I'm a taxpayer, that's who I am. Anyone who does not pay taxes, and receives government assistance, is by definition not only worthless, but of negative worth: they're a drain on the system.
Apparently you believe that paying taxes entitles you to judge the lives of others. From their perspective life may look rich and varied -- and life may look more rich and varied to those who do not just perceive worth in purely financial terms.
But for most of these people (especially those who reproduce while on welfare), they stay a drain permanently, so they are indeed "worthless" or worse.
People cannot stay on welfare for more than five years in most cases, following the welfare reform of the mid-1990s. Rants that treat welfare as it was 15 years ago make little sense.
If you think these people are so wonderful, why aren't you donating your entire income to them so they can continue with their unproductive lives?
You create a false dichotomy by saying that I either have to agree you with about "these people" (which people?) or want to donate my entire income to "them." If you read my grandparent post, you'll note that I pointed out some of the historical and other problems of the great-grandparent post.
that not only were people like this allowed to breathe the same air
If only laws prevented that! Surely eugenics is the answer, or perhaps some other form of law to keep the higher-quality people from those lower-quality ones.
They're going to spend the rest of their miserable, worthless lives on welfare, no doubt failing to raise their bastard kids properly.
Who are you to say that their lives will be miserable and worthless? To those living them, perhaps their lives are rich and provide emotional sustenance, or seem worthy and interesting. It is dangerous to try and judge someone from the outside, and if you hold the rest of humanity in such low regard, perhaps you should think about what is happening in your own life that you castigate others as you do.
Robertson Davies sometimes writes about such people who are left behind by time or technology or society, and writes about them with great sympathy. In The Cunning Man a doctor treats patients with more than just science, and in Conversation with Robertson Davies this exchange occurs:
Cameron: Don't those novels show a fairly strong current of sympathy for some aspects of that [cultural] tradition?
Davies: It is sympathy for the people -- not, I think the tradition -- because they are people. They're not caricatures, they're not oddities, they're not cardboard. They bleed when you stick them and they weep when they are miserable, and their sorrows and their distresses are made sometimes more poignant by the fact that they don't know why things are happening to them.
I will lament that my penis has by then received so little use.
Most women, I suspect, would choose a carefree bad boy over an angry, uptight Republican with a chip on his shoulder; Dan Savage makes a similar point in some of his columns. If you think ignorant fools can get laid so easily but someone as perspicacious as you wants to and can't, who is smart?
"It sucks, nothing works, DRM is t3h evil, I'm switching to Linux!" line. However as time has gone on none of them have made even a budge in that direction and are indeed toying with Vista.
It's easier to talk than do, as the occasional letters to the editor prior to the 2004 election demonstrated, when people threatened to move to Canada. Staying with Microsoft is easier than leaving, even if you're unhappy with Windows.
It seems unlikely that this person went to Stanford, as the school only offers Ph.D.s in CS, not IT, as far as I know. Furthermore, do you know he actually received any degree? The same link shows Robert Cringely pretended to have a degree from there, and I'm sure he's not the only one.
If you think worthwhile things can be learned only in college, you don't deserve a degree. I didn't say that. You quoted what I said above: "If you think the only things you learn in college are facts you can learn piecemeal on the internet, you probably don't belong in college." That's not the same as saying that "worthwhile" things can only be attained in college.
The point of the matter is that some people love to learn and they'll do it wherever and however they can. For people like that, college can be extremely frustrating because of the emphasis that is placed on things other than knowledge.
That's true, but you can draw false conclusions from correct premises, and what you say doesn't mean college is without value. A while ago someone e-mail a bunch of computer science biggies how they got into the field, and to his surprise many responded; the story was posted to Slashdot. Almost all of them had a natural interest in the subject they augmented with schooling. I wish I could find the link, as their answers were illustrative.
If only Apple would learn the same is true of windows and let us specify whether we want windows to open to full size by default, and thus not play the "drag the edge" and "find the scroll bar" games.
Why would I pay several thousand a year to learn something that I can learn on the internet?
If you think the only things you learn in college are facts you can learn piecemeal on the internet, you probably don't belong in college.
I've personally had to teach someone with a Ph.D. in IT
From where? Very few reputable schools offer a Ph.D. in IT -- I think the University of Oklahoma does, but very few others do. If you hire people with degrees from the University of Phoenix and its ilk, you can expect to get what you pay for.
it'll be to get the degree and get out of there, because I honestly doubt that they'll be able to teach me anything interesting that I haven't already learned from another source.
Then I suggest not going to college, because with that attitude you'll be right. College is supposed to cultivate knowledge, and if you aren't open to learning -- which includes learning on your own -- you're only going to graduate with a piece of paper, rather than the changes inside college is supposed to foment.
James Fallows had problems, and that post has links to his other posts. He's a relatively famous journalist and technofile; see his first article about computers here. The Atlantic has given him a real tech column -- as opposed to Mossberg's -- that he's been writing for the last few months, and I'd provide a link were they not behind a walled garden.
If that's not enough, you can read the TechWorld article he links to.
How many laptop users keep a laptop for more than a few years? By the time their laptops' hinges wear out, the laptop itself is ready to be replaced. Some of us only haul laptops around sporadically and thus use them more as a convenience than anything else. I bought mine while in college in anticipation of taking it to school, back, abroad, back, and back to school. Mine now feels slow thanks to a stuffed hard drive, and so I wish I'd been able to buy a desktop then. Now I still do, but I still move somewhat frequently, and the lack of a stable living situation means that I'm not as inclined to buy one.
Your comment just proved the OP right. To burn a CD, put the CD in the drive and tell iTunes or Windows Media Player or whatever to rip it and you're done. Maybe plug in your iPod if you want to copy it to a portable device. You ignore CSS, which doesn't let you just copy files to your hard drive, and even so, you're also recommending that you change the TV setup, taking complex steps to make sure the DVD actually plays in Grandma's DVD player.
In any case, I don't bother unless I have the original DVD. But it's nice, I mean, downloading takes days and days, and there's the possibility of being caught and fined (or worse). Ripping means I just borrow the DVD from roommates for about 15 mins, then give it back, and the only way I get caught is if they seize my computer.
Or you could just pay $10 and buy the damn thing, or get a Netflix subscription.
Which is true, but far, far less than 95% of the smart people with post-secondary degrees are foreign-born and foreign-educated; for all the United States' primary and secondary education problems, its university system is still among the best in the world. The kind of people Microsoft is interested in for these positions -- Ph.D.s, post-docs, etc. -- were probably educated in the U.S., with a smaller but still significant number in Europe. Post-9/11 hassles make them less likely to a) be able to come to the U.S. and b) like staying here once they do. Maybe the United States should consider that it might be shooting itself in the foot with its overreactions to 9/11.
Russia was humiliated by the end of the Cold War, it lost its Empire, saw its beliefs collapse and then allowed its economy to be destroyed by Western 'reformers'; the end result was millions of Russians in horrifying poverty, the collapse of the economy, social system, education, and in large parts of the country, law-and-order. Now, it has discovered it has unbelievable power in the form of its energy reserves, it has massive amounts of foreign currency sloshing around, AND in the form of Putin, the fabled Russian strong man who can unite the country.
Putin no longer believes this, but a rational observer should believe that Russia has long been humiliated by the fact that it can't live by the rule of law or allow its citizens to participate in a meaningful way in government. The wealth and military power of the U.S. do not flow from the government, they flow from the people, and the purpose of the government is to serve the people, not vice-versa (cue Bush jokes). Consequently, if Russia wants to avoid humiliation, it also wants to avoid the strong man at the center, which it has never been able to do. Putin seeks the trappings of a great state without the government of a great state.
There is no shortage of math and science majors. I'm nearing completion of a PhD in science, and if I could go back 6 years, I would go to law school instead.
Reading comments like this frustrates me. I attended a year of law school before realizing what apparently took you six years in getting a Ph.D. There actually *aren't* as many law jobs as you seem to think; consider this article from the Wall Street Journal. From the article:
The legal profession is really two professions: the elite
lawyers and everyone else. Most of the former start out at big law firms. Many of the latter
never find gainful legal employment. Instead, they work at jobs that might be characterized as
"quasi-legal": paralegals, clerks, administrators, doing work for which they probably never
needed a J.D.
Although hard data about the nature of these jobs are difficult to come by (and rely on
self-reporting, which is inherently unreliable), the mean salary for graduates of top 10 law
schools is $135,000 while it is $60,000 for "tier three" schools. It's certainly possible that
tier-three graduates tend to gravitate toward lower-paying public-interest and government jobs,
but this lower salary may also reflect the nonlegal nature of many of these jobs and the fact
that these graduates are settling for anything that will pay the bills.
Consider also this article from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It says: "Competition for job openings should be keen because of the large number of students graduating from law school each year."
The point I'm trying to make is that there is no shortage of lawyers; there is a shortage of brilliant lawyers. For that matter, there's a shortage of brilliance in just about every field conceivable. Do you really think it's easy to go into $100K of debt to go to three additional years of school with a rapacious, hard-working group just to graduate into a profession where 60+ hour weeks is the norm, not the anomaly? Too many of the recent law grads I know tell me they wish they'd done the same thing I do.
The real truth is that the brilliant people in any field -- law, science, math -- are the ones who love their job and hence it doesn't seem like work to them and hence they're willing to go mentally further than the drudges.
All you people who are grousing at the recommendations that people do what they love should keep this in mind when you're telling people to go to law school and the like.
To the OP: This isn't directed exclusively against you, although I think you'll benefit from realizing that you're experiencing a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" effect. Were you quitting a job in the firm rat race, you might have the same opinion about law as you presently do about your Ph.D. But maybe not -- you could always go to law school; patent lawyers genuinely are in short supply, so you could always try that. Granted, being in school till you're 35 may not appeal, but I saw people doing it. This assumes you think you'll be passionate about the law, because if you aren't, the same burnout factors affecting you today will affect you tomorrow.
I've actually heard of kids in middle and high school who use SMS and IM so much that they legitimately don't know how to spell words like "you", "your/you're", and will use internet abbreviations (lol, idk, etc.) in school papers.
I've heard similar ideas, but just because I've heard them doesn't make them true; most such stories sound like another version of old men waving their canes and telling those damn kids to get off their lawn. This article from Ars reports on an Irish report essentially agreeing with what you say, but Ars also cites a Toronto report contradicting the idea that young people are losing their ability to spell based on IM.
This article from Technology Review argues that the increasing pervasiveness of writing in students' lives is actually improving their language skills rather than the opposite. Given these contrasting viewpoints, I'm not sure what is the "right" answer, but I bring a healthy amount of skepticism to any claim like the one you're repeating.
Most people I know spell fairly well if they care or if what they're doing is important and don't if the inverse is true. I'm part of the "txting" generation, but as my website probably indicates, I'm probably a reasonably proficient writer. (Anecdotes, blah blah, yes, I'm aware, but they help make the point I was raising above).
Replace "X" with any profession, and the answer is the same: some are and some aren't. The professions with high barriers to entry (i.e. medicine) tend to root out some if not most of the incompetents or otherwise poorly qualified, but some will still slip through. The same is true of sysadmins. They obviously exist for reason -- maybe the article writer should ask, "What would a world without sysadmins look like?" For large organization, the answer is "chaos," and they would quickly re-implement the same positions now being mocked.
Yes, teaching people better habits is a nice thing to do, but getting them to actually drop their old bad habits is an entirely different story.
Actually, this is astonishingly easy: all you have to do is impose a Pigoviantax on the behavior you want to correct. Want people to use less water? Raise the cost of water. Want people to use less gas? Raise the cost of gas.
Moral exhortations tend to be of limited effectiveness compared to adding to cost because those exhortations assume that people are sufficiently educated to understand them, selfless enough to care, and disciplined enough to act. It's not necessarily being "lazy" not to turn off water -- it's just that people don't have much incentive to. Give them an incentive and they will.
Well, actually, I think the EU is really just the Germans and the French finally figuring out how to do jointly what they've been trying unsuccessfully to do independently for the last 300-odd years -- conquer the rest of Europe.
Are Germany and France conquering the rest of Europe, or is the rest of Europe conquering Germany and France? I ask because I read -- chiefly in The Economist and The New York Times, granted -- about the angst in both countries over the rising tide of English as a language and the difficulty both have had with economic growth over the last 20 years. The language aspect is particularly important: the best way to kill or submerge a culture is to destroy its language. Look at what the English did to the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish; to most of the world, people who are from all four geographic region would seem one and the same. Not many people know Welsh, and few writers work with it any longer. The same happened to American Indian cultures.
It seems like the rest of Europe is changing the cultures of those two countries moreso than the other way around.
I've bonded very thoroughly with my laptop - it's name is Turing. I jealously clutch it when I travel. Whenever I put it down, I'm very careful to ensure that there's no stress on any cables, plugs, etc.
You could just say you're a Mac user and we'll understand all the rest.
In Heinlein's Starship Troopers, there's a bit about how the K-9 units just kill the dog part of the team if the human dies, but they can't do the same when the dog half dies, and someone (the narrator?) speculates that it would be more humane if the same happened.
In at least one other book, the protagonist loves, after a fashion, a simulacrum of something he knows cannot be who he loved. As the protagonist says, "We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws." We know robots are the opposite of material creatures, but that doesn't stop us from dreaming that they are not, and we have been dreaming of objects that come alive for at least as long as we have been writing things down. The truly strange part is that we are closer to having what we think of as "things" that do come alive.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you believe that paying taxes entitles you to judge the lives of others. From their perspective life may look rich and varied -- and life may look more rich and varied to those who do not just perceive worth in purely financial terms.
But for most of these people (especially those who reproduce while on welfare), they stay a drain permanently, so they are indeed "worthless" or worse.
People cannot stay on welfare for more than five years in most cases, following the welfare reform of the mid-1990s. Rants that treat welfare as it was 15 years ago make little sense.
If you think these people are so wonderful, why aren't you donating your entire income to them so they can continue with their unproductive lives?
You create a false dichotomy by saying that I either have to agree you with about "these people" (which people?) or want to donate my entire income to "them." If you read my grandparent post, you'll note that I pointed out some of the historical and other problems of the great-grandparent post.
If only laws prevented that! Surely eugenics is the answer, or perhaps some other form of law to keep the higher-quality people from those lower-quality ones.
They're going to spend the rest of their miserable, worthless lives on welfare, no doubt failing to raise their bastard kids properly.
Who are you to say that their lives will be miserable and worthless? To those living them, perhaps their lives are rich and provide emotional sustenance, or seem worthy and interesting. It is dangerous to try and judge someone from the outside, and if you hold the rest of humanity in such low regard, perhaps you should think about what is happening in your own life that you castigate others as you do.
Robertson Davies sometimes writes about such people who are left behind by time or technology or society, and writes about them with great sympathy. In The Cunning Man a doctor treats patients with more than just science, and in Conversation with Robertson Davies this exchange occurs:
I will lament that my penis has by then received so little use.
Most women, I suspect, would choose a carefree bad boy over an angry, uptight Republican with a chip on his shoulder; Dan Savage makes a similar point in some of his columns. If you think ignorant fools can get laid so easily but someone as perspicacious as you wants to and can't, who is smart?
Quick heads up: you should also have an apostrophe in your subject line, which indicates "is" as a contraction afterwards.
It's easier to talk than do, as the occasional letters to the editor prior to the 2004 election demonstrated, when people threatened to move to Canada. Staying with Microsoft is easier than leaving, even if you're unhappy with Windows.
If you think worthwhile things can be learned only in college, you don't deserve a degree. I didn't say that. You quoted what I said above: "If you think the only things you learn in college are facts you can learn piecemeal on the internet, you probably don't belong in college." That's not the same as saying that "worthwhile" things can only be attained in college.
The point of the matter is that some people love to learn and they'll do it wherever and however they can. For people like that, college can be extremely frustrating because of the emphasis that is placed on things other than knowledge.
That's true, but you can draw false conclusions from correct premises, and what you say doesn't mean college is without value. A while ago someone e-mail a bunch of computer science biggies how they got into the field, and to his surprise many responded; the story was posted to Slashdot. Almost all of them had a natural interest in the subject they augmented with schooling. I wish I could find the link, as their answers were illustrative.
If only Apple would learn the same is true of windows and let us specify whether we want windows to open to full size by default, and thus not play the "drag the edge" and "find the scroll bar" games.
If you think the only things you learn in college are facts you can learn piecemeal on the internet, you probably don't belong in college.
I've personally had to teach someone with a Ph.D. in IT
From where? Very few reputable schools offer a Ph.D. in IT -- I think the University of Oklahoma does, but very few others do. If you hire people with degrees from the University of Phoenix and its ilk, you can expect to get what you pay for.
it'll be to get the degree and get out of there, because I honestly doubt that they'll be able to teach me anything interesting that I haven't already learned from another source.
Then I suggest not going to college, because with that attitude you'll be right. College is supposed to cultivate knowledge, and if you aren't open to learning -- which includes learning on your own -- you're only going to graduate with a piece of paper, rather than the changes inside college is supposed to foment.
If that's not enough, you can read the TechWorld article he links to.
How many laptop users keep a laptop for more than a few years? By the time their laptops' hinges wear out, the laptop itself is ready to be replaced. Some of us only haul laptops around sporadically and thus use them more as a convenience than anything else. I bought mine while in college in anticipation of taking it to school, back, abroad, back, and back to school. Mine now feels slow thanks to a stuffed hard drive, and so I wish I'd been able to buy a desktop then. Now I still do, but I still move somewhat frequently, and the lack of a stable living situation means that I'm not as inclined to buy one.
In any case, I don't bother unless I have the original DVD. But it's nice, I mean, downloading takes days and days, and there's the possibility of being caught and fined (or worse). Ripping means I just borrow the DVD from roommates for about 15 mins, then give it back, and the only way I get caught is if they seize my computer.
Or you could just pay $10 and buy the damn thing, or get a Netflix subscription.
Which is true, but far, far less than 95% of the smart people with post-secondary degrees are foreign-born and foreign-educated; for all the United States' primary and secondary education problems, its university system is still among the best in the world. The kind of people Microsoft is interested in for these positions -- Ph.D.s, post-docs, etc. -- were probably educated in the U.S., with a smaller but still significant number in Europe. Post-9/11 hassles make them less likely to a) be able to come to the U.S. and b) like staying here once they do. Maybe the United States should consider that it might be shooting itself in the foot with its overreactions to 9/11.
Sorry, you're too late.
No shit. So why are you posting this kind of idiocy?
The parent said: gtk+, pygtk, gtk#, SWT, etc.
Are you trying to refute the GP or prove his point?
Anyone tried to put one of these Matias Tactile Pros through the dishwasher? (I'm actually only interested in version 1, which I have).
Putin no longer believes this, but a rational observer should believe that Russia has long been humiliated by the fact that it can't live by the rule of law or allow its citizens to participate in a meaningful way in government. The wealth and military power of the U.S. do not flow from the government, they flow from the people, and the purpose of the government is to serve the people, not vice-versa (cue Bush jokes). Consequently, if Russia wants to avoid humiliation, it also wants to avoid the strong man at the center, which it has never been able to do. Putin seeks the trappings of a great state without the government of a great state.
Good luck. Russia humiliates itself.
Reading comments like this frustrates me. I attended a year of law school before realizing what apparently took you six years in getting a Ph.D. There actually *aren't* as many law jobs as you seem to think; consider this article from the Wall Street Journal. From the article:
Consider also this article from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It says: "Competition for job openings should be keen because of the large number of students graduating from law school each year."
The point I'm trying to make is that there is no shortage of lawyers; there is a shortage of brilliant lawyers. For that matter, there's a shortage of brilliance in just about every field conceivable. Do you really think it's easy to go into $100K of debt to go to three additional years of school with a rapacious, hard-working group just to graduate into a profession where 60+ hour weeks is the norm, not the anomaly? Too many of the recent law grads I know tell me they wish they'd done the same thing I do.
The real truth is that the brilliant people in any field -- law, science, math -- are the ones who love their job and hence it doesn't seem like work to them and hence they're willing to go mentally further than the drudges.
All you people who are grousing at the recommendations that people do what they love should keep this in mind when you're telling people to go to law school and the like.
To the OP: This isn't directed exclusively against you, although I think you'll benefit from realizing that you're experiencing a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" effect. Were you quitting a job in the firm rat race, you might have the same opinion about law as you presently do about your Ph.D. But maybe not -- you could always go to law school; patent lawyers genuinely are in short supply, so you could always try that. Granted, being in school till you're 35 may not appeal, but I saw people doing it. This assumes you think you'll be passionate about the law, because if you aren't, the same burnout factors affecting you today will affect you tomorrow.
I've heard similar ideas, but just because I've heard them doesn't make them true; most such stories sound like another version of old men waving their canes and telling those damn kids to get off their lawn. This article from Ars reports on an Irish report essentially agreeing with what you say, but Ars also cites a Toronto report contradicting the idea that young people are losing their ability to spell based on IM.
This article from Technology Review argues that the increasing pervasiveness of writing in students' lives is actually improving their language skills rather than the opposite. Given these contrasting viewpoints, I'm not sure what is the "right" answer, but I bring a healthy amount of skepticism to any claim like the one you're repeating. Most people I know spell fairly well if they care or if what they're doing is important and don't if the inverse is true. I'm part of the "txting" generation, but as my website probably indicates, I'm probably a reasonably proficient writer. (Anecdotes, blah blah, yes, I'm aware, but they help make the point I was raising above).
So, do you still have a TV?
The porn finders came directly from the hands of president Tabaré Vazquez.
There, fixed that for you.
Replace "X" with any profession, and the answer is the same: some are and some aren't. The professions with high barriers to entry (i.e. medicine) tend to root out some if not most of the incompetents or otherwise poorly qualified, but some will still slip through. The same is true of sysadmins. They obviously exist for reason -- maybe the article writer should ask, "What would a world without sysadmins look like?" For large organization, the answer is "chaos," and they would quickly re-implement the same positions now being mocked.
Actually, this is astonishingly easy: all you have to do is impose a Pigovian tax on the behavior you want to correct. Want people to use less water? Raise the cost of water. Want people to use less gas? Raise the cost of gas.
Moral exhortations tend to be of limited effectiveness compared to adding to cost because those exhortations assume that people are sufficiently educated to understand them, selfless enough to care, and disciplined enough to act. It's not necessarily being "lazy" not to turn off water -- it's just that people don't have much incentive to. Give them an incentive and they will.
Are Germany and France conquering the rest of Europe, or is the rest of Europe conquering Germany and France? I ask because I read -- chiefly in The Economist and The New York Times, granted -- about the angst in both countries over the rising tide of English as a language and the difficulty both have had with economic growth over the last 20 years. The language aspect is particularly important: the best way to kill or submerge a culture is to destroy its language. Look at what the English did to the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish; to most of the world, people who are from all four geographic region would seem one and the same. Not many people know Welsh, and few writers work with it any longer. The same happened to American Indian cultures.
It seems like the rest of Europe is changing the cultures of those two countries moreso than the other way around.
You could just say you're a Mac user and we'll understand all the rest.
In at least one other book, the protagonist loves, after a fashion, a simulacrum of something he knows cannot be who he loved. As the protagonist says, "We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws." We know robots are the opposite of material creatures, but that doesn't stop us from dreaming that they are not, and we have been dreaming of objects that come alive for at least as long as we have been writing things down. The truly strange part is that we are closer to having what we think of as "things" that do come alive.