a professional working physicist. Even among string theorists, of which I've known a fair number, I've never met any physicist who thinks there's virtue in untestable conjecture. They simply believe that if they work hard enough and are clever enough, they'll come up with effective ways to test string theories that are reachable by experiment or observation. They may be wrong about that (and whether they are or they aren't wrong, until they do come up with some way to test it, I'm not interested); but all the string theorists I've known understand quite well the importance of experiment and observation. They aren't simply believers. And at any rate, string theorists make up a small fraction of the community of research physicists.
Dirac's argument (and all the field-theoretic) arguments in favor of the existence of magnetic monopoles have had to do with an elementary particle exhibiting those characteristics. Sometimes this is phrased in the terms of a 0-dimensional topological defect, something that would be produced by certain kinds of symmetry breaking; and indeed one of the arguments in favor of cosmological inflation theories was the fact that we don't see fundamental-particle monopoles, and would expect to. Finding one of these guys would be amazing news.
What these experiements seem to have done, however, is detected the effect of what condensed matter physicists like to refer to as a quasi-particle, akin to the phonon, which is a different thing entirely.
It wasn't close to major population centers when it was built.
This. Also, not all observing is in the visual bands; and of that which is, not all of it is ruined by the light pollution (there's still some observing that's possible, light pollution and all). And while the light pollution is a problem, there's comparatively little issue with seeing because of the inversion layer over LA, which is a really good thing.
Then why didn't it happen uniformly, on all charges? Unless the posting function for 12 50 ($46.88) is different from the posting function for every other amount?
Way back when EA was a small-ish independent company, and was run very very differently from how it's run now, they issued a really fun little game entitled Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic. At one of the locations in the game universe that was relevant to the overarching plot, there's a large laboratory and underground/underwater cave complex. At one point, as your team moves through a set of corridors, there's a fork in the corridor. Taking the left fork keeps you in the game world; taking the right fork sends you down a corridor that eventually brings you to the offices of Electronic Arts itself, a maze of cubicles where you find yourself engaged by "EA Rowdies," bands of programmers with Nerf guns (which were indeed popular in the EA Offices back then). Very very funny. And who knew how badly you could get hurt by Nerf guns!
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference.
Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money. People who really want to teach, such as myself, will often take a cut in pay to do so.
Yes, I agree, some people who are good teachers are willing to take a pay cut to teach. But others who would also be good teachers opt to do something else because they don't want to be paid so poorly. Your approach guarantees that the teacher population is made up of two groups: 1) people who are so committed to teaching that they don't mind the low pay (good) and 2) people that take the teaching job because it's the best they can get (bad).
I swear to god, teaching is the only profession where people seemingly earnestly make the argument that improving pay won't improve the pool of job candidates. In every other profession on the planet, people raise the pay to attract higher-quality candidates and use competition for jobs between the candidates to select the best ones from that pool of candidates.
Yes, you're right. Raising teacher pay will attract more people. Then, we do our best to hire the ones who will be best at teaching. With a larger pool of applicants than before (including the applicants who would have been there anyway at a lower pay point, but also a bunch of new applicants as well), how can you argue that we'll end up with worse teachers than if we paid them bus fare and had the smaller applicant pool? That really strains the boundaries of logic.
For a long time, the standard for headphones in hardcore audio was Sennheiser's HD-580. Even though Sennheiser sold more expensive models, everyone seemed to consider the HD-580 the pinnacle. Well, they don't make HD-580's anymore; and last I checked, the logical successor products (the HD-600?) weren't getting anywhere near as strong reviews.
So what's the logical replacement for the HD-580? What's the best pair of headphones for under $300? And what's the amount you'd be expected to spend now to find headphones of the same quality as the HD-580 (and what's the product)?
I was just coming here to post something similar to this
Over the years, there have been numerous "ASK SLASHDOT" and otherwise categorized posts here on the subject of discharge procedures. "I got laid off, and they made me pack up my stuff in front of someone who watched me and then escorted me out of the building. It was humiliating." That kind of thing.
Well, this event illustrates why some places decide to do it that way. FNMA didn't do it that way with this guy, and he took advantage of the time between firing and removal of access.
I read PJ's post on Groklaw, linked to in the article summary. It seems as if she's effectively defining Groklaw's purpose as being to deal with the threat to free and open-source software brought on by the SCO cases; that being so, if the threat from SCO is over, there's not much to do except to make sure that the tons of archived information is correct, and to work to make it easily accessible to those who might come to need it in the future.
1. Is it really the case that the SCO cases are over? It's true that SCO's cases against IBM, Autozone, and Red Hat are moot if SCO doesn't hold the copyrights they use as the basis for their claim; but SCO plans to appeal the judgment in Novell's favor. Until that appeal is done, it doesn't seem to me to be over.
2. Even assuming the SCO aspect of this situation is over, the fundamental issues here haven't been decided. Essentially, the judgment against SCO means that SCO doesn't have standing to bring a lawsuit against IBM. But if Novell were to become evil, then who's to say they couldn't bring such a lawsuit? The fundamental question of whether Linux infringes on UNIX copyrights has yet to be decided on in court (however ridiculous any of us may feel such a claim to be). That was the issue when Groklaw originally got started, and it's still out there.
3. Furthermore, it's not the only legal issue that could threaten Linux or other FOSS projects in the future. Groklaw has at times addressed issues associated with patents and trade secrets, and those aren't going anywhere. And we still have yet to finish cases in which software companies attempt to invalidate the terms of the GPL, to exculpate themselves from appropriating code from projects licensed under the GPL -- also a topic occasionally covered by Groklaw. I understand that it's PJ's blog, and her life, and the focus of Groklaw is whatever she says it is. But it's still sad, because the decision to define the focus of the resource (for that's what its archives and especially its participant base are) narrowly leaves behind a vacuum at a time when there are still real threats to oppose.
Please don't limit it to just arrest - good intentions of well meaning people never trump civil liberties. At least when it concerns constitutionally protected liberties then no matter how they are infringing your civil liberties if it is not done in a completely legal manner then your civil liberties do trump their well meaning intentions and they need to be brought up sharply and made to understand that being well meaning is not a get out of jail free card.
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
-- Daniel Webster
It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.
Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.
I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.
Meh. As others have noted, it was for a poster session. This conference isn't in my field, but at the conferences I've been to in my field (astronomy and astrophysics), pretty much anything gets accepted for poster sessions. At AAS meetings, I've seen particularly wacky posters in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology all clumped together in a kind of ghetto; and back when I was a grad student, during free time between oral sessions or at the end of the day, someone among my friends and I would say "hey, let's go look at the crazy stuff" and we'd take a look at the posters about space potatoes or the Plutonium Atom Totality or whatever. On occasion, I've even seen oral sessions -- typically one of the last ones on the last day -- devoted to something like "Speculative Ideas in Cosmology" with some of the nuttier talks tucked in there (as well as ones which are almost certainly wrong, but aren't in the same league of crazy as we're talking about, unfortunately).
Wait, has anyone on this forum ever talked to Nobel Laureates in any sciences? Or read about them?
The vast majority (I'd ballpark it at 80% from completely non-scientific, anecdotal experience) of Nobel Prize winners IN SCIENCE are ego-driven megalomaniacs that are addicted to prestige and influence
I've at least met, and in some cases taken multiple semesters of courses from or worked with, Martinus Veltman, T.D. Lee, Norman Ramsey, Leon Lederman, Riccardo Giaconi, John Mather and George Smoot. I wouldn't agree with your assessment at all.
But he's accomplished something significant in one particular field. How does that make him qualified to do anything outside of that field? And let's leave aside the potential that the Nobel prizes themselves are awarded based on a political basis.
Can you give me an example of a Nobel prize in physics that was awarded on a political basis?
When it comes to MS, anti-trust regulations have been toothless in the past; why would they have any more teeth in the future? Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was a *Clinton* appointment.
I hate to be the one to bring reality into this little discussion, but for HP to dump Windows and start selling Linux (or any other OS) instead is really, really stupid.
Who said that? You are just making up a strawman argument.
People are saying that if HP had the cojones, they would push to sell good consumer-grade linux systems.
But they are not saying to "dump Windows."
They're equivalent, since if HP started pushing quality consumer-grade Linux systems, MS can respond by simply no longer providing HP with OEM Windows to pre-install. After all, there are many other computer manufacturers that can fill the market space; there's only one MS to get Windows from.
As long as it's a fair question then here's a fair answer - I'm working on it, I anticipate emigrating in 6-12 months.
Fair enough.
I still don't get this loyalty thing though. What's it supposed to count for? I mean, if the government goes to war am I supposed to join in, not because I agree but because of loyalty? I need some help with the concept, if it's not just tribalism and it's not supporting the government, and it's not just agreeing with what the people decide?
I can only speak for myself here. For me, there are things I don't like about this country, and things that I do. I have no doubt that'd be true anywhere -- no place is perfect. The things that I do like about this country win; if they didn't, I too would look for a place with which I'd be happier.
Once I've made that choice -- the choice that the good things about this country are more persuasive than the bad things about it, and therefore I do want to live here -- then I personally feel that I owe a debt. I feel like I owe a debt to those who came before me who worked to create a place, a society, in which I'd want to live my life, and to those here now who maintain it and try hard (and often fail, but they're trying) to improve it. Otherwise, I'm a freeloader: I'm simply taking advantage of someone else's hard work. And so I work that debt off: by showing honest gratitude for the opportunities I have here which I might not have elsewhere; by doing my tiny, tiny best to help the society and the country function; and by contributing what little I have towards leaving this place better than I found it. Doing those things, and not giving up on them, is loyalty to the country, for me -- it's saying "I love what I've got here, and am grateful for it, and so I'm going to keep trying to help it get better and I'm not going to give up on it."
In answer to the specific question you asked, no, I don't think loyalty to a country *necessarily* requires one to go to war for it; but it's not a simple question. If I were English, for instance, I would feel differently about the loyalty of someone who chose not to fight in WW2 than I would someone who chose not to fight in colonial India.
Why do I owe any loyalty to the UK?
I was born here, great, I disagree with pretty much everythiung the government does, I find the people short-sighted, generally ignorant, scared and celebrity obsessed.
Do I owe loyalty to the rocks?
Then why don't you leave?
Please don't misunderstand me -- I'm not being accusatory or trying to insult you. If you don't like the place where you are, then why don't you go someplace you *would* like? Or at least *try* to go there?
Dissent is not disloyal. Like the grandparent poster, I encourage dissent. Disloyalty is another matter. If you don't value your citizenship, then why stay a citizen?
I wonder if one of the questions they asked had to do with whether the candidate thought it made any sense to submit an article to/., with a link back to one's own website, when the database server on one's website can't handle the load the article would generate.
For years I've bought most of my parts from Newegg. But historically, I've bought CPU/heatsink/fan/motherboard/one stick as part of a bundle from Monarch Computer. I did this for two reasons:
1. they stress-tested the setup for 48 hours before packing and shipping;
2. (the main reason) I'm perfectly comfortable building my own machine, except for one thing that terrifies me -- attaching the heatsink/fan to the CPU. I've not only never done it, I've never even seen it done. I have visions of trying to do it, screwing it up, and Bad Stuff (tm) happening -- I'm not exactly rich. And I know no one locally who builds their own machine and can look over my shoulder while I do it.
It's been long enough since I built my last machine that I'm shopping again. But since that last machine, Monarch apparently went from good to bad customer service, then went bust. So is there anyone else reliable out there that does this? With good current mobo/processor options? Or am I overestimating how easy it is to screw this up?
Slashdot Mirror
I have to take exception to this:
For 30 years, physicists have believed that the universe is made up of tiny vibrating dimensional strings which only they are clever enough to understand. A fine idea, except it turns out not even they are clever enough after all. Nevertheless, they persist in this belief because the mathematics is beautiful.
It is incorrect to say "physicists have believed." It would be correct if you were to say "some physicists," or even better, "a small minority of physicists." String theorists certainly put a lot of stock in string theory; but even among that group of physicists, not all of them believe it's right so much as they think it's an idea worth working on. And at any rate, string theorists make up a tiny fraction of the community of physicists. Outside of that community, there's a lot of physicists who think it's hogwash, a lot of physicists who think it's uninteresting as long as it's so far divorced from the experimental realm (including myself), and a lot of physicists who simply don't care one way or the other because their work is in so separate a domain that they don't have a dog in that hunt.
I mention this because the overall premise of your post -- that physics (or, more accurately, physics research) is becoming more and more divorced from experiment -- is not borne out by my experience as a professional working physicist. Even among string theorists, of which I've known a fair number, I've never met any physicist who thinks there's virtue in untestable conjecture. They simply believe that if they work hard enough and are clever enough, they'll come up with effective ways to test string theories that are reachable by experiment or observation. They may be wrong about that (and whether they are or they aren't wrong, until they do come up with some way to test it, I'm not interested); but all the string theorists I've known understand quite well the importance of experiment and observation. They aren't simply believers. And at any rate, string theorists make up a small fraction of the community of research physicists.
Dirac's argument (and all the field-theoretic) arguments in favor of the existence of magnetic monopoles have had to do with an elementary particle exhibiting those characteristics. Sometimes this is phrased in the terms of a 0-dimensional topological defect, something that would be produced by certain kinds of symmetry breaking; and indeed one of the arguments in favor of cosmological inflation theories was the fact that we don't see fundamental-particle monopoles, and would expect to. Finding one of these guys would be amazing news.
What these experiements seem to have done, however, is detected the effect of what condensed matter physicists like to refer to as a quasi-particle, akin to the phonon, which is a different thing entirely.
Or am I missing something?
It wasn't close to major population centers when it was built.
This. Also, not all observing is in the visual bands; and of that which is, not all of it is ruined by the light pollution (there's still some observing that's possible, light pollution and all). And while the light pollution is a problem, there's comparatively little issue with seeing because of the inversion layer over LA, which is a really good thing.
If you believe that god doesn't exist then you are an atheist (despite the fact that it can't be proved)
You can say this as many times as you like; but that simply is not the definition of the term.
Then why didn't it happen uniformly, on all charges? Unless the posting function for 12 50 ($46.88) is different from the posting function for every other amount?
My group has a satellite going up on this launch. It got delayed from last month; now it's delayed again.
I love this.
Way back when EA was a small-ish independent company, and was run very very differently from how it's run now, they issued a really fun little game entitled Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic. At one of the locations in the game universe that was relevant to the overarching plot, there's a large laboratory and underground/underwater cave complex. At one point, as your team moves through a set of corridors, there's a fork in the corridor. Taking the left fork keeps you in the game world; taking the right fork sends you down a corridor that eventually brings you to the offices of Electronic Arts itself, a maze of cubicles where you find yourself engaged by "EA Rowdies," bands of programmers with Nerf guns (which were indeed popular in the EA Offices back then). Very very funny. And who knew how badly you could get hurt by Nerf guns!
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference. Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money. People who really want to teach, such as myself, will often take a cut in pay to do so.
Yes, I agree, some people who are good teachers are willing to take a pay cut to teach. But others who would also be good teachers opt to do something else because they don't want to be paid so poorly. Your approach guarantees that the teacher population is made up of two groups: 1) people who are so committed to teaching that they don't mind the low pay (good) and 2) people that take the teaching job because it's the best they can get (bad).
I swear to god, teaching is the only profession where people seemingly earnestly make the argument that improving pay won't improve the pool of job candidates. In every other profession on the planet, people raise the pay to attract higher-quality candidates and use competition for jobs between the candidates to select the best ones from that pool of candidates.
Yes, you're right. Raising teacher pay will attract more people. Then, we do our best to hire the ones who will be best at teaching. With a larger pool of applicants than before (including the applicants who would have been there anyway at a lower pay point, but also a bunch of new applicants as well), how can you argue that we'll end up with worse teachers than if we paid them bus fare and had the smaller applicant pool? That really strains the boundaries of logic.
For a long time, the standard for headphones in hardcore audio was Sennheiser's HD-580. Even though Sennheiser sold more expensive models, everyone seemed to consider the HD-580 the pinnacle. Well, they don't make HD-580's anymore; and last I checked, the logical successor products (the HD-600?) weren't getting anywhere near as strong reviews.
So what's the logical replacement for the HD-580? What's the best pair of headphones for under $300? And what's the amount you'd be expected to spend now to find headphones of the same quality as the HD-580 (and what's the product)?
I was just coming here to post something similar to this
Over the years, there have been numerous "ASK SLASHDOT" and otherwise categorized posts here on the subject of discharge procedures. "I got laid off, and they made me pack up my stuff in front of someone who watched me and then escorted me out of the building. It was humiliating." That kind of thing.
Well, this event illustrates why some places decide to do it that way. FNMA didn't do it that way with this guy, and he took advantage of the time between firing and removal of access.
The accusation was that she was an operative for IBM. SCO v. IBM still exists -- although if the judgment on the Novell case stands, not for long.
I read PJ's post on Groklaw, linked to in the article summary. It seems as if she's effectively defining Groklaw's purpose as being to deal with the threat to free and open-source software brought on by the SCO cases; that being so, if the threat from SCO is over, there's not much to do except to make sure that the tons of archived information is correct, and to work to make it easily accessible to those who might come to need it in the future.
1. Is it really the case that the SCO cases are over? It's true that SCO's cases against IBM, Autozone, and Red Hat are moot if SCO doesn't hold the copyrights they use as the basis for their claim; but SCO plans to appeal the judgment in Novell's favor. Until that appeal is done, it doesn't seem to me to be over.
2. Even assuming the SCO aspect of this situation is over, the fundamental issues here haven't been decided. Essentially, the judgment against SCO means that SCO doesn't have standing to bring a lawsuit against IBM. But if Novell were to become evil, then who's to say they couldn't bring such a lawsuit? The fundamental question of whether Linux infringes on UNIX copyrights has yet to be decided on in court (however ridiculous any of us may feel such a claim to be). That was the issue when Groklaw originally got started, and it's still out there.
3. Furthermore, it's not the only legal issue that could threaten Linux or other FOSS projects in the future. Groklaw has at times addressed issues associated with patents and trade secrets, and those aren't going anywhere. And we still have yet to finish cases in which software companies attempt to invalidate the terms of the GPL, to exculpate themselves from appropriating code from projects licensed under the GPL -- also a topic occasionally covered by Groklaw. I understand that it's PJ's blog, and her life, and the focus of Groklaw is whatever she says it is. But it's still sad, because the decision to define the focus of the resource (for that's what its archives and especially its participant base are) narrowly leaves behind a vacuum at a time when there are still real threats to oppose.
Please don't limit it to just arrest - good intentions of well meaning people never trump civil liberties. At least when it concerns constitutionally protected liberties then no matter how they are infringing your civil liberties if it is not done in a completely legal manner then your civil liberties do trump their well meaning intentions and they need to be brought up sharply and made to understand that being well meaning is not a get out of jail free card.
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." -- Daniel Webster
It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.
Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.
I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.
Meh. As others have noted, it was for a poster session. This conference isn't in my field, but at the conferences I've been to in my field (astronomy and astrophysics), pretty much anything gets accepted for poster sessions. At AAS meetings, I've seen particularly wacky posters in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology all clumped together in a kind of ghetto; and back when I was a grad student, during free time between oral sessions or at the end of the day, someone among my friends and I would say "hey, let's go look at the crazy stuff" and we'd take a look at the posters about space potatoes or the Plutonium Atom Totality or whatever. On occasion, I've even seen oral sessions -- typically one of the last ones on the last day -- devoted to something like "Speculative Ideas in Cosmology" with some of the nuttier talks tucked in there (as well as ones which are almost certainly wrong, but aren't in the same league of crazy as we're talking about, unfortunately).
Wait, has anyone on this forum ever talked to Nobel Laureates in any sciences? Or read about them?
The vast majority (I'd ballpark it at 80% from completely non-scientific, anecdotal experience) of Nobel Prize winners IN SCIENCE are ego-driven megalomaniacs that are addicted to prestige and influence
I've at least met, and in some cases taken multiple semesters of courses from or worked with, Martinus Veltman, T.D. Lee, Norman Ramsey, Leon Lederman, Riccardo Giaconi, John Mather and George Smoot. I wouldn't agree with your assessment at all.
But he's accomplished something significant in one particular field. How does that make him qualified to do anything outside of that field? And let's leave aside the potential that the Nobel prizes themselves are awarded based on a political basis.
Can you give me an example of a Nobel prize in physics that was awarded on a political basis?
In many cases, "reckless" behavior is considered to satisfy the mens rea requirement.
Lets run the numbers.
I think you mean "Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers."
When it comes to MS, anti-trust regulations have been toothless in the past; why would they have any more teeth in the future? Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was a *Clinton* appointment.
I hate to be the one to bring reality into this little discussion, but for HP to dump Windows and start selling Linux (or any other OS) instead is really, really stupid.
Who said that? You are just making up a strawman argument.
People are saying that if HP had the cojones, they would push to sell good consumer-grade linux systems. But they are not saying to "dump Windows."
They're equivalent, since if HP started pushing quality consumer-grade Linux systems, MS can respond by simply no longer providing HP with OEM Windows to pre-install. After all, there are many other computer manufacturers that can fill the market space; there's only one MS to get Windows from.
As long as it's a fair question then here's a fair answer - I'm working on it, I anticipate emigrating in 6-12 months.
Fair enough.
I still don't get this loyalty thing though. What's it supposed to count for? I mean, if the government goes to war am I supposed to join in, not because I agree but because of loyalty? I need some help with the concept, if it's not just tribalism and it's not supporting the government, and it's not just agreeing with what the people decide?
I can only speak for myself here. For me, there are things I don't like about this country, and things that I do. I have no doubt that'd be true anywhere -- no place is perfect. The things that I do like about this country win; if they didn't, I too would look for a place with which I'd be happier.
Once I've made that choice -- the choice that the good things about this country are more persuasive than the bad things about it, and therefore I do want to live here -- then I personally feel that I owe a debt. I feel like I owe a debt to those who came before me who worked to create a place, a society, in which I'd want to live my life, and to those here now who maintain it and try hard (and often fail, but they're trying) to improve it. Otherwise, I'm a freeloader: I'm simply taking advantage of someone else's hard work. And so I work that debt off: by showing honest gratitude for the opportunities I have here which I might not have elsewhere; by doing my tiny, tiny best to help the society and the country function; and by contributing what little I have towards leaving this place better than I found it. Doing those things, and not giving up on them, is loyalty to the country, for me -- it's saying "I love what I've got here, and am grateful for it, and so I'm going to keep trying to help it get better and I'm not going to give up on it."
In answer to the specific question you asked, no, I don't think loyalty to a country *necessarily* requires one to go to war for it; but it's not a simple question. If I were English, for instance, I would feel differently about the loyalty of someone who chose not to fight in WW2 than I would someone who chose not to fight in colonial India.
Why do I owe any loyalty to the UK? I was born here, great, I disagree with pretty much everythiung the government does, I find the people short-sighted, generally ignorant, scared and celebrity obsessed. Do I owe loyalty to the rocks?
Then why don't you leave?
Please don't misunderstand me -- I'm not being accusatory or trying to insult you. If you don't like the place where you are, then why don't you go someplace you *would* like? Or at least *try* to go there?
Dissent is not disloyal. Like the grandparent poster, I encourage dissent. Disloyalty is another matter. If you don't value your citizenship, then why stay a citizen?
I wonder if one of the questions they asked had to do with whether the candidate thought it made any sense to submit an article to
Sigh.
A related question to the OP's:
For years I've bought most of my parts from Newegg. But historically, I've bought CPU/heatsink/fan/motherboard/one stick as part of a bundle from Monarch Computer. I did this for two reasons:
1. they stress-tested the setup for 48 hours before packing and shipping;
2. (the main reason) I'm perfectly comfortable building my own machine, except for one thing that terrifies me -- attaching the heatsink/fan to the CPU. I've not only never done it, I've never even seen it done. I have visions of trying to do it, screwing it up, and Bad Stuff (tm) happening -- I'm not exactly rich. And I know no one locally who builds their own machine and can look over my shoulder while I do it.
It's been long enough since I built my last machine that I'm shopping again. But since that last machine, Monarch apparently went from good to bad customer service, then went bust. So is there anyone else reliable out there that does this? With good current mobo/processor options? Or am I overestimating how easy it is to screw this up?