The point is that there are many fights to fight, and the fact that I'd fight your particular fight if I was directly involved doesn't mean that your fight is the only fight worth fighting.
I don't fault your reasoning, but that wasn't the contention I was arguing against - I was arguing specifically that I was a) brainless, b) reciting propaganda, c) presenting no opinions, d) ideal cannon fodder, and e) if everybody just stayed out of each other's business, things would be okay. That last is the one that gives rise to the 'cowardice' charge, since things are only 'okay' for oneself - not, necessarily, for them.
It's the implication that this responsibility is somehow more important than resonsibility to fellow Americans, and the idea that the best way to defend these people is by joining the National Guard and physically interposing oneself into the struggle that get you labelled "gung ho".
I don't object to being labeled "gung ho", that's accurate - I object to be labeled brainwashed. That said, I find 'reasonability' in the face of evil to be a...less than optimal...means of deterrence, from ethical, moral, and historical perspectives all.
It's the hallmark of the extremist to think that the best solution for him is the best solution for everyone, and your presentation implies that anyone who isn't willing to sign up for guard duty is failing to do so because he's afraid for his own safety.
I was reacting to the notion that what I was saying wasn't comprehensible ("presenting no opinions") to someone of sufficient intelligence to post to slashdot (not a high bar, admittedly). It's not "not signing up" that I have a problem with (plenty of good reasons - family, children, inability, other important work) - it's not grasping that a sane, rational individual would find it something worth doing that I have a problem with. Perhaps this is extremist of me, but I do think everybody should be capable of understanding what I expressed, and not recourse to ad hominim.
As to who exactly I am, I'm your equal. Did you forget for a moment that this is the ideal you're fighting for? "All men are created equal" applies to both of us, which gives me just as much right to call you brainwashed as it gives you to call me cowardly.
And you haven't shown in your response that you _are_ cowardly, since being cowardly, in my earlier expression, was contingent on finding nothing greater than oneself to fight for.
As to the "who are you?" comment, I was specifically reacting to the dismissive tone and tenor in what I was responding to, in a "who do you think you are" - that one is qualified to assert what is going in my head, sort of way, which is more what I intended to convey. I was reacting to the criticism-by-deconstruction inherent in the post to which I was responding. Deconstruction(which asserts there exists no meaning to communication, only pretext and subtext) universally resorts to the power dialectic and ad hominim (if you damage the messenger, you destroy the message), whereas actual (constructed, for lack of a better term) criticism answers the meaning, of which there was plenty (such as you are doing, I am quick to add - you and I are talking policy, he and I were talking about character).
I presume, anyway, you aren't actually calling me brainwashed - the rest of the tone and tenor of your article belies it.
Sometimes the biggest threat to what I hold dear isn't something that threatens my safety, and sometimes I have more to fear from the president than from a terrorist.
And I think the prime difference between you and the previous poster is that you aren't attacking the underlying value of what I've stated or chosen - we're disagreeing on policy, and on that we may respectfully disagree.
For instance, I would disagree that the Patriot Act hallmarks the end of civil rights in America, for instance. I disagree that the government should give
Regardless of the morality judgements, was there some factual misstatement I made in my post? I looked again, and am aware of none of substance.
Do you disagree that the things I state I would fight against are actually bad? If that were the case, I can understand why you wouldn't want to fight (but, in that instance, I'd suspect you of being a sociopath). But I think it's not the case.
If not, then perhaps you do not think that they rise to the level of being worthy of some random American putting himself in the fight against. If it's that: would you fight if it was your sister who was being infibulated, raped, killed, or their rights denied? If it was your child who died in Beslan? If your friend had been killed in 9/11, or by a suicide bomber, or by an indiscriminate Israeli? Or if it was your value as a non-Muslim being less than half of what a Muslim's are? Or if you were enslaved? Obviously, you would.
Then, why is it so hard to fathom that my sense of responsibility, that derives from my own priveleges and luck for being born in the right place at the right time and from my own connection to greater humanity, extends to those people who cannot defend their own rights? Extends to women and children I've never met and will never know?
Perhaps my use of a 'slogan' phrases like the Jefferson quote means that I'm incapable of forming my own opinions as a whole - I'm merely swayed by demogogues of ye olde quaint tymes. Despite the other, non-slogan reasons in the post, I simply don't think that's the case: among other things, I'm a 32 year old blue-state born American, well-travelled internationally, well-educated in history, theology and psychology, professionally employed software guy making a six-figure salary, who has rejected marxism, deconstruction, and po-mo moral relativism. Who, exactly, are you to question my intellectual or moral philsophy and choices?
Now, as for the suicide bombers: It is my understanding that they fight because they a) don't know any better, b) don't have better options in life, c) feel that Islam itself is under attack, d) want to establish a world-wide Islamic califate, e) because some interpretations of their religion tells them they will receive reward in heaven by dying for the cause. For me: b) I certainly have better options, c) I know Islam is not under attack because we are not attacking Islam, d) I refuse to allow a world-wide Islamic califate to be instantiated, and e) I'm not expecting any special treatment in the afterlife. But, I choose fight because of duty, my own sense of what is right and wrong, and my understanding of the philosophy and the 'why' of the world. Whether a) I 'don't know any better', remains to be seen. You certainly haven't shown you know better. Far from it, in fact.
As for cannon fodder - hardly that, I think - but on the front lines is, definitely, where I would choose to be. And, standing the line between you, your sister, any of the majority of good people of the world and a 'suicide bomber', terrorist, or Islamofascist is where I would want to place myself. If I can save a life (or kill a terrorist, same diff), then I will have made a difference, and being on that line will have been worth it, for me.
Sometimes, there are things of value that are more important than one's own skin. This is one of those. Those from whom nothing is more important than their own skin are called 'cowards'.
I'm a kid of some poor(ish) people. I'm no longer anything resembling poor, but it's my intention to join the National Guard anyway, because they need the people. It's definitely not for the money.
I'd take a couple of years out to fight (i.e. kill, and risk dying, in your terminology) for a free Iran, one in which they may blog hateful or joyful things about me, to their hearts content. I'd fight to stop the Iranian-state-sponsored murder of girl-children who were victims of rape (aka 'unfaithful wives'), and to free their women and dhimmis from second (or third) class status. I'd fight in the Sudan to bring something resembling justice and fair play, and end slavery. I'd fight to end the abomination of infibulation (look it up) in certain Islamic and W. African cultures. I'd fight to stop the genocide in Darfur. Drop me in Chechnya, and point, and I would strike at the heart of the groups who were affiliated with the Beslan atrocity. I'd fight to stop Syrians crossing over to Iraq, as well as fight to take down Bashar Assad's Baathist regime. I'd stand on a wall between Palestinians and Israelis, suicide bombers and all, to make sure neither side harms up the other while I'm standing there. I'd go into the mountains of Afghanistan and work to end bin Ladin's mortal coil. Or to help complete the route of the Taliban, to help stabilize the entire country of Afghanistan.
The question is, why won't you? What happened to you that you can see the abominations of the world and not work to oppose them by whatever means feasible?
Maybe you think all wars of liberation are, somehow, wrong when we play a part. Maybe you want to see a world marxist international instead of a free market. Maybe you think f* em, they can do it themselves. Maybe you don't see anything about America worth propagating (let alone even defending). Maybe you think that we can change Iran, or N. Korea, or al Queda by protesting. (If the latter, I'd love to see that. But you and your type don't even give it a try, because, like I, you know it's a worthless gesture, and you save your protests for people who won't just kill you outright)
But for me, my duty (the responsibility to recapitulate the blessings I've lived with all my life) calls me: America is good in that it has democracy, stability and freedom for itself. It is great in that it can bring democracy, stability, and freedom to others. I want to be part of that greatness.
Jefferson said it well: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". For Liberty to take root in the world, our patriots (not nationalists - the patriotism of free men can transcend nationalism) might have to bloody up the sand in another land. We just have to find the patriots over there, is all. There aren't that many now - but there are more every day.
I think a lot of people here forget how blessed we are - not just America but the entire West - and, instead of feeling the duty to be the best we can be because of those blessings, instead become resentful, spiteful little trolls (c.f. France, the Democrats, Michael Moore, and you).
Did anybody notice this little section, on page 59?
The U.S. response to Soviet psychotronics R&D programs was the Remote Viewing program. In
addition, the U.S. Army began the JEDI Project in 1983, which sought to increase human potential using
teachable models of behavioral/physical excellent by unconventional means (Alexander et al., 1990). The
JEDI Project was essentially a human-performance modeling experiment based on neuro-linguistic
programming (NLP) skills, whereby advanced influence technologies to model excellence in human
performance was used. The program ran under the auspices of the Army INSCOM and the
Organizational Effectiveness School, and was sponsored by a U.S. government interagency task force.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the program had successfully trained several hundred people,
including members of Congress (such as Al Gore, Jr. and Tom Downey), before being terminated.
Um...okay, I'll bite: if the US was invaded by someone (call it the Martians) who were trying to re-establish our lost Democratic Republic (for instance, as would happen, if, as the left would desire, they took away the 2nd amendment, made illegal aliens eligible to vote, and then China, Mexico, Canada and France had quietly invaded and outpopulated us in the red states so they vote the neocommunist party (aka Democrats) into unchecked power), then, um...yes. Absolutely.
Allawi has proposed a perfectly reasonable plan by going forward with elections before complete stability is achieved.
Those places where stability is the worst have one thing in common - the local populace is not doing anything significant to actively combat, passively deny, rat the insurgents out to the Iraqi gov't, or otherwise discourage the behavior of the insurgents. So, they, rightly I think, should have less of a voice.
It's only when insurgent behavior is exported that you get an unfair situation - and judging from the fact that there are just a short list of 'hotspots', with thin tendrils snaking out from them, it's not exported that effectively.
The whelming majority of the country is perfectly suited to holding something resembling elections. Kurds are definitely all ready, much of the Southern Shia areas (anti-Iran parts) are quiet, Iraq's 'flyover' country probably doesn't have all that much invested in either way. So the only losers are really going to end up being a percentage of the Sunni areas, which is political karma.
If you take your tinfoil hats off for a bit, what would make a killer app would be to have chat channels (akin to IRC) searchable and indexable through google.
Obviously, Cybering and such stuff would make lame reading (ooh, baby), as would all the script kiddies and elite gamers talking trash, but in a reasonably large number of cases, there's stuff out there one might want to preserve for posterity.
I envision two mechanisms: 1) "Private chat" which would work like gmail, but save the resultant session so that the two could access it.
2) "Public Chat" would just log whatever's there in some location tagged with the name of the channel, for future reference.
Obviously, you wouldn't want to archive junk: no binaries, maybe have a lameness filter, and you would have to find some way around robo-spammers, who would "recite" the works of Shakespeare, except punctuated by ads for V14GR4.
Dude, you've never flown El Al. Beyond checking me against every list known to man and I'm sure several known to nobody, they did everything except a full body cavity search and kept sending different people to see me to ask me the same questions for on the order of an hour before I was allowed to try to pack my stuff back into my suitcase and give it to them so it would make it on the same flight as me to Jerusalem.
About the only positive part of it was I spent a good half hour talking with (and looking at) a nice looking Sabra (Israeli girl) as she was pawing through my shorts (the ones in my suitcase, get your mind out of the gutter). The time went quickly.
I'm almost certain they hired a number of fairly attractive youngish women (all of whom have, de facto as Israelis, military experience and whom I'm betting had orders of magnitude better training than the TSA people get) to do such things as a way of keeping people from being irritated - good customer service, in all.
Also, the guys who came in to talk to me intermittently, who were admittedly brusque and obviously daring me to take offense at it, all had a similar look of sharp, competent authority about them - something I fear our own TSA has not considered a factor for in their hiring process.
Of course, in America, you're not allowed to hire based on age, sex, or overall prettiness or the appearance of competence (or, in a union shop, actual competence;-), so last time I flew here, I, my carry-on and my shoes were checked by this big, ugly, chubby gorilla of a guy for five minutes - and it seemed like an hour.
This is not to say that I minded - I always say 'Good job, thank you, sir', and 'have a good day'. Because I am grateful that someone is doing something to protect what could be my behind, regardless that their getting paid for it. I say "Thank you" when a cop gives me a ticket too. Silly me, perhaps.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Ben
I don't think this means what I think you think it means.
Please note that the quote does not read: Those who would temporarily give up a little Liberty to purchase essential safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
1) Essential Liberty - there is no right to privacy when conducting many types of business transactions. For instance, moving millions of dollars around. Or sending a dangerous chemical substance through the mail. Or buying and utilizing a car.
I am not saying that my icecream preference, bathroom habits, who I voted for in the last election, or my innermost heart's desire should be an open book just because I once got on a plane. That's essential privacy.
Certainly one has no natural 'right to fly': I am hindered from that by the force of gravity and lack of adequate wings.
So, I can make a contract with someone who has the ability to move me from one location to another quickly. As part of that contract, they can ask me to prove who I am. Further, since this is (usually) interstate commerce, government has been granted the power to regulate that contract. Thus, government can require that the contract stipulate that I will attempt to prove who I am.
2) Give up - in fact, in this scenario, I _retain_ my right to privacy: I can accept or reject the contract with (given an ounce of perspective) little or no permenant harm to myself: I trade the expediency of getting on a flight for the 'good old days', where I can get a horse and carriage and clip-clop across the country just like my forebears did. Or the 'good really old days' where I can walk. It's good for the environment.
3) Little - this one is debatable. Yes, you still have a very small percentage of dying by the actions of a terrorist. But it's become very important that we put up some barriers to avoid making it trivially easy for bad people to do bad things to many people simultaneously. Every time you raise the bar a notch, you increase their chances of getting, as a previous poster called it, 'unlucky' and screwing up and getting caught before they have actualized their murderous intent.
4) Temporary - Death is permenant for those unfortunate enough to be involved. Death is the fundamental denial of all other Liberties. Conversely, the right to life is the sine qua non of all natural rights and liberties. The Safety (which is, the defense of that right to life) of those innocent non-Combatants on the plane and on the ground is a good thing.
Remind me again what we're arguing about? Oh...showing your ID and checking it against one of the few records we have about the bad guys: the names or known aliases of a handful of known terrorists in order to board a plane, and if you are, inconveniencing you until it's straightened out. Right.
I think the correct response to this is "Thank you, yes, here's my ID, and and, please do double-check my bag thoroughly and even make me take off my shoes and twiddle my thumbs while the machine churns - I'm really okay with that, if spending time on my bag at random is the cost to effectively increase the chance you'll stop someone bad before they do something very bad."
Unlike Spain's recent attempt to bribe the jihadis (by paying the "submission tax", as Sayyid Qutb of the Islamic Brotherhood called it) by giving state money to Mosques (oh, I understand their stated reason of weaning mosques off of foreign funds, but I also understand the implied one, and find it reprehensible), America still has enough of it's history and culture to know that at it's heart (when someone reminds them of what Ben Franklin said, since they weren't taught it it school) that "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety". Or that "(Thousands of) Millions for defense, not one penny for tribute" has long-lasting wisdom to it. I never see America paying Zakat. Ain't gonna happen, certainly not until they take away the 2nd Amendment.
Again, I think it's easy to mistake what one gets in the media for the "facts on the ground" in America.
I'm _really_ looking forward to this election, and I have reason to hope it's not the gnat's whisker like last time: I live in Massachusetts, in Cambridge in fact, and I'm seeing people who used to consider themselves either independent or somewhat liberal going "Crap. I really can't vote for this guy. Maybe Nader. Although, it would be kind of nice if the IRS maybe could go away...".
As for shiny toys, even they don't have the capacity to get us to turn from the....um...the...oooh....shiny....;-)
You're coming at this from entirely the wrong perspective.
This is WW IV, fought between the forces of Islamofacisism and the forces of Freedom. Just like the WWIII (the 'Cold' War) between Communism and Freedom. Just like the WWII between Fascism and Freedom. Just like WWI between Imperialism (the Kaisar - Ceasar) and Freedom. Just like the American War of Independence, between Royalism and Freedom.
The weapons of the Islamofascists are their uneducated, no-prospects, mind-controlled youth, who they hook up to bombs and send walking into cafes. These 'footsoldiers' aren't seen as individuals with a life to live and hopes to tain: they are seen as the weapons of Islamofascism, to be manipulated and disgarded. Make no mistake that those who are in charge and in power (just like Saddam, who called for his militia to suicide attacks, cowered in fear and was found down a hole) have their hands at the switch, and will utilize them solely for their personal view of power: this is only tangentially related to the Islamic Caliphate, all the actions of their leaders (like al Sadr in Iraq) are just in it for the power, not the ideology.
Take a look at what they have in store for us as their utopian society, from the Afghanistan as run by the Taliban. Every single trivial 'free' thing we take for granted is at their disposal, and all actions are either required or prohibited: from noneducating women to locking them up and forcing them into wearing walking tents, to what you believe and how you worship (Not just enforcing shiite-versus-sunni-versus-sufi whoever happens to be in power in the area, but Iraqi Coptic Christians have been murdered even as recently as last week in Iraq and Afghani Christians of some denomination couple of weeks ago in Afghanistan), to what you hear on radio and TV, to what you can say about them and others(nothing but praise for them, and "Death to America"), right down to the millimeter of the length of your beard. (Oh, you don't have a beard, you say? You must be effeminate, so they'll just drop a wall on you.)
Compare that to what we've done with Afghanistan and Iraq. Or Japan. Or France. Or West Germany. Or S. Korea.
Did you really buy into all the moral relativism they relentlessly force-fed us in college and in the mainstream? Didn't all that theory fall apart when you started having to take responsibility for your own life? Or did their teaching take hold, deluding yourself that you can get away with the little evils and it was okay: that a little lie here and a little bad over there doesn't have a big effect on who you are? Doesn't actually damage your character? (I doubt it - most people recover, eventually - I think most people just don't have the sense to look at their own value systems again after college so that their words again meet with their actions).
I've run across many people who claim "everything is relative", pure pseudoscience, harkening back to Einstein as 'proof'. What they forget is that, even there, there is an absolute: the speed of light. In the context, you can't get around the speed of light, and in much the same way, you can't get away from good and evil.
"Everything is shades of gray" is another bit of pablum, and false too: there is no gray, there is only greater or lesser intensity of white: there is either an absence of white, or the presence of it. And history, I think, even the history over there, will record that in the war on terrorism, despite flaws and failures and mistakes, but from the _long term effect_ ("by their works shall you know them") that the United States and GB were shining with white, and the Islamofascists - not so much - probably not at all. Ash-heap of history.
They don't understand us as well as you assert: they understand the mainstream media, made up of a certain brand of the most trivial of ideology America has to offer. They forget that there are millions of us who are willing, ready, and able to defend our Freedom - and, oh yeah, able to go about arrange for others to have their
from The White House where the Director of the OST, I can't think of a better word than 'debunks' the hystrionic claims made by the so-called 'Concerned Scientists'....
Regarding the document that was released on February 18, 2004 by the Union of Concerned
Scientists (UCS), I believe the UCS accusations are wrong and misleading. The accusations in
the document are inaccurate, and certainly do not justify the sweeping conclusions of either the
document or the accompanying statement. I believe the document has methodological flaws
that undermine its own conclusions, not the least of which is the failure to consider publicly
available information or to seek and reflect responses or explanations from responsible
3
government officials. Unfortunately, these flaws are not necessarily obvious to those who are
unfamiliar with the issues, and the misleading, incomplete, and even personal accusations made
in the document concern me deeply. It is my hope that the detailed response I submit today will
allay the concerns of the scientists who signed the UCS statement.
I can say from personal experience that the accusation of a litmus test that must be met before
someone can serve on an advisory panel is preposterous. After all, President Bush sought me out
to be his Science Advisor - the highest-ranking S&T official in the federal government - and I
am a lifelong Democrat.
Greenwatch, not a member of the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' lists UCS as part of the 'radical left': here
The Washington Times says here that the UCS is funded entirely by the left:
The New York Times' reporter James Glanz, for example, identified the Union of Concerned Scientists simply as "an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and often has taken stands at odds with administration policy." The Washington Post characterized the critics as "two groups of prestigious scientists."
Unfortunately, we're likely to see a gushing torrent of this kind of a "blinders-on" reporting from now until Election Day.
Anyone who has taken Journalism 101 -- or Propaganda 101, for that matter -- knows reporters have a duty to delve more deeply into the background of the critics.
If the media had taken the trouble to dig a little further, they would have known the Union of Concerned Scientists is partially funded by a secretive philanthropy called the Tides Foundation, a clearinghouse that funnels money into a variety of left-wing groups including MoveOn.org, a Web site devoted to defeating President Bush this fall. The Tides Foundation also has received more than $4 million in recent years from the Howard Heinz Endowment, whose board is chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry.
Do you believe there will come a time that we will have a 'robot rights' movement? Will it be more credible than most of the 'animal rights' movement, or just a good-hearted (but weak-minded) anthropomorphization of our silicon companion machines?
Someone (Dennis Miller?) once said, animals can have rights as soon as they accept responsibilities. Robots obviously can be given responsibilities (your job is to fit tab A into slot B), but ethically, should they get rights? As soon as someone programs a robot to pass the turing test, and then immediately ask for his rights? Or is it something deeper?
Beyond some kind of second-class entity status, will robots become citizens? Do robots have a god-given right (recall, our rights are considered by the Declaration of Independence to be given us either by 'Nature's God' or by their 'Creator') to freedom of expression, association, religion? The right to bear arms? Do robots have a 'right to work'? "One Robot, One Vote"? Will Robots have to file tax returns? Will there be Robot Courts? Robot Lawyers? Robot Jail? Robot Schools? Robotic Members elected to the Legislature? Some day, will we have a Robot President? Is a Robot built in Japan eligible to be president? What if the robot was shipped from Japan as parts with software, and put together here, does that count?
If you start building a robot, and decide to stop, will that be considered to be a robaboration? Or the work of their 'creator'? And if, after building, you switch it on and then decide you don't like it that much, and power it off again and harvest the parts, is that robomurder and disrobomemberment?
Isn't it possible that Online Gambling could be used for Money Laundering?
Consider - you and I are playing blackjack (you're the dealer, I'm the player, and the house doesn't automatically win if it gets a blackjack), or backgammon, or heads-up poker. I with my 'horrible luck' always draw until I'm bused, or always leave several pips open, or only bet lots when I am dealt an 7-2. I bet 50-100k per hand. I can lose several million dollars to you rather quickly. And legally. And without oversight for tax purposes.
Unrestricted online gambling is ridiculously prone to misuse.
Consider 1) So, given it takes money to make money, $1000 isn't going to net you much in ROI. 2) Instead, write something gratis that other people will use, and will give you something to put on your resume after college. 3) Open up a sourceforge account to organize your project. Do all the project planning work out in the open - project goals and descriptions, requirements, specs, docs, code. In the future, you can point people to this as a sample of your early work (keep it updated). Have a GUI (I don't recommend Web apps for something like this - too much infrastructure), write it in C++ (what I suggest), Java, or VB, depending on your talent and audience (and resources - Gnu C++ and Java are free). 4) People don't use 80% of software they buy - so make that 80% open-sourced 'infrastructure' libraries and such, and the remaining 20% closed-source plug-ins or specialized customizations (and a good installer - people tend to buy stuff that has a good installer). 5) If someone wants a feature or a bug fixed, see if they will pay for support. 6) Leverage other people for the product. 7) Learn how to market your product. Just see it as an experiment - don't be shy, be outgoing, and specifically, be clever.
Do some market research: go and figure out what someone wants to do that they can't do now, or that the software to do is expensive. How? Ask them!
The criterion for your research should be - you should have a representative sample of the population nearby, they probably should be a small business (since individuals don't pay much and usually need more prettiness-per-unit-usefulness than a small business solving a specific problem would need), they should have some general-purpose computers that are underleveraged (people do one or two applications on them (mail, word/excel/quicken, and Minesweeper) and don't really use them to their full potential).
Consider what target audiences you have around you: small, non-chain restaurants (specifically their back office); professional practices, like small dentist/physical therapist/massage therapists/chiropractor offices; the corner bodega - they might have a cash register, but no computer tracking of stock so they never quite know what their inventory is or how much to buy - sell them that. House painters/plumbers/small general contractors. Churches/Synagogues/Mosques.
Find something some group of the people above do that's tedius, and see if you can make it trivial. Don't be afraid to ask a lot of people, and say 'no' if it looks like too much - even if they will pay you. Do _not_ get in over your head.
KISS - keep it simple, silly. Bang-for-the-buck is the keyword for this sort of development. You are trying to make their lives better/easier/smarter, and they might need 'just one thing'. Consider the first spreadsheets - they merely edited columns of numbers and added them up correctly, and saved and read them to a file. This saved an _enormous_ amount of time for people who had to do this stuff day-in-day-out. Almost nothing subsequently has had as profound an impact on their lives as taking the grunt work out of moving raw numbers around with pen-and-paper.
Since cost is an issue, you're not going to get most of your (useless to the problem) requirements met. If I wanted to do so, I'd probably dedicate a (cheezy) computer to it and have to write the darn software myself. Luckily, I have more important things to worry about...
I'd recommend the simple expedient of two alarm clocks.
I went to Sears and bought a cheap Panasonic (iirc) alarm clock radio/cd with 2 alarms and progressive volume. (The progressive volume has a min setting and a max setting, but not a duration setting (silly of them)). It was pretty cheap, like $35-45 a year and a half ago.
For you, I'd recommend two of them (or one of those and one of what you already have). One by your bedside, one across the room, requiring you to haul your backside out of bed, at least.
I just leave mine single one across the room, and have it turn on talk radio (two settings, starts low, waits a few minutes, the second gets much louder). Depending on the station I set it to, it usually infuriates me into wakefulness. (I recommend NPR if you are a heartless conservative or Rush or Bill O' if you are a flaming liberal gasbag).
However, I bet the real problem is not the waking, it's the sleeping - getting to sleep/staying asleep. If you find yourself waking up at night out of breath, or if you snore, or your gf/wife/so hears you stop breathing during the night, see a sleep doctor. Skip the last can/bottle/gallon of caffeinated soda, cut out cigs if you smoke, keep the room cool. Melatonin works well for sleep regulation if taken aperiodically, and consider Ambien for periodic regulation (note that it's addictive - not in the heroine withdrawal way, but if you use it too often, you get to feel like you can't get to sleep without it - a feeling which goes away after a few days, but still...).
Ambien is magic to those who have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep - bed down, one pill, read for 15 minutes, turn off the light, I'm down for 7.5 hours almost exactly and wake up feeling like a tiger. IANAD, YMMV.
Um...could it merely be that you were forcing yourself to smoke lousy cigs which made you disgusted?:-)
Frankly, I wish all the money that we're taking from the Tobacco companies in settlements, all the money we spend on anti-tobacco ads, all the money we take in to taxes on tobacco, and, heck, throw in the money we spent developing this vaccine had gone in to Lung Cancer (or just Cancer-in-general) Research.
But, it didn't, and it won't. It goes to lawyers. It goes to pork. It goes to propping up a overly beaurocratic, social-welfareish political system. And, oh yeah, a little bit of some of the money goes to substandard treatment of destitute ex-smokers.
Thank you, anti-smoking lobby and political hacks on both sides of the fence, for making the world a better place by decreasing the tax base which should have been all along going to fund cancer research.
The fact that someone has some bit of information about you isn't usually a problem.
The problem is that that bit of information which is uniquely identifiable to you, is being moved around without your knowledge, to third parties.
Take a (fake) example: I own a pair of black size 13 Bruno Magli shoes with RFID#112512214412211 in them. Anyone who can look at me can know I own a pair of this kind of shoes. Anyone who can get a few feet from me can tell that I have that one specific pair of shoes. But you have to hook that piece of information (these shoes were at this place at this time) to another piece of information (the mapping of the RFID# -> the store where I bought them->my Visa Card#) in order to violate my privacy. And once you bring those two things together, violate it you do.
Another way to think about is that people are really talking about you behind your back, and nobody likes that. Nothing good comes from gossip.
The only real way to fix this is with a constitutional amendment - freedom of speech and the press trumps it.
I'll set aside the worthless part of your reply, and agree with 'robust and maintainable' (parts I mentioned some practical points for this further down in my original), and 'finish in a timely manner' (something I didn't think was much of an issue in an open source project, but may be).
You'll note that your two useful points are not contrary to mine.
I think the underlying contention is between 'good hacker' (who can slap something together sufficient to solve a problem) with 'good developer' (who can do things in such a way as it can get easily better in the future). I assert 'Develop quality code' implies one is a good developer. If he had said "whack together something that doesn't have that many bugs and looks alright", I wouldn't have responded at all negatively.
Bad programmers do neither of the things either of us suggest. Bad programmers do a half-assed job at all of them.
"Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in/home/groups/f/fr/free-cmms/htdocs/maint/equip_tre e.php on line 52 Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in/home/groups/f/fr/free-cmms/htdocs/maint/equip_tre e.php on line 52 Could not connect to the databse server"
Okay, but seriously, the above is not such a big deal, except that you are able to read from the DB - one would think you should be able to write. This implies to me that the code to do database work isn't split out into a testable and self-referential unit (I don't know this, guessing). It also implies you haven't tested it since you last updated it. (This one is less of a guess.:-)
My issues with the statement "I have never been involved with any serious software development although I am competent to develop quality code." is that, unless you've walked the walk, "competence" can't really be said to be reached. You might be able to turn out okay code and pretty UI, but 'quality' is in a myriad of little things. Like the above. Like making it highly configurable, and meta-configurable, so it can solve more than one problem at a time. Like maximizing reuse and minimizing duplication of effort. Like knowing at what level of abstraction to code to. Etc.
That said, I do want to encourage you - it's an interesting project, of adequate use. There's already stuff out there that does stuff vaugely like this that could be adapted, but they tend to get large and complex. You seem to be shooting for simple system to solve a straightfoward problem that has a consistent UI - an admirable goal.
Given that, I'd start out by clearly defining your goals (things like: not that complex and have few dependencies, not a reimplementation of <some other thing>, simple UI, should send email, request types should be more heirarchical) and non-goals (while sending emails is an option, this will never be extended to allowing users to read their email, we will not be including a discussion forum, this will never be skinnable or templated, the low bang-for-the-buck of foreign language support is not desired, etc).
Define coding standards and stick to them (unless someone suggests a better one). I'd keep a tight control, and code review each change both for functionality as well as 'feel'. Keep things highly modularized, keep the interfaces consistent, and avoid monoliths (big sets of source that do lots of things) at all cost.
Try to keep it to a smallish team of motivated individuals - one or two like you, one or two who are very unlike you, one or two who do have more serious development background. Designate one person as 'infrastructure architect' (not you), and one as 'UI ombudsman' (also not you), and maybe some 'tech domain experts' (also not you, but someone with specific knowledge - like how to get it to work on NT or linux or how to import user lists from an LDAP directory, or something). You get to make priotizations of feature requests or suggestions, and then allow the other team members to pick what they want: you get stuck with the highest priority ones that nobody else wants to do. It's a good split, with adequate responsibility and interest levels for all.
You don't patent an idea...or at least you aren't supported to: you patent the execution of an idea - the 'how'.
Yes, the system should be allowed to be swayed by public opinion, or at least expert opinion: we make requests for comment to academia, for instance, all the time in plenty of areas of government, why not the patent system?
The Patent system was designed to reward innovation and further the public good. It's our way of conferring the 'king's monopoly' to those who do something useful. It's supposed to avoid uncreative people making cheap knock-offs of a good implementation and profiting that way, but, it's supposed to be only for a limited period of time, to encourage additional innovation. Given the speed of our economy, a 3-year patent cycle might be just the thing we need to boost it in the 'right way'.
Other words for obvious might be: trivial, uninteresting, derivative.
Final note: there's no reason why Patents have to be awarded so statically, or that the government couldn't charge a variable fee.
For instance, any product that is protected by patents could be required to pay a 5% patent-surcharge (minimum $1k/yr to keep the patent), instead of a static fee of a few hundred dollars.
I think that it reads as you interpret: if you put some stuff in a.ZIP, it will further compress it. But, on a very close reading, they are only comparing sizes, and not necessarily saying they are compressing the zip file.
From the article: "Netopsystems specialists combine and customize these tools and processes for each individual software product so that optimal size reduction results are achieved."
Note the following from the whitepaper: "Usually software producers compress their data by generating cabinet files or the like...Applying a conventional compression tool like WinZip or WinRAR on such data does not lead to appreciable - often negative - results."
Read strictly, this says what we know: compressing a compressed file generally doesn't work. They aren't saying they compress the compressed file here.
Note that towards the bottom, they are comparing 'lossless compressed' data to what they do.
So, here's my bet: they probably do something like crack open a cab or zip, parse a PDF, for example, for 'magic things' that can be ignored without changing the functionality ('lossy' but nothing of significance lost), or take an HTML file and strip all spaces and newlines between tags. Similar things could be done for other file types: Removing quotes and instead, magic-quoting commas in a CDF. Etc, ad inifinitum.
All in all, it's lame, but so is most software.
If you have a gigantic amount (hundreds of gigs terabytes) of different files to back up or move around, with so many file formats that you can't keep them straight, then it might be worth it. If you are lazy and it's cheap, it might be worth it. Other than that, I fail to see the real utility here - disk is cheap, bandwidth is getting cheaper, and reasonably assuming the bulk of this data is generated (an adequate assumption), you can do very similar things by fiddling around with the the output formatting in code.
The most effective benchmark I can think of for typical use is Windows Boots per second (WB/s).
First of all, restarting is the single most used feature of Windows.:-)
But beyond that, what's funny is I'm not kidding: it does more or less everything you want it to do - lots of disk IO, lots of processing, lots of memory access.
WB/s should be measured from power on to 'quiescence' - that is, when the services have finished initializing and are 'ready for action'. This goes beyond gina-time login to actually being able to, for instance, start up an IE and connect to yourself.
This figure has stayed nearly constant for 5ish years, at about 0.005 WB/s (i.e. about 2 and a half minutes between power on and being able to really do stuff). Even 'hibernate' (the ultimate fake optimization for WB/s), is only.06 WB/s.
Ultimately, I'm waiting for a 10 WB/s CPU. Then, I'll be happy. BSOD? Who cares.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that there are many fights to fight, and the fact that I'd fight your particular fight if I was directly involved doesn't mean that your fight is the only fight worth fighting.
I don't fault your reasoning, but that wasn't the contention I was arguing against - I was arguing specifically that I was a) brainless, b) reciting propaganda, c) presenting no opinions, d) ideal cannon fodder, and e) if everybody just stayed out of each other's business, things would be okay. That last is the one that gives rise to the 'cowardice' charge, since things are only 'okay' for oneself - not, necessarily, for them.
It's the implication that this responsibility is somehow more important than resonsibility to fellow Americans, and the idea that the best way to defend these people is by joining the National Guard and physically interposing oneself into the struggle that get you labelled "gung ho".
I don't object to being labeled "gung ho", that's accurate - I object to be labeled brainwashed. That said, I find 'reasonability' in the face of evil to be a...less than optimal...means of deterrence, from ethical, moral, and historical perspectives all.
It's the hallmark of the extremist to think that the best solution for him is the best solution for everyone, and your presentation implies that anyone who isn't willing to sign up for guard duty is failing to do so because he's afraid for his own safety.
I was reacting to the notion that what I was saying wasn't comprehensible ("presenting no opinions") to someone of sufficient intelligence to post to slashdot (not a high bar, admittedly). It's not "not signing up" that I have a problem with (plenty of good reasons - family, children, inability, other important work) - it's not grasping that a sane, rational individual would find it something worth doing that I have a problem with. Perhaps this is extremist of me, but I do think everybody should be capable of understanding what I expressed, and not recourse to ad hominim.
As to who exactly I am, I'm your equal. Did you forget for a moment that this is the ideal you're fighting for? "All men are created equal" applies to both of us, which gives me just as much right to call you brainwashed as it gives you to call me cowardly.
And you haven't shown in your response that you _are_ cowardly, since being cowardly, in my earlier expression, was contingent on finding nothing greater than oneself to fight for.
As to the "who are you?" comment, I was specifically reacting to the dismissive tone and tenor in what I was responding to, in a "who do you think you are" - that one is qualified to assert what is going in my head, sort of way, which is more what I intended to convey. I was reacting to the criticism-by-deconstruction inherent in the post to which I was responding. Deconstruction(which asserts there exists no meaning to communication, only pretext and subtext) universally resorts to the power dialectic and ad hominim (if you damage the messenger, you destroy the message), whereas actual (constructed, for lack of a better term) criticism answers the meaning, of which there was plenty (such as you are doing, I am quick to add - you and I are talking policy, he and I were talking about character).
I presume, anyway, you aren't actually calling me brainwashed - the rest of the tone and tenor of your article belies it.
Sometimes the biggest threat to what I hold dear isn't something that threatens my safety, and sometimes I have more to fear from the president than from a terrorist.
And I think the prime difference between you and the previous poster is that you aren't attacking the underlying value of what I've stated or chosen - we're disagreeing on policy, and on that we may respectfully disagree.
For instance, I would disagree that the Patriot Act hallmarks the end of civil rights in America, for instance. I disagree that the government should give
Regardless of the morality judgements, was there some factual misstatement I made in my post? I looked again, and am aware of none of substance.
Do you disagree that the things I state I would fight against are actually bad? If that were the case, I can understand why you wouldn't want to fight (but, in that instance, I'd suspect you of being a sociopath). But I think it's not the case.
If not, then perhaps you do not think that they rise to the level of being worthy of some random American putting himself in the fight against. If it's that: would you fight if it was your sister who was being infibulated, raped, killed, or their rights denied? If it was your child who died in Beslan? If your friend had been killed in 9/11, or by a suicide bomber, or by an indiscriminate Israeli? Or if it was your value as a non-Muslim being less than half of what a Muslim's are? Or if you were enslaved? Obviously, you would.
Then, why is it so hard to fathom that my sense of responsibility, that derives from my own priveleges and luck for being born in the right place at the right time and from my own connection to greater humanity, extends to those people who cannot defend their own rights? Extends to women and children I've never met and will never know?
Perhaps my use of a 'slogan' phrases like the Jefferson quote means that I'm incapable of forming my own opinions as a whole - I'm merely swayed by demogogues of ye olde quaint tymes. Despite the other, non-slogan reasons in the post, I simply don't think that's the case: among other things, I'm a 32 year old blue-state born American, well-travelled internationally, well-educated in history, theology and psychology, professionally employed software guy making a six-figure salary, who has rejected marxism, deconstruction, and po-mo moral relativism. Who, exactly, are you to question my intellectual or moral philsophy and choices?
Now, as for the suicide bombers: It is my understanding that they fight because they a) don't know any better, b) don't have better options in life, c) feel that Islam itself is under attack, d) want to establish a world-wide Islamic califate, e) because some interpretations of their religion tells them they will receive reward in heaven by dying for the cause. For me: b) I certainly have better options, c) I know Islam is not under attack because we are not attacking Islam, d) I refuse to allow a world-wide Islamic califate to be instantiated, and e) I'm not expecting any special treatment in the afterlife. But, I choose fight because of duty, my own sense of what is right and wrong, and my understanding of the philosophy and the 'why' of the world. Whether a) I 'don't know any better', remains to be seen. You certainly haven't shown you know better. Far from it, in fact.
As for cannon fodder - hardly that, I think - but on the front lines is, definitely, where I would choose to be. And, standing the line between you, your sister, any of the majority of good people of the world and a 'suicide bomber', terrorist, or Islamofascist is where I would want to place myself. If I can save a life (or kill a terrorist, same diff), then I will have made a difference, and being on that line will have been worth it, for me.
Sometimes, there are things of value that are more important than one's own skin. This is one of those. Those from whom nothing is more important than their own skin are called 'cowards'.
I'm a kid of some poor(ish) people. I'm no longer anything resembling poor, but it's my intention to join the National Guard anyway, because they need the people. It's definitely not for the money.
I'd take a couple of years out to fight (i.e. kill, and risk dying, in your terminology) for a free Iran, one in which they may blog hateful or joyful things about me, to their hearts content. I'd fight to stop the Iranian-state-sponsored murder of girl-children who were victims of rape (aka 'unfaithful wives'), and to free their women and dhimmis from second (or third) class status. I'd fight in the Sudan to bring something resembling justice and fair play, and end slavery. I'd fight to end the abomination of infibulation (look it up) in certain Islamic and W. African cultures. I'd fight to stop the genocide in Darfur. Drop me in Chechnya, and point, and I would strike at the heart of the groups who were affiliated with the Beslan atrocity. I'd fight to stop Syrians crossing over to Iraq, as well as fight to take down Bashar Assad's Baathist regime. I'd stand on a wall between Palestinians and Israelis, suicide bombers and all, to make sure neither side harms up the other while I'm standing there. I'd go into the mountains of Afghanistan and work to end bin Ladin's mortal coil. Or to help complete the route of the Taliban, to help stabilize the entire country of Afghanistan.
The question is, why won't you? What happened to you that you can see the abominations of the world and not work to oppose them by whatever means feasible?
Maybe you think all wars of liberation are, somehow, wrong when we play a part. Maybe you want to see a world marxist international instead of a free market. Maybe you think f* em, they can do it themselves. Maybe you don't see anything about America worth propagating (let alone even defending). Maybe you think that we can change Iran, or N. Korea, or al Queda by protesting. (If the latter, I'd love to see that. But you and your type don't even give it a try, because, like I, you know it's a worthless gesture, and you save your protests for people who won't just kill you outright)
But for me, my duty (the responsibility to recapitulate the blessings I've lived with all my life) calls me: America is good in that it has democracy, stability and freedom for itself. It is great in that it can bring democracy, stability, and freedom to others. I want to be part of that greatness.
Jefferson said it well: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". For Liberty to take root in the world, our patriots (not nationalists - the patriotism of free men can transcend nationalism) might have to bloody up the sand in another land. We just have to find the patriots over there, is all. There aren't that many now - but there are more every day.
I think a lot of people here forget how blessed we are - not just America but the entire West - and, instead of feeling the duty to be the best we can be because of those blessings, instead become resentful, spiteful little trolls (c.f. France, the Democrats, Michael Moore, and you).
The U.S. response to Soviet psychotronics R&D programs was the Remote Viewing program. In addition, the U.S. Army began the JEDI Project in 1983, which sought to increase human potential using teachable models of behavioral/physical excellent by unconventional means (Alexander et al., 1990). The JEDI Project was essentially a human-performance modeling experiment based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) skills, whereby advanced influence technologies to model excellence in human performance was used. The program ran under the auspices of the Army INSCOM and the Organizational Effectiveness School, and was sponsored by a U.S. government interagency task force. Finally, it should be pointed out that the program had successfully trained several hundred people, including members of Congress (such as Al Gore, Jr. and Tom Downey), before being terminated.
Um...okay, I'll bite: if the US was invaded by someone (call it the Martians) who were trying to re-establish our lost Democratic Republic (for instance, as would happen, if, as the left would desire, they took away the 2nd amendment, made illegal aliens eligible to vote, and then China, Mexico, Canada and France had quietly invaded and outpopulated us in the red states so they vote the neocommunist party (aka Democrats) into unchecked power), then, um...yes. Absolutely.
I, for one, would welcome our Martian Liberators.
Why's that so hard to fathom?
Allawi has proposed a perfectly reasonable plan by going forward with elections before complete stability is achieved.
Those places where stability is the worst have one thing in common - the local populace is not doing anything significant to actively combat, passively deny, rat the insurgents out to the Iraqi gov't, or otherwise discourage the behavior of the insurgents. So, they, rightly I think, should have less of a voice.
It's only when insurgent behavior is exported that you get an unfair situation - and judging from the fact that there are just a short list of 'hotspots', with thin tendrils snaking out from them, it's not exported that effectively.
The whelming majority of the country is perfectly suited to holding something resembling elections. Kurds are definitely all ready, much of the Southern Shia areas (anti-Iran parts) are quiet, Iraq's 'flyover' country probably doesn't have all that much invested in either way. So the only losers are really going to end up being a percentage of the Sunni areas, which is political karma.
Nothing on NECN's website, which is affiliated with that Bastion of Truth, the Boston Globe, so it's not a surprise.
Just a thought...
If you take your tinfoil hats off for a bit, what would make a killer app would be to have chat channels (akin to IRC) searchable and indexable through google.
Obviously, Cybering and such stuff would make lame reading (ooh, baby), as would all the script kiddies and elite gamers talking trash, but in a reasonably large number of cases, there's stuff out there one might want to preserve for posterity.
I envision two mechanisms: 1) "Private chat" which would work like gmail, but save the resultant session so that the two could access it.
2) "Public Chat" would just log whatever's there in some location tagged with the name of the channel, for future reference.
Obviously, you wouldn't want to archive junk: no binaries, maybe have a lameness filter, and you would have to find some way around robo-spammers, who would "recite" the works of Shakespeare, except punctuated by ads for V14GR4.
Dude, you've never flown El Al. Beyond checking me against every list known to man and I'm sure several known to nobody, they did everything except a full body cavity search and kept sending different people to see me to ask me the same questions for on the order of an hour before I was allowed to try to pack my stuff back into my suitcase and give it to them so it would make it on the same flight as me to Jerusalem.
;-), so last time I flew here, I, my carry-on and my shoes were checked by this big, ugly, chubby gorilla of a guy for five minutes - and it seemed like an hour.
About the only positive part of it was I spent a good half hour talking with (and looking at) a nice looking Sabra (Israeli girl) as she was pawing through my shorts (the ones in my suitcase, get your mind out of the gutter). The time went quickly.
I'm almost certain they hired a number of fairly attractive youngish women (all of whom have, de facto as Israelis, military experience and whom I'm betting had orders of magnitude better training than the TSA people get) to do such things as a way of keeping people from being irritated - good customer service, in all.
Also, the guys who came in to talk to me intermittently, who were admittedly brusque and obviously daring me to take offense at it, all had a similar look of sharp, competent authority about them - something I fear our own TSA has not considered a factor for in their hiring process.
Of course, in America, you're not allowed to hire based on age, sex, or overall prettiness or the appearance of competence (or, in a union shop, actual competence
This is not to say that I minded - I always say 'Good job, thank you, sir', and 'have a good day'. Because I am grateful that someone is doing something to protect what could be my behind, regardless that their getting paid for it. I say "Thank you" when a cop gives me a ticket too. Silly me, perhaps.
I don't think this means what I think you think it means.
Please note that the quote does not read: Those who would temporarily give up a little Liberty to purchase essential safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
1) Essential Liberty - there is no right to privacy when conducting many types of business transactions. For instance, moving millions of dollars around. Or sending a dangerous chemical substance through the mail. Or buying and utilizing a car.
I am not saying that my icecream preference, bathroom habits, who I voted for in the last election, or my innermost heart's desire should be an open book just because I once got on a plane. That's essential privacy.
Certainly one has no natural 'right to fly': I am hindered from that by the force of gravity and lack of adequate wings.
So, I can make a contract with someone who has the ability to move me from one location to another quickly. As part of that contract, they can ask me to prove who I am. Further, since this is (usually) interstate commerce, government has been granted the power to regulate that contract. Thus, government can require that the contract stipulate that I will attempt to prove who I am.
2) Give up - in fact, in this scenario, I _retain_ my right to privacy: I can accept or reject the contract with (given an ounce of perspective) little or no permenant harm to myself: I trade the expediency of getting on a flight for the 'good old days', where I can get a horse and carriage and clip-clop across the country just like my forebears did. Or the 'good really old days' where I can walk. It's good for the environment.
3) Little - this one is debatable. Yes, you still have a very small percentage of dying by the actions of a terrorist. But it's become very important that we put up some barriers to avoid making it trivially easy for bad people to do bad things to many people simultaneously. Every time you raise the bar a notch, you increase their chances of getting, as a previous poster called it, 'unlucky' and screwing up and getting caught before they have actualized their murderous intent.
4) Temporary - Death is permenant for those unfortunate enough to be involved. Death is the fundamental denial of all other Liberties. Conversely, the right to life is the sine qua non of all natural rights and liberties. The Safety (which is, the defense of that right to life) of those innocent non-Combatants on the plane and on the ground is a good thing.
Remind me again what we're arguing about? Oh...showing your ID and checking it against one of the few records we have about the bad guys: the names or known aliases of a handful of known terrorists in order to board a plane, and if you are, inconveniencing you until it's straightened out. Right.
I think the correct response to this is "Thank you, yes, here's my ID, and and, please do double-check my bag thoroughly and even make me take off my shoes and twiddle my thumbs while the machine churns - I'm really okay with that, if spending time on my bag at random is the cost to effectively increase the chance you'll stop someone bad before they do something very bad."
Unlike Spain's recent attempt to bribe the jihadis (by paying the "submission tax", as Sayyid Qutb of the Islamic Brotherhood called it) by giving state money to Mosques (oh, I understand their stated reason of weaning mosques off of foreign funds, but I also understand the implied one, and find it reprehensible), America still has enough of it's history and culture to know that at it's heart (when someone reminds them of what Ben Franklin said, since they weren't taught it it school) that "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety". Or that "(Thousands of) Millions for defense, not one penny for tribute" has long-lasting wisdom to it. I never see America paying Zakat. Ain't gonna happen, certainly not until they take away the 2nd Amendment.
;-)
Again, I think it's easy to mistake what one gets in the media for the "facts on the ground" in America.
I'm _really_ looking forward to this election, and I have reason to hope it's not the gnat's whisker like last time: I live in Massachusetts, in Cambridge in fact, and I'm seeing people who used to consider themselves either independent or somewhat liberal going "Crap. I really can't vote for this guy. Maybe Nader. Although, it would be kind of nice if the IRS maybe could go away...".
As for shiny toys, even they don't have the capacity to get us to turn from the....um...the...oooh....shiny....
You're coming at this from entirely the wrong perspective.
This is WW IV, fought between the forces of Islamofacisism and the forces of Freedom. Just like the WWIII (the 'Cold' War) between Communism and Freedom. Just like the WWII between Fascism and Freedom. Just like WWI between Imperialism (the Kaisar - Ceasar) and Freedom. Just like the American War of Independence, between Royalism and Freedom.
The weapons of the Islamofascists are their uneducated, no-prospects, mind-controlled youth, who they hook up to bombs and send walking into cafes. These 'footsoldiers' aren't seen as individuals with a life to live and hopes to tain: they are seen as the weapons of Islamofascism, to be manipulated and disgarded. Make no mistake that those who are in charge and in power (just like Saddam, who called for his militia to suicide attacks, cowered in fear and was found down a hole) have their hands at the switch, and will utilize them solely for their personal view of power: this is only tangentially related to the Islamic Caliphate, all the actions of their leaders (like al Sadr in Iraq) are just in it for the power, not the ideology.
Take a look at what they have in store for us as their utopian society, from the Afghanistan as run by the Taliban. Every single trivial 'free' thing we take for granted is at their disposal, and all actions are either required or prohibited: from noneducating women to locking them up and forcing them into wearing walking tents, to what you believe and how you worship (Not just enforcing shiite-versus-sunni-versus-sufi whoever happens to be in power in the area, but Iraqi Coptic Christians have been murdered even as recently as last week in Iraq and Afghani Christians of some denomination couple of weeks ago in Afghanistan), to what you hear on radio and TV, to what you can say about them and others(nothing but praise for them, and "Death to America"), right down to the millimeter of the length of your beard. (Oh, you don't have a beard, you say? You must be effeminate, so they'll just drop a wall on you.)
Compare that to what we've done with Afghanistan and Iraq. Or Japan. Or France. Or West Germany. Or S. Korea.
Did you really buy into all the moral relativism they relentlessly force-fed us in college and in the mainstream? Didn't all that theory fall apart when you started having to take responsibility for your own life? Or did their teaching take hold, deluding yourself that you can get away with the little evils and it was okay: that a little lie here and a little bad over there doesn't have a big effect on who you are? Doesn't actually damage your character? (I doubt it - most people recover, eventually - I think most people just don't have the sense to look at their own value systems again after college so that their words again meet with their actions).
I've run across many people who claim "everything is relative", pure pseudoscience, harkening back to Einstein as 'proof'. What they forget is that, even there, there is an absolute: the speed of light. In the context, you can't get around the speed of light, and in much the same way, you can't get away from good and evil.
"Everything is shades of gray" is another bit of pablum, and false too: there is no gray, there is only greater or lesser intensity of white: there is either an absence of white, or the presence of it. And history, I think, even the history over there, will record that in the war on terrorism, despite flaws and failures and mistakes, but from the _long term effect_ ("by their works shall you know them") that the United States and GB were shining with white, and the Islamofascists - not so much - probably not at all. Ash-heap of history.
They don't understand us as well as you assert: they understand the mainstream media, made up of a certain brand of the most trivial of ideology America has to offer. They forget that there are millions of us who are willing, ready, and able to defend our Freedom - and, oh yeah, able to go about arrange for others to have their
Greenwatch, not a member of the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' lists UCS as part of the 'radical left': here
The Washington Times says here that the UCS is funded entirely by the left:
Do you believe there will come a time that we will have a 'robot rights' movement? Will it be more credible than most of the 'animal rights' movement, or just a good-hearted (but weak-minded) anthropomorphization of our silicon companion machines?
Someone (Dennis Miller?) once said, animals can have rights as soon as they accept responsibilities. Robots obviously can be given responsibilities (your job is to fit tab A into slot B), but ethically, should they get rights? As soon as someone programs a robot to pass the turing test, and then immediately ask for his rights? Or is it something deeper?
Beyond some kind of second-class entity status, will robots become citizens? Do robots have a god-given right (recall, our rights are considered by the Declaration of Independence to be given us either by 'Nature's God' or by their 'Creator') to freedom of expression, association, religion? The right to bear arms? Do robots have a 'right to work'? "One Robot, One Vote"? Will Robots have to file tax returns? Will there be Robot Courts? Robot Lawyers? Robot Jail? Robot Schools? Robotic Members elected to the Legislature? Some day, will we have a Robot President? Is a Robot built in Japan eligible to be president? What if the robot was shipped from Japan as parts with software, and put together here, does that count?
If you start building a robot, and decide to stop, will that be considered to be a robaboration? Or the work of their 'creator'? And if, after building, you switch it on and then decide you don't like it that much, and power it off again and harvest the parts, is that robomurder and disrobomemberment?
-JRP
Isn't it possible that Online Gambling could be used for Money Laundering?
Consider - you and I are playing blackjack (you're the dealer, I'm the player, and the house doesn't automatically win if it gets a blackjack), or backgammon, or heads-up poker. I with my 'horrible luck' always draw until I'm bused, or always leave several pips open, or only bet lots when I am dealt an 7-2. I bet 50-100k per hand. I can lose several million dollars to you rather quickly. And legally. And without oversight for tax purposes.
Unrestricted online gambling is ridiculously prone to misuse.
Consider
1) So, given it takes money to make money, $1000 isn't going to net you much in ROI.
2) Instead, write something gratis that other people will use, and will give you something to put on your resume after college.
3) Open up a sourceforge account to organize your project. Do all the project planning work out in the open - project goals and descriptions, requirements, specs, docs, code. In the future, you can point people to this as a sample of your early work (keep it updated). Have a GUI (I don't recommend Web apps for something like this - too much infrastructure), write it in C++ (what I suggest), Java, or VB, depending on your talent and audience (and resources - Gnu C++ and Java are free).
4) People don't use 80% of software they buy - so make that 80% open-sourced 'infrastructure' libraries and such, and the remaining 20% closed-source plug-ins or specialized customizations (and a good installer - people tend to buy stuff that has a good installer).
5) If someone wants a feature or a bug fixed, see if they will pay for support.
6) Leverage other people for the product.
7) Learn how to market your product. Just see it as an experiment - don't be shy, be outgoing, and specifically, be clever.
Do some market research: go and figure out what someone wants to do that they can't do now, or that the software to do is expensive. How? Ask them!
The criterion for your research should be - you should have a representative sample of the population nearby, they probably should be a small business (since individuals don't pay much and usually need more prettiness-per-unit-usefulness than a small business solving a specific problem would need), they should have some general-purpose computers that are underleveraged (people do one or two applications on them (mail, word/excel/quicken, and Minesweeper) and don't really use them to their full potential).
Consider what target audiences you have around you: small, non-chain restaurants (specifically their back office); professional practices, like small dentist/physical therapist/massage therapists/chiropractor offices; the corner bodega - they might have a cash register, but no computer tracking of stock so they never quite know what their inventory is or how much to buy - sell them that. House painters/plumbers/small general contractors. Churches/Synagogues/Mosques.
Find something some group of the people above do that's tedius, and see if you can make it trivial. Don't be afraid to ask a lot of people, and say 'no' if it looks like too much - even if they will pay you. Do _not_ get in over your head.
KISS - keep it simple, silly. Bang-for-the-buck is the keyword for this sort of development. You are trying to make their lives better/easier/smarter, and they might need 'just one thing'. Consider the first spreadsheets - they merely edited columns of numbers and added them up correctly, and saved and read them to a file. This saved an _enormous_ amount of time for people who had to do this stuff day-in-day-out. Almost nothing subsequently has had as profound an impact on their lives as taking the grunt work out of moving raw numbers around with pen-and-paper.
-J
Since cost is an issue, you're not going to get most of your (useless to the problem) requirements met. If I wanted to do so, I'd probably dedicate a (cheezy) computer to it and have to write the darn software myself. Luckily, I have more important things to worry about...
I'd recommend the simple expedient of two alarm clocks.
I went to Sears and bought a cheap Panasonic (iirc) alarm clock radio/cd with 2 alarms and progressive volume. (The progressive volume has a min setting and a max setting, but not a duration setting (silly of them)). It was pretty cheap, like $35-45 a year and a half ago.
For you, I'd recommend two of them (or one of those and one of what you already have). One by your bedside, one across the room, requiring you to haul your backside out of bed, at least.
I just leave mine single one across the room, and have it turn on talk radio (two settings, starts low, waits a few minutes, the second gets much louder). Depending on the station I set it to, it usually infuriates me into wakefulness.
(I recommend NPR if you are a heartless conservative or Rush or Bill O' if you are a flaming liberal gasbag).
However, I bet the real problem is not the waking, it's the sleeping - getting to sleep/staying asleep. If you find yourself waking up at night out of breath, or if you snore, or your gf/wife/so hears you stop breathing during the night, see a sleep doctor. Skip the last can/bottle/gallon of caffeinated soda, cut out cigs if you smoke, keep the room cool. Melatonin works well for sleep regulation if taken aperiodically, and consider Ambien for periodic regulation (note that it's addictive - not in the heroine withdrawal way, but if you use it too often, you get to feel like you can't get to sleep without it - a feeling which goes away after a few days, but still...).
Ambien is magic to those who have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep - bed down, one pill, read for 15 minutes, turn off the light, I'm down for 7.5 hours almost exactly and wake up feeling like a tiger. IANAD, YMMV.
-J
Um...could it merely be that you were forcing yourself to smoke lousy cigs which made you disgusted? :-)
Frankly, I wish all the money that we're taking from the Tobacco companies in settlements, all the money we spend on anti-tobacco ads, all the money we take in to taxes on tobacco, and, heck, throw in the money we spent developing this vaccine had gone in to Lung Cancer (or just Cancer-in-general) Research.
But, it didn't, and it won't. It goes to lawyers. It goes to pork. It goes to propping up a overly beaurocratic, social-welfareish political system. And, oh yeah, a little bit of some of the money goes to substandard treatment of destitute ex-smokers.
Thank you, anti-smoking lobby and political hacks on both sides of the fence, for making the world a better place by decreasing the tax base which should have been all along going to fund cancer research.
The fact that someone has some bit of information about you isn't usually a problem.
The problem is that that bit of information which is uniquely identifiable to you, is being moved around without your knowledge, to third parties.
Take a (fake) example: I own a pair of black size 13 Bruno Magli shoes with RFID#112512214412211 in them. Anyone who can look at me can know I own a pair of this kind of shoes. Anyone who can get a few feet from me can tell that I have that one specific pair of shoes. But you have to hook that piece of information (these shoes were at this place at this time) to another piece of information (the mapping of the RFID# -> the store where I bought them->my Visa Card#) in order to violate my privacy. And once you bring those two things together, violate it you do.
Another way to think about is that people are really talking about you behind your back, and nobody likes that. Nothing good comes from gossip.
The only real way to fix this is with a constitutional amendment - freedom of speech and the press trumps it.
I'll set aside the worthless part of your reply, and agree with 'robust and maintainable' (parts I mentioned some practical points for this further down in my original), and 'finish in a timely manner' (something I didn't think was much of an issue in an open source project, but may be).
You'll note that your two useful points are not contrary to mine.
I think the underlying contention is between 'good hacker' (who can slap something together sufficient to solve a problem) with 'good developer' (who can do things in such a way as it can get easily better in the future). I assert 'Develop quality code' implies one is a good developer. If he had said "whack together something that doesn't have that many bugs and looks alright", I wouldn't have responded at all negatively.
Bad programmers do neither of the things either of us suggest. Bad programmers do a half-assed job at all of them.
"Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in /home/groups/f/fr/free-cmms/htdocs/maint/equip_tre e.php on line 52 Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in /home/groups/f/fr/free-cmms/htdocs/maint/equip_tre e.php on line 52 Could not connect to the databse server"
:-)
Okay, but seriously, the above is not such a big deal, except that you are able to read from the DB - one would think you should be able to write. This implies to me that the code to do database work isn't split out into a testable and self-referential unit (I don't know this, guessing). It also implies you haven't tested it since you last updated it. (This one is less of a guess.
My issues with the statement "I have never been involved with any serious software development although I am competent to develop quality code." is that, unless you've walked the walk, "competence" can't really be said to be reached. You might be able to turn out okay code and pretty UI, but 'quality' is in a myriad of little things. Like the above. Like making it highly configurable, and meta-configurable, so it can solve more than one problem at a time. Like maximizing reuse and minimizing duplication of effort. Like knowing at what level of abstraction to code to. Etc.
That said, I do want to encourage you - it's an interesting project, of adequate use. There's already stuff out there that does stuff vaugely like this that could be adapted, but they tend to get large and complex. You seem to be shooting for simple system to solve a straightfoward problem that has a consistent UI - an admirable goal.
Given that, I'd start out by clearly defining your goals (things like: not that complex and have few dependencies, not a reimplementation of <some other thing>, simple UI, should send email, request types should be more heirarchical) and non-goals (while sending emails is an option, this will never be extended to allowing users to read their email, we will not be including a discussion forum, this will never be skinnable or templated, the low bang-for-the-buck of foreign language support is not desired, etc).
Define coding standards and stick to them (unless someone suggests a better one). I'd keep a tight control, and code review each change both for functionality as well as 'feel'. Keep things highly modularized, keep the interfaces consistent, and avoid monoliths (big sets of source that do lots of things) at all cost.
Try to keep it to a smallish team of motivated individuals - one or two like you, one or two who are very unlike you, one or two who do have more serious development background. Designate one person as 'infrastructure architect' (not you), and one as 'UI ombudsman' (also not you), and maybe some 'tech domain experts' (also not you, but someone with specific knowledge - like how to get it to work on NT or linux or how to import user lists from an LDAP directory, or something). You get to make priotizations of feature requests or suggestions, and then allow the other team members to pick what they want: you get stuck with the highest priority ones that nobody else wants to do. It's a good split, with adequate responsibility and interest levels for all.
My $.03.
-J
> I would have called it 'artifical artifical intellegence'.
I'd call this 'scarily life-like intelligence'.
You don't patent an idea...or at least you aren't supported to: you patent the execution of an idea - the 'how'.
Yes, the system should be allowed to be swayed by public opinion, or at least expert opinion: we make requests for comment to academia, for instance, all the time in plenty of areas of government, why not the patent system?
The Patent system was designed to reward innovation and further the public good. It's our way of conferring the 'king's monopoly' to those who do something useful. It's supposed to avoid uncreative people making cheap knock-offs of a good implementation and profiting that way, but, it's supposed to be only for a limited period of time, to encourage additional innovation. Given the speed of our economy, a 3-year patent cycle might be just the thing we need to boost it in the 'right way'.
Other words for obvious might be: trivial, uninteresting, derivative.
Final note: there's no reason why Patents have to be awarded so statically, or that the government couldn't charge a variable fee.
For instance, any product that is protected by patents could be required to pay a 5% patent-surcharge (minimum $1k/yr to keep the patent), instead of a static fee of a few hundred dollars.
I think that it reads as you interpret: if you put some stuff in a .ZIP, it will further compress it. But, on a very close reading, they are only comparing sizes, and not necessarily saying they are compressing the zip file.
From the article: "Netopsystems specialists combine and customize these tools and processes for each individual software product so that optimal size reduction results are achieved."
Note the following from the whitepaper: "Usually software producers compress their data by generating cabinet files or the like...Applying a conventional compression tool like WinZip or WinRAR on such data does not lead to appreciable - often negative - results."
Read strictly, this says what we know: compressing a compressed file generally doesn't work. They aren't saying they compress the compressed file here.
Note that towards the bottom, they are comparing 'lossless compressed' data to what they do.
So, here's my bet: they probably do something like crack open a cab or zip, parse a PDF, for example, for 'magic things' that can be ignored without changing the functionality ('lossy' but nothing of significance lost), or take an HTML file and strip all spaces and newlines between tags. Similar things could be done for other file types: Removing quotes and instead, magic-quoting commas in a CDF. Etc, ad inifinitum.
All in all, it's lame, but so is most software.
If you have a gigantic amount (hundreds of gigs terabytes) of different files to back up or move around, with so many file formats that you can't keep them straight, then it might be worth it. If you are lazy and it's cheap, it might be worth it. Other than that, I fail to see the real utility here - disk is cheap, bandwidth is getting cheaper, and reasonably assuming the bulk of this data is generated (an adequate assumption), you can do very similar things by fiddling around with the the output formatting in code.
J
Hi,
:-)
.06 WB/s.
The most effective benchmark I can think of for typical use is Windows Boots per second (WB/s).
First of all, restarting is the single most used feature of Windows.
But beyond that, what's funny is I'm not kidding: it does more or less everything you want it to do - lots of disk IO, lots of processing, lots of memory access.
WB/s should be measured from power on to 'quiescence' - that is, when the services have finished initializing and are 'ready for action'. This goes beyond gina-time login to actually being able to, for instance, start up an IE and connect to yourself.
This figure has stayed nearly constant for 5ish years, at about 0.005 WB/s (i.e. about 2 and a half minutes between power on and being able to really do stuff). Even 'hibernate' (the ultimate fake optimization for WB/s), is only
Ultimately, I'm waiting for a 10 WB/s CPU. Then, I'll be happy. BSOD? Who cares.
J