By the same logic, fat men and televisions in close proximity are CREATING couches.
Aren't they, though? Fat man has TV, but can't properly use it. (No couch to sit on.) He says to the free market, "GIVE ME MY COUCH!" Free market says, "OTAY!" It makes a couch, and it is good.
Hopefully this will be the perfect storm of voter fraud exposure. Consider the factors:
1) Voting machines have been decommissioned in several states already. 2) The possibility of voting machine tampering has settled well in the minds of many Americans. 3) Exit polls and virtually all polls prior to the primary showed Obama with a lead. Even the Clinton campaign thought they were going to lose. 4) The MSM hates Clinton. This will give them motive to investigate.
And finally, there is speculative motive on why Clinton would be helped and Paul suppressed. 1) Clinton is the desired opponent of the Republican party establishment. She unites their constituents like no other person alive. And, on the flip side, there's actually a Republicans for Obama movement. 2) The same folks hate Ron Paul. (He would draw off votes from their core voter pool.)
So, if there is intentional vote manipulation, this would be the best time to find it. If it comes out, it can always be pinned to the Clinton campaign. Nothing ever gets done in this country unless a Democrat can get the shaft in the process.:)
Even if you do own an HD TV, the gain is marginal.
I'm with you on the rest of your post, but have to disagree here. 1080p vs standard res is like night and day. Just watch "300" on DVD vs an HD format. It's really a more enjoyable experience.
If we ignore the astronomer because his way of telling us the asteriod is coming we have only ourselves to thank when we the asteroid hits. Whichever way he tells us we stil have to check out if there is truth there.
Yes, and if said astronomer's way of telling us was to try to cut us in half with a samurai sword, you'd probably have to take him out before he could get his point across.
Has this metaphor been stretched enough?:)
The thing is humans are prone to respond to threats first and ask questions later. Being confronted with lots of anger (and talk of ass kicking, and whatnot) tends to start up folk's threat response. If you really want to get a point across you don't start out by igniting fight or flight. It's counterproductive, and when done deliberately is somewhat adolescent. (Kind of like my 14 year old nephew who loves to say anything to get a rise out of folks, even when it's directly against his best interests to do so. Sound familiar?)
Well, there's no real engineering left, its a Lemon Market now full of "consultants".
Now? Son, you must have been born yesterday. The IT industry - heck, all industry - has been like that from the beginning.
Words are just words, and his points are still valid.
Part of the message is the medium. If I wrote a love note full of sweetness and light, then delivered it stapled to a flaming bag of shit, I'll bet you'd have a hard time seeing the sweetness and light bits.
It was here 50 years ago with nuclear power. Thankfully, it's finally getting attention again.
Back in 1960 my grandfather patented a fuel creation process for molten salt reactors while working at ORNL. These days my uncle is carrying the torch for green nuclear power, and fighting the good fight to get people to accept it as a viable power alternative. It's an uphill battle. Folks on the left are terrified of nukes. Folks on the right are in bed with the oil and coal industries. Thankfully the technology is all there, so when the environmental and peak oil shit really starts hitting the fan nuclear power will be up to the task. It'd be nice if we could be ahead of the game a bit more, but that's OK. The solution is there. We just need to be sufficiently motivated to do it.
I'd never heard of Zed Shaw before this story, but he will now be who I think of when the words "self" and "parody" are juxtaposed in my mind. To wit:
This means that thanks to Larry Flynt I can stab them in the ear verbally, insult them, question their sexual orientation, and say anything that's true and they just have to take it. Their only recourse is to write their pathetic little rebuttals in their stupid little blogs.
Obligatory pot/kettle/black reference.
I'll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I'll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally.
O....K.... I think that stands by itself.
But wait! There's more...
I've been thinking this over ever since I realized that Mongrel and Rails more or less killed my career.
No, I believe you're doing that...right now...
Before Mongrel I was building kick ass software for the NYC Dept. of Correction with a tiny team.
And, based on the "beat your fucking ass" statements above, he'll be utilizing that software as a client at some point.
After Mongrel I couldn't get a gang of monkeys to rape me, so forget any jobs.
Seriously, based on reading only a portion of his post, I wouldn't hire this man even if he was a coding god. I don't think his woes are due to his previous co-workers. Textbook example of a serious attitude problem.
It is funny, companies worry about their 20k per year factory workers when it comes to noise, and environmental conditions, but the 60-150k IT guy gets the shaft. Apparently server noise has a different effect on the ears than machine noise.
Nah. The 20k per year factory workers have something the IT guys don't: union representation.
Someone already got it, but it was waaaaay before it's time.
In 1998 I worked for Ericsson in a project called Geoportal. (later named Geobility) It's purpose was to build a system exactly as you describe: geographically targeted and triggered ads, coupons, promotions. We were going to include a user's preferences, schedule, to-do list, etc., all to better target a user's needs and wants.
Of course it died on the vine. It was too ambitious for the time and impossible to implement. Now? It's probably doable, and Google is just about the only entity that could pull it off. Good luck to them. It should be marvelous.
...If there was anything more fundamental, one would expect it to be even simpler: why should a more-complex set of rules just happen to have a nice, neat approximation right at the scales where humans happen to be able to observe them easily?
Because that was the scale we evolved (i.e. optimized) to observe efficiently.
But, about the assumption that the smaller scales should be simpler, there are many structures where that's not the case. Take fractals. At a large scale they may seem simple, but the deeper you delve the more complexity you see. (Infinitely complex, in fact.) There is a simple rule for generation, but that may be hard, or even impossible, to discover without the right analysis.
The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way.
Already he's wrong. Just look at quantum dynamics. At the time of it's discovery it seemed (and still does) completely irrational. Describing the actions of particles in terms of probabilities? You can't know how fast a particle is moving and it's location at the same time? When you observe a phenomena it changes it's behavior? There may be multiple divergent emerging universes?
Science challenges the nature of rationality all of the time. It destroys orthodoxy through observation. The very pillars of science, observation and interpretation (i.e. modeling) are always subject to change. That change, by necessity, comes slow and must have mountains of evidence justifying it, but it is possible. Quantum theory is still, almost 100 years on, challenging our notions of what is rational.
Davies again asks:
Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity?
Of course. Reason in it's present form cannot model the entire universe. To do that it would have to be on the order of complexity of the universe, and it ain't there yet. Give it a few million years of progress. Davies derides the notion that science is governed by immutable physical laws. That's all well and good. But he's implicitly arguing from the standpoint that reason is immutable. That's just not the case.
The problem will not get easier to deal with the longer you leave it, at some point they will have to be dealt with - so better to get it out of the way now.
Oh, no. If a Democrat is elected president it becomes extremely easy to deal with. No matter what the new president does, yell as loudly as you can that they're "SOFT ON TERRORISTS!"
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't they, though? Fat man has TV, but can't properly use it. (No couch to sit on.) He says to the free market, "GIVE ME MY COUCH!" Free market says, "OTAY!" It makes a couch, and it is good.
Here endeth the lesson.
Hopefully this will be the perfect storm of voter fraud exposure. Consider the factors:
:)
1) Voting machines have been decommissioned in several states already.
2) The possibility of voting machine tampering has settled well in the minds of many Americans.
3) Exit polls and virtually all polls prior to the primary showed Obama with a lead. Even the Clinton campaign thought they were going to lose.
4) The MSM hates Clinton. This will give them motive to investigate.
And finally, there is speculative motive on why Clinton would be helped and Paul suppressed. 1) Clinton is the desired opponent of the Republican party establishment. She unites their constituents like no other person alive. And, on the flip side, there's actually a Republicans for Obama movement. 2) The same folks hate Ron Paul. (He would draw off votes from their core voter pool.)
So, if there is intentional vote manipulation, this would be the best time to find it. If it comes out, it can always be pinned to the Clinton campaign. Nothing ever gets done in this country unless a Democrat can get the shaft in the process.
I wish I could mod you higher than 5. :) Most fuckin' awesome description of refactoring I've ever read.
No, you mean pasteurization is death! We must stand against this genocide of our microbial brothers and sisters!
Have you?
'nuff said.
I'm with you on the rest of your post, but have to disagree here. 1080p vs standard res is like night and day. Just watch "300" on DVD vs an HD format. It's really a more enjoyable experience.
If he's correct, it'd really be a new kind of science, wouldn't it?
Yes, and if said astronomer's way of telling us was to try to cut us in half with a samurai sword, you'd probably have to take him out before he could get his point across.
Has this metaphor been stretched enough?
The thing is humans are prone to respond to threats first and ask questions later. Being confronted with lots of anger (and talk of ass kicking, and whatnot) tends to start up folk's threat response. If you really want to get a point across you don't start out by igniting fight or flight. It's counterproductive, and when done deliberately is somewhat adolescent. (Kind of like my 14 year old nephew who loves to say anything to get a rise out of folks, even when it's directly against his best interests to do so. Sound familiar?)
Now? Son, you must have been born yesterday. The IT industry - heck, all industry - has been like that from the beginning.
Part of the message is the medium. If I wrote a love note full of sweetness and light, then delivered it stapled to a flaming bag of shit, I'll bet you'd have a hard time seeing the sweetness and light bits.
Get it?
Back in 1960 my grandfather patented a fuel creation process for molten salt reactors while working at ORNL. These days my uncle is carrying the torch for green nuclear power, and fighting the good fight to get people to accept it as a viable power alternative. It's an uphill battle. Folks on the left are terrified of nukes. Folks on the right are in bed with the oil and coal industries. Thankfully the technology is all there, so when the environmental and peak oil shit really starts hitting the fan nuclear power will be up to the task. It'd be nice if we could be ahead of the game a bit more, but that's OK. The solution is there. We just need to be sufficiently motivated to do it.
Obligatory pot/kettle/black reference.
O....K.... I think that stands by itself.
But wait! There's more...
No, I believe you're doing that...right now...
And, based on the "beat your fucking ass" statements above, he'll be utilizing that software as a client at some point.
Seriously, based on reading only a portion of his post, I wouldn't hire this man even if he was a coding god. I don't think his woes are due to his previous co-workers. Textbook example of a serious attitude problem.
Nah. The 20k per year factory workers have something the IT guys don't: union representation.
Someone already got it, but it was waaaaay before it's time.
In 1998 I worked for Ericsson in a project called Geoportal. (later named Geobility) It's purpose was to build a system exactly as you describe: geographically targeted and triggered ads, coupons, promotions. We were going to include a user's preferences, schedule, to-do list, etc., all to better target a user's needs and wants.
Of course it died on the vine. It was too ambitious for the time and impossible to implement. Now? It's probably doable, and Google is just about the only entity that could pull it off. Good luck to them. It should be marvelous.
Do you believe that breaking a cfl requires the dispatch of a hazmat team?
It never happened...seriously...
Just visit your local Home Depot. They've got standard, soft white, warm light, and full spectrum cfls.
Because that was the scale we evolved (i.e. optimized) to observe efficiently.
But, about the assumption that the smaller scales should be simpler, there are many structures where that's not the case. Take fractals. At a large scale they may seem simple, but the deeper you delve the more complexity you see. (Infinitely complex, in fact.) There is a simple rule for generation, but that may be hard, or even impossible, to discover without the right analysis.
Yes, it's "Save us from a global depression, please."
Already he's wrong. Just look at quantum dynamics. At the time of it's discovery it seemed (and still does) completely irrational. Describing the actions of particles in terms of probabilities? You can't know how fast a particle is moving and it's location at the same time? When you observe a phenomena it changes it's behavior? There may be multiple divergent emerging universes?
Science challenges the nature of rationality all of the time. It destroys orthodoxy through observation. The very pillars of science, observation and interpretation (i.e. modeling) are always subject to change. That change, by necessity, comes slow and must have mountains of evidence justifying it, but it is possible. Quantum theory is still, almost 100 years on, challenging our notions of what is rational.
Davies again asks:
Of course. Reason in it's present form cannot model the entire universe. To do that it would have to be on the order of complexity of the universe, and it ain't there yet. Give it a few million years of progress. Davies derides the notion that science is governed by immutable physical laws. That's all well and good. But he's implicitly arguing from the standpoint that reason is immutable. That's just not the case.
A high school buddy of mine went to the south pole a couple of years ago. Here's his blog.
Behind you...
According to the state run media, you mean.
What were their actual approval ratings?
Zeno can't get here soon enough for me. :)
Dude! You can love your pets...just done LOVE your pets. Know what I'm sayin'?
Oh, no. If a Democrat is elected president it becomes extremely easy to deal with. No matter what the new president does, yell as loudly as you can that they're "SOFT ON TERRORISTS!"
Same goes for solving that "Iraq War" problem.