Not to be a shill, but you might want to try Coda for PHP. On my Mac I use TextMate for damn near everything else, but Coda is just a really nice, well-integrated experience for PHP. It manages projects on a site-by-site basis which keeps things simpler for me, understands having a local and a remote copy, doesn't mind editing stuff right on the server over SFTP (probably WebDAV too, but I haven't tried it), and has integrated documentation for PHP. I bought it on a whim and found myself quite addicted to it for PHP.
I was looking into it for one of my little side projects. If you know Java and have the time to look at it, I recommend it. To call it a game server is really to limit it; it's actually a framework and server for persistent, low-latency agent-based computing. Seems to scale quite well and the API isn't too intimidating. On the website they have some showcased apps as well as case studies, but if you're really looking to find out a bit more, you should look at Project Snowman, a sample game of 3D snowmen wandering around a landscape hitting each other with snowballs.
All the same, I don't see much other use of it. Then again I think the gaming industry tends to keep its cards close to the chest (apart from rendering engines, I guess.)
I think it's a shame, but I'm not altogether surprised. At the same time, I'd be surprised if the community didn't rescue the project.
This may not be exactly what you want, but you can actually run XMonad as the WM on top of KDE or GNOME. It comes with a configuration so you still have the Kicker wherever you put it. XMonad also can float arbitrary windows, either programmatically by their name or class, or manually by dragging them out of the tiles. I've been using XMonad for about three days, with KDE at work, and I like it tremendously; prior to this my only real experience with tiling WMs was with Ion/Pwm, which apparently intentionally does not support Xinerama in the core, though there is a plugin for it. Tuomo is about the whiniest programmer on the planet though. Something about Finnish programmers...;)
Another thing to consider, though I'm not sure how doable this is in actuality, would be some kind of X proxy to launch your apps in, and then just run two X sessions, one for each display, and manually migrate them through the proxy when you need to. This, if it can be done, would be completely WM/DE agnostic.
Actually, it was better. Consumers put up a big fuss and Comcast changed their policy. Do you think they're likely to respond that well to their customers' rage once they have governmental backing for their anti-consumer policies?
Another explanation would be that this behavior is simply in keeping with their brand archetype, the magician. Apple obviously pays close attention to the way their products are received; they've had many failures. However, unlike their competition, they have no trouble burying a bad idea quickly. Do you remember the iPod BoomBox? Do you remember the Motorola Rokr? Apple notices when their stuff isn't well received and then it's gone.
By the same token, you don't expect the magician to hang out with the audience after the show. Merlin does not pass out a Rate My Performance card. Nor does Merlin hope to see you at Comdex. Being aloof is simply part of the brand identity, and you can't do that if you let each little division have their own blog.
I'm under the impression SGI traded delete expense for other benefits, like faster writes and more reliable streaming data performance. This kind of tradeoff is pretty common in data structures; AVL trees, for example, have a more costly insertion in exchange for better guarantees about access than red/black trees. Presumably the same kinds of tradeoffs exist for disk data structures as memory.
I've had my disk eaten by XFS, ReiserFS and ext2, but it's happened less often with XFS. I vaguely remember ReiserFS bugs looking a lot more psychedelic though (halfway through one corrupted file, finding the middle of another corrupted file's content, etc.) whereas with XFS, the files were simply gone. I haven't tried an ext filesystem in a long time but I recall them being recommended for servers due to their stability, not doing anything terribly fancy.
Discrete math is "easier" because as someone who has written programs, you already have an intuitive understanding of some aspects of formal logic and set theory and the higher level stuff in that class is within reach of where you probably already are. If that class has anything to teach you, it will be immensely useful, in a fundamental way. Nobody manages to be a good programmer without understanding at least some of that stuff but a fair amount of it comes to you if you program. If it were 1870, that material would be just as hard to learn.
The other material is probably great and would be useful to many programmers but I had no use for any of that stuff. It's certainly a bit removed from pure CS which adds that mystique.
That said, there's no total ordering over knowledge. Take both. And read some EWD's while you're at it.
It's pretty obnoxious, isn't it? But I still feel guilty about it. I think I probably waste about an hour to an hour and a half. It takes me a little while to get ready when I get in and sporadically through the day one takes little five minute breaks while waiting for the code to compile or whatever. That time adds up. But in practice, most of us in most workplaces, waste a certain amount of time each day. If it's more than a certain amount or if it's endemic, it might be a bad workplace. Watch "The Office." If it seems comparable to the show or worse, it's too much.
I still remember the surprise I had when I first started working in high school. I had an internship with the county government that started right after school (3 PM). By the time I got there, most everyone was already cruising for 5 and I was fired up wanting to get some stuff done. I thought they were shockingly lazy. That summer I had a full time internship for the local electric company. You just can't keep all processors going at 100% for 8 hours straight.
The challenge for people hell-bent on starting their careers as programmers (as opposed to computer engineers) seems to be that starting programmers are not worth as much.
From where I'm sitting, part of the reason for this is that to successfully program anything you have to understand it. Most starting programmers, even if they understand programming very well, don't understand any application domain. I'd like to know if the salary situation is as depressed for programmers with 5 or more years of experience. I suspect that though the barrier to entry in this field is low, the road to excellence is still narrow. I would be willing to wager that with engineering the starting salaries are higher because there are fewer people competing for starting positions, but that the overall career attrition rate is lower. Lots of people think they want to be programmers but find out after a year or two in industry that it doesn't suit them as a career. Most engineering fields don't have the same romantic draw. Other fields with high turnover in the early stages have low salaries that grow rapidly. The movie industry takes this to an absurd extreme, where you almost have to beg just to work for free in the beginning, but if you demonstrate a modicum of talent, it appears to me that you can find a fair amount of paying work simply because the volunteers are so bad and producers and directors get tired of wading through them to find the underpriced jewel.
I didn't get into this field to make a ton of money and I have been pleasantly surprised when pitifully low salaries turned into median salaries. The rule of thumb for programming as a career seems to be: interesting work, excellent tools, or high salary: pick one and a half. Don't do anything you don't enjoy just for the money or you'll burn out after a few years. I hope your son finds a way to follow his passions while still making decent money.
I think (as a new Java developer) that a big part of Java's success lies in the IDE. We have to put the complexity somewhere. Some languages put it in the library, some into the language itself, and Java definitely puts a lot of it into the IDE. I find it hard to imagine needing or wanting or even being able to provide this kind of experience to a malleable language like Ruby or a terse language like Haskell. But for Java it really makes a big difference to use a bloated IDE.
I started professionally programming Java about two months ago and hadn't had any experience with it before.
First impression of Eclipse: it's slow, there were display artifacts. It's versioning scheme was clearly designed with pride rather than usability in mind (which is newer, Galileo or Ganymede, and how can you tell?). I could never find the correct Subversion plugin (was I supposed to be using Subclipse or Eclipse Subversion?). Both of them seemed to depend on other plugins which I was supposed to choose between or manually install. Ran into similar issues with Maven integration. The plugin had a clever name and once installed I never really figured out how to make it "go." I only have so much time to spend any given day on configuring my editor. Both coworkers who used Eclipse also helpfully assured me that I'd have to reinstall it every six months or so, because it tends to "go bad" after a while. Not a great sign.
On a whim I downloaded NetBeans. Nobody in my software group was using it, apparently older versions had turned them off completely. Out of the box, it opens Maven projects and the integration is seamless, and it has Subversion and Mercurial integration out of the box. For a new user, the out-of-the-box experience with NetBeans today beats Eclipse hands-down. Especially coming into a professional environment with many moving parts integrated.
The story isn't perfect. NetBeans takes forever and a day to start up. It also can get unresponsive from time to time. You can sink your whole day into configuring it. Plugin integration seems to in general be better than with Eclipse (at least to me) but configuration is a bit worse; everything seems to get thrown under that one tab in the preferences. It tries to manage Tomcat for me but I usually wind up manually force-quitting it (our app probably has a memory leak) because NetBeans' Terminate option doesn't ever seem to do anything. And there have been plenty of confusing issues. Tab completion worked in EL in our JSF facelets, but only inside in a valid XHTML file; figuring that out took an afternoon. I'm still not altogether sure how to get the relationships between multiple projects right.
If I were going to summarize my opinion of NetBeans as a two month user, I'd say: usually it just works but when it doesn't, it's hard to figure out how to fix it. The situation with Eclipse seems to me to be more like, there's a plugin out there that does what you need, good luck figuring out how to get it installed and use it.
Prior to using Java and NetBeans, I mainly did PHP and Ruby plus some other miscellaneous on a Mac with TextMate, Emacs or Coda, depending on the situation. From a usability perspective, Coda in particular but also TextMate are wonderful tools. NetBeans and Eclipse both do some space-age cool stuff but their usability isn't quite up to par. Lots of things are slow that don't seem like they should be, like switching tabs and opening files, and fundamentals tend to be screwy. For example, in NetBeans, if I'm debugging an app and have an SQL window open, there will be three green play icons on my screen. One of them runs the app in not-debug mode, one of them continues from a breakpoint, and one of them runs the SQL command. None of these have particularly memorable shortcuts and their icons are too similar. NetBeans will happily run and deploy the app while I have it at a break point in a debugging session, though the exact intended meaning of that action would be hard to guess.
All in all, if you have a day to throw at it, I recommend giving NetBeans a shot. Two of my three coworkers wound up switching. It also has better Vim integration, if that's relevant to you.
Due to the nature of nuclear reactions, I find it very implausible that it could have "fizzled." It's a damn chain reaction - set it and forget it, as the saying goes.
However, I think it's probably better to take the claim at face value than risk being wrong.
Here's a clue to the wealthy and educated to whom I assume you believe you belong: stop killing your children in the womb, and maybe that birth rate discrepancy you have such disdain for will be reduced.
If you really think you have the answers to all the world's problems embedded in your shining DNA, maybe you could invest in the future and pass some of it on rather than murdering it.
The standard template library is one of the reasons writing C++ looks like writing Perl. It's the perfect complement to a terrible language, the same way that a lice, flea and tick infestation is the perfect complement to the bed of a sleazy main-street motel with hourly rates.
VRML was one of the most ill-conceived ideas in the history of the web. The only time anyone brings it up is to make fun of it. A "cool technology" in the sense that, woo, we could have three dee websites, but an irrelevent technology because anyone with anything to say in the 3D medium would rather say it some other way and those people for whom it could have been an augmentative technology couldn't afford it in terms of development. Not to mention the accessibility fiasco.
Screw SGI. They made a really cool computer for a long time -- arguably the best in its niche -- but were continually losing, at first to a much older technology (the Amiga) and later to a much slower technology (the Mac). Being fastest isn't good enough. You also have to be good. They aren't.
To make an entity's rights contingent on the entity's intelligence seems to me to be a serious crime. After all, the real message of Western religion in this area is that there is something irreducibly different about being human, and this is true whether you're intelligent or a human pile of jelly.
To consider a redefinition of personhood which would extend only to those who are more intelligent than a chimp (which seems to be the direction you're going in) would of course open up the very same question for all of our mentally handicapped citizens. On one side would be the intelligence worshippers, saying that these people are not human (or people, or whatever) and on the other side would be everyone else. There are of course organizations like PETA that seem to espouse a notion of rights that extend to anything animated and there are religious people who simply believe that humans, and humans alone, are different. Some religion believes that what makes a human different from an animal is his ability to distinguish between right and wrong, to freely choose to be good even with an inclination towards evil. I'm sure there would be divisions but ultimately I think that most religion would be accepting of anything which appears to be able to choose freely.
The state, of course, will have to accede to the notion that sentient non-humans can become citizens. It's an interesting thought, and probably one we'll eventually have to tackle, but I think that the state will be forced to choose a definition of citizen which will encompass whatever new sentient-seeming entities are encountered without rejecting people or categories of people who are already citizens, as any attempt to include a concrete conception of intelligence in that definition will necessarily reject certain categories of people who are already citizens. That kind of thing generally results in loud and angry public outcry, and in this case I would certainly be a part of it.
Furthermore, I personally think that the notion of quantified intelligence is already taken way too seriously in this world and that things would be a damnsite better if it weren't so. The government is always more unjust when it attempts to work with qualities instead of quantities because soft concepts require interpretation and thus magnify the variable of human error. Compounded with that, intelligence as a concept hasn't yet been scientifically defined to everyone's satisfaction; the best definition I've heard is that it is linked to being able to distinguish more categories, and while that resonates with me as correct, I cannot see how the time that it takes a person to figure out that they're looking at the Fibonacci sequence has anything to do with it. Standardized testing in this area is very weak, highly culturally- and age-dependant, and this is on top of being a bad idea implementing a poor scientific theory.
It is my sincere hope that this fringe line of thinking remain there if and when we do need to face these questions directly rather than speculatively.
Preach it, brother. My second test is next Tuesday.
Though to be totally honest, my next thought was, "like what, Perl?" But I guess an AC got that one before I showed up here.
-- Daniel
Re:stick to e16 for a wm, but e17 has nice stuff
on
State of the E-nion
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, it was that page in the google cache too. I went back after reading your post, and sure enough, it's back. Must have been a DNS hickup or something equally weird like that. GFXGIRL? Weird.
-- Daniel
Re:stick to e16 for a wm, but e17 has nice stuff
on
State of the E-nion
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Didn't Afterstep become GNUStep?
Nope. A popular misconception however.
Afterstep was a window manager based on Bowman, which was in turn based on FVWM 1. GNUstep is the GNU reimplementation of the NeXTSTEP libraries and interfaces (i.e. the Cocoa part of Mac OS X). As a matter of fact, they recommend using Window Maker as your window manager to complete your NeXT under Linux experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be a shill, but you might want to try Coda for PHP. On my Mac I use TextMate for damn near everything else, but Coda is just a really nice, well-integrated experience for PHP. It manages projects on a site-by-site basis which keeps things simpler for me, understands having a local and a remote copy, doesn't mind editing stuff right on the server over SFTP (probably WebDAV too, but I haven't tried it), and has integrated documentation for PHP. I bought it on a whim and found myself quite addicted to it for PHP.
I also thought this was an odd omission. I have three or four editors I use on my Mac, but Coda is the only one I'd go near PHP with.
I was looking into it for one of my little side projects. If you know Java and have the time to look at it, I recommend it. To call it a game server is really to limit it; it's actually a framework and server for persistent, low-latency agent-based computing. Seems to scale quite well and the API isn't too intimidating. On the website they have some showcased apps as well as case studies, but if you're really looking to find out a bit more, you should look at Project Snowman, a sample game of 3D snowmen wandering around a landscape hitting each other with snowballs.
All the same, I don't see much other use of it. Then again I think the gaming industry tends to keep its cards close to the chest (apart from rendering engines, I guess.)
I think it's a shame, but I'm not altogether surprised. At the same time, I'd be surprised if the community didn't rescue the project.
This may not be exactly what you want, but you can actually run XMonad as the WM on top of KDE or GNOME. It comes with a configuration so you still have the Kicker wherever you put it. XMonad also can float arbitrary windows, either programmatically by their name or class, or manually by dragging them out of the tiles. I've been using XMonad for about three days, with KDE at work, and I like it tremendously; prior to this my only real experience with tiling WMs was with Ion/Pwm, which apparently intentionally does not support Xinerama in the core, though there is a plugin for it. Tuomo is about the whiniest programmer on the planet though. Something about Finnish programmers... ;)
Another thing to consider, though I'm not sure how doable this is in actuality, would be some kind of X proxy to launch your apps in, and then just run two X sessions, one for each display, and manually migrate them through the proxy when you need to. This, if it can be done, would be completely WM/DE agnostic.
Actually, it was better. Consumers put up a big fuss and Comcast changed their policy. Do you think they're likely to respond that well to their customers' rage once they have governmental backing for their anti-consumer policies?
What a stupid asshat. I can't believe anyone ever believes anything he says.
Another explanation would be that this behavior is simply in keeping with their brand archetype, the magician. Apple obviously pays close attention to the way their products are received; they've had many failures. However, unlike their competition, they have no trouble burying a bad idea quickly. Do you remember the iPod BoomBox? Do you remember the Motorola Rokr? Apple notices when their stuff isn't well received and then it's gone.
By the same token, you don't expect the magician to hang out with the audience after the show. Merlin does not pass out a Rate My Performance card. Nor does Merlin hope to see you at Comdex. Being aloof is simply part of the brand identity, and you can't do that if you let each little division have their own blog.
I'm with you on that.
I'm under the impression SGI traded delete expense for other benefits, like faster writes and more reliable streaming data performance. This kind of tradeoff is pretty common in data structures; AVL trees, for example, have a more costly insertion in exchange for better guarantees about access than red/black trees. Presumably the same kinds of tradeoffs exist for disk data structures as memory.
I've had my disk eaten by XFS, ReiserFS and ext2, but it's happened less often with XFS. I vaguely remember ReiserFS bugs looking a lot more psychedelic though (halfway through one corrupted file, finding the middle of another corrupted file's content, etc.) whereas with XFS, the files were simply gone. I haven't tried an ext filesystem in a long time but I recall them being recommended for servers due to their stability, not doing anything terribly fancy.
Discrete math is "easier" because as someone who has written programs, you already have an intuitive understanding of some aspects of formal logic and set theory and the higher level stuff in that class is within reach of where you probably already are. If that class has anything to teach you, it will be immensely useful, in a fundamental way. Nobody manages to be a good programmer without understanding at least some of that stuff but a fair amount of it comes to you if you program. If it were 1870, that material would be just as hard to learn.
The other material is probably great and would be useful to many programmers but I had no use for any of that stuff. It's certainly a bit removed from pure CS which adds that mystique.
That said, there's no total ordering over knowledge. Take both. And read some EWD's while you're at it.
It's pretty obnoxious, isn't it? But I still feel guilty about it. I think I probably waste about an hour to an hour and a half. It takes me a little while to get ready when I get in and sporadically through the day one takes little five minute breaks while waiting for the code to compile or whatever. That time adds up. But in practice, most of us in most workplaces, waste a certain amount of time each day. If it's more than a certain amount or if it's endemic, it might be a bad workplace. Watch "The Office." If it seems comparable to the show or worse, it's too much.
I still remember the surprise I had when I first started working in high school. I had an internship with the county government that started right after school (3 PM). By the time I got there, most everyone was already cruising for 5 and I was fired up wanting to get some stuff done. I thought they were shockingly lazy. That summer I had a full time internship for the local electric company. You just can't keep all processors going at 100% for 8 hours straight.
If they work, they eventually become medicine. Otherwise they remain snake oil.
Seriously? Turkey is a secular democracy that happens to have a Muslim majority. Read up on Ataturk sometime.
The challenge for people hell-bent on starting their careers as programmers (as opposed to computer engineers) seems to be that starting programmers are not worth as much.
From where I'm sitting, part of the reason for this is that to successfully program anything you have to understand it. Most starting programmers, even if they understand programming very well, don't understand any application domain. I'd like to know if the salary situation is as depressed for programmers with 5 or more years of experience. I suspect that though the barrier to entry in this field is low, the road to excellence is still narrow. I would be willing to wager that with engineering the starting salaries are higher because there are fewer people competing for starting positions, but that the overall career attrition rate is lower. Lots of people think they want to be programmers but find out after a year or two in industry that it doesn't suit them as a career. Most engineering fields don't have the same romantic draw. Other fields with high turnover in the early stages have low salaries that grow rapidly. The movie industry takes this to an absurd extreme, where you almost have to beg just to work for free in the beginning, but if you demonstrate a modicum of talent, it appears to me that you can find a fair amount of paying work simply because the volunteers are so bad and producers and directors get tired of wading through them to find the underpriced jewel.
I didn't get into this field to make a ton of money and I have been pleasantly surprised when pitifully low salaries turned into median salaries. The rule of thumb for programming as a career seems to be: interesting work, excellent tools, or high salary: pick one and a half. Don't do anything you don't enjoy just for the money or you'll burn out after a few years. I hope your son finds a way to follow his passions while still making decent money.
I think (as a new Java developer) that a big part of Java's success lies in the IDE. We have to put the complexity somewhere. Some languages put it in the library, some into the language itself, and Java definitely puts a lot of it into the IDE. I find it hard to imagine needing or wanting or even being able to provide this kind of experience to a malleable language like Ruby or a terse language like Haskell. But for Java it really makes a big difference to use a bloated IDE.
I started professionally programming Java about two months ago and hadn't had any experience with it before.
First impression of Eclipse: it's slow, there were display artifacts. It's versioning scheme was clearly designed with pride rather than usability in mind (which is newer, Galileo or Ganymede, and how can you tell?). I could never find the correct Subversion plugin (was I supposed to be using Subclipse or Eclipse Subversion?). Both of them seemed to depend on other plugins which I was supposed to choose between or manually install. Ran into similar issues with Maven integration. The plugin had a clever name and once installed I never really figured out how to make it "go." I only have so much time to spend any given day on configuring my editor. Both coworkers who used Eclipse also helpfully assured me that I'd have to reinstall it every six months or so, because it tends to "go bad" after a while. Not a great sign.
On a whim I downloaded NetBeans. Nobody in my software group was using it, apparently older versions had turned them off completely. Out of the box, it opens Maven projects and the integration is seamless, and it has Subversion and Mercurial integration out of the box. For a new user, the out-of-the-box experience with NetBeans today beats Eclipse hands-down. Especially coming into a professional environment with many moving parts integrated.
The story isn't perfect. NetBeans takes forever and a day to start up. It also can get unresponsive from time to time. You can sink your whole day into configuring it. Plugin integration seems to in general be better than with Eclipse (at least to me) but configuration is a bit worse; everything seems to get thrown under that one tab in the preferences. It tries to manage Tomcat for me but I usually wind up manually force-quitting it (our app probably has a memory leak) because NetBeans' Terminate option doesn't ever seem to do anything. And there have been plenty of confusing issues. Tab completion worked in EL in our JSF facelets, but only inside in a valid XHTML file; figuring that out took an afternoon. I'm still not altogether sure how to get the relationships between multiple projects right.
If I were going to summarize my opinion of NetBeans as a two month user, I'd say: usually it just works but when it doesn't, it's hard to figure out how to fix it. The situation with Eclipse seems to me to be more like, there's a plugin out there that does what you need, good luck figuring out how to get it installed and use it.
Prior to using Java and NetBeans, I mainly did PHP and Ruby plus some other miscellaneous on a Mac with TextMate, Emacs or Coda, depending on the situation. From a usability perspective, Coda in particular but also TextMate are wonderful tools. NetBeans and Eclipse both do some space-age cool stuff but their usability isn't quite up to par. Lots of things are slow that don't seem like they should be, like switching tabs and opening files, and fundamentals tend to be screwy. For example, in NetBeans, if I'm debugging an app and have an SQL window open, there will be three green play icons on my screen. One of them runs the app in not-debug mode, one of them continues from a breakpoint, and one of them runs the SQL command. None of these have particularly memorable shortcuts and their icons are too similar. NetBeans will happily run and deploy the app while I have it at a break point in a debugging session, though the exact intended meaning of that action would be hard to guess.
All in all, if you have a day to throw at it, I recommend giving NetBeans a shot. Two of my three coworkers wound up switching. It also has better Vim integration, if that's relevant to you.
The surreality of sharing a name with that bastard is a sensation I hope few others have to endure.
Sigh.
Thank you! I can't stand this kind of crap. If more people stood up like you and addressed it for what it is, things would be a lot better.
Due to the nature of nuclear reactions, I find it very implausible that it could have "fizzled." It's a damn chain reaction - set it and forget it, as the saying goes.
However, I think it's probably better to take the claim at face value than risk being wrong.
Here's a clue to the wealthy and educated to whom I assume you believe you belong: stop killing your children in the womb, and maybe that birth rate discrepancy you have such disdain for will be reduced.
If you really think you have the answers to all the world's problems embedded in your shining DNA, maybe you could invest in the future and pass some of it on rather than murdering it.
You're joking, right?
The standard template library is one of the reasons writing C++ looks like writing Perl. It's the perfect complement to a terrible language, the same way that a lice, flea and tick infestation is the perfect complement to the bed of a sleazy main-street motel with hourly rates.
VRML was one of the most ill-conceived ideas in the history of the web. The only time anyone brings it up is to make fun of it. A "cool technology" in the sense that, woo, we could have three dee websites, but an irrelevent technology because anyone with anything to say in the 3D medium would rather say it some other way and those people for whom it could have been an augmentative technology couldn't afford it in terms of development. Not to mention the accessibility fiasco.
Screw SGI. They made a really cool computer for a long time -- arguably the best in its niche -- but were continually losing, at first to a much older technology (the Amiga) and later to a much slower technology (the Mac). Being fastest isn't good enough. You also have to be good. They aren't.
To make an entity's rights contingent on the entity's intelligence seems to me to be a serious crime. After all, the real message of Western religion in this area is that there is something irreducibly different about being human, and this is true whether you're intelligent or a human pile of jelly.
To consider a redefinition of personhood which would extend only to those who are more intelligent than a chimp (which seems to be the direction you're going in) would of course open up the very same question for all of our mentally handicapped citizens. On one side would be the intelligence worshippers, saying that these people are not human (or people, or whatever) and on the other side would be everyone else. There are of course organizations like PETA that seem to espouse a notion of rights that extend to anything animated and there are religious people who simply believe that humans, and humans alone, are different. Some religion believes that what makes a human different from an animal is his ability to distinguish between right and wrong, to freely choose to be good even with an inclination towards evil. I'm sure there would be divisions but ultimately I think that most religion would be accepting of anything which appears to be able to choose freely.
The state, of course, will have to accede to the notion that sentient non-humans can become citizens. It's an interesting thought, and probably one we'll eventually have to tackle, but I think that the state will be forced to choose a definition of citizen which will encompass whatever new sentient-seeming entities are encountered without rejecting people or categories of people who are already citizens, as any attempt to include a concrete conception of intelligence in that definition will necessarily reject certain categories of people who are already citizens. That kind of thing generally results in loud and angry public outcry, and in this case I would certainly be a part of it.
Furthermore, I personally think that the notion of quantified intelligence is already taken way too seriously in this world and that things would be a damnsite better if it weren't so. The government is always more unjust when it attempts to work with qualities instead of quantities because soft concepts require interpretation and thus magnify the variable of human error. Compounded with that, intelligence as a concept hasn't yet been scientifically defined to everyone's satisfaction; the best definition I've heard is that it is linked to being able to distinguish more categories, and while that resonates with me as correct, I cannot see how the time that it takes a person to figure out that they're looking at the Fibonacci sequence has anything to do with it. Standardized testing in this area is very weak, highly culturally- and age-dependant, and this is on top of being a bad idea implementing a poor scientific theory.
It is my sincere hope that this fringe line of thinking remain there if and when we do need to face these questions directly rather than speculatively.
Preach it, brother. My second test is next Tuesday.
Though to be totally honest, my next thought was, "like what, Perl?" But I guess an AC got that one before I showed up here.
--
Daniel
Yeah, it was that page in the google cache too. I went back after reading your post, and sure enough, it's back. Must have been a DNS hickup or something equally weird like that. GFXGIRL? Weird.
--
Daniel
Didn't Afterstep become GNUStep?
Nope. A popular misconception however.
Afterstep was a window manager based on Bowman, which was in turn based on FVWM 1. GNUstep is the GNU reimplementation of the NeXTSTEP libraries and interfaces (i.e. the Cocoa part of Mac OS X). As a matter of fact, they recommend using Window Maker as your window manager to complete your NeXT under Linux experience.
--
Daniel