Actually, Linux projects and distros and companies have realized the advantage of installing the OS for the user, which is why they've tried to compete in the pre-installed OEM market. The reason they haven't succeeded there has nothing to do with technical quality or a desire to provide Linux installed already, and everything to do with Microsoft telling the OEMs that if they sell Linux pre-installed on any consumer systems Microsoft will make their life miserable with regards to all the Windows machines they're selling (In theory, this is illegal anticompetitive behavior, but in practice the US DoJ looks the other way). That's why the Linux netbook market, which had been going fairly strong a couple of years ago, is now almost non-existant.
A business can attempt to buy a politician to represent them. That is fine. Businesses and Unions do it all the time.
No it isn't fine: The majority of the country does not control a business nor have a vote in a union, so this bribery ensures that some people are not represented in government.
Alternately, it's a symptom of the fairly easily documented fact that the US- and UK-backed governments throughout much of the Middle East fail to meet the needs of their population and regularly use repression and torture to maintain power. It's not uncommon for people who are under repressive political systems to turn to religious groups as a way to organize and maintain some sense of there being good in the world (e.g. Polish Catholics under Communism).
For example, the Egyptians who took down the Mubarak government were mostly young, highly educated but with no job prospects, and no welfare system, meaning that they were quite literally hungry for any sort of viable alternative.
Of course, if you really think about it, here's some fun logic: 1. An article says that if people analyze written articles and books, they won't believe them. 2. Ergo, If I analyze the this article, I won't believe it. 3. If I believe the article, I didn't analyze it. (contrapositive) 4. But if I didn't analyze it, it might not be complete BS, so I shouldn't believe the article. 5. Conclusion: Don't believe anything you read, including this analysis.
Or you can always look at Adolf Eichmann, who was just your regular family man, doing his job to the best of his ability, with his job including wiping out all the Jews in Europe. His ordinariness that serves as a warning to everyone else not to just follow orders and rules and assume that you will be morally correct.
It would be a big mistake to assume that the opportunities available for Cuban-American immigrants in Miami (which is what I'm guessing you are based on your post) are identical to the opportunities available for African-Americans in the worst neighborhoods in Detroit. I'm not saying drive doesn't count, but in order to succeed a person needs both drive and opportunity. Someone with no opportunities can't succeed no matter how much they're driven to do so.
You made the most of what you could do, and you have every right to be proud of it. But that doesn't mean everybody could have done what you did with the same talent and drive.
Yes, yes, of course taxing CO2 emissions, deploying alternative energy production, increasing the price of gas in the US to European levels, building high-speed rail connections between major cities, and encouraging conservation efforts would completely destroy Western civilization!
Actually, judges do take into account the intent of laws as well as the letter of the law. For instance, if there's a controversy about what a particular word or phrase means in a law, they look up what legislators or the executive said about it when they passed it.
For instance, with your bicycle law, the law might have been not "bicycles must have lights" but "bicyclists must make reasonable efforts to remain visible to other traffic." And then the question is what "reasonable efforts" constitutes, and why the legislators decided not to specify that bicycles have lights but might have been ok with reflectors or reflective clothing. So they look at the debate in the state legislature, discover that somebody was killed because they were hard to see while riding a bike but according to the letter of previous traffic law the driver was still at fault and a big controversy erupted over the ensuing vehicular homicide case, but the legislators didn't want to mandate particular ways of being visible. The judge then tells the police to stop going after people wearing reflective clothing but not having lights.
That's why law gets complicated, by the way - while in software the weird cases may comprise 5% of the problem, in law they comprise most of the problem, because the reason a case comes before a court is because something unusual happened.
Slightly paraphrasing Hubert Farnsworth: "Yes, there's no safer occupation than mining. Especially when you're on a rock whipping through space at a million miles an hour! Whoo whoo whoo whoooo! Safe!"
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion.
That's not entirely true: - Guys like Pythagoras (c 500 BCE) and Aristotle (c 400 BCE) were living in a polytheistic society where religion was not really the force that it became under Christianity. Everyone seems to have paid at least lip service to worshipping the official state gods, but it was nothing like an environment where if you didn't profess a particular faith you were killed. Roman documents were very clear that they were generally fine with people believing whatever they wanted unless that belief encouraged them to revolt against Rome (which Nero thought the Christians were doing). And the BC / AD split (now BCE / CE, of course) obviously wasn't something that happened until Christianity became fairly well established. - The Abbasid Caliphate actively encouraged and funded the study of mathematics and science from about 750 CE to 1250 CE, in what has been termed the Islamic Golden Age. The difference between the math that was being used by the Romans and the math that was available for Isaac Newton to draw on are largely the result of Arabic mathematicians (who in turn drew from mathematicians in India) - they had codified writing of numbers including fractions and decimals, created algebra and trigonometry, and vastly improved understanding of irrational numbers. - The aforementioned Isaac Newton was incredibly religious, writing a great deal about alchemy and metaphysics. Same with Renee Descartes: his magnum opus was a philosophical proof (in his mind at least) that God exists.
If you mean that mathematics was held back in Europe in the Middle Ages due to dogmatic Christianity, then you'd be somewhat right, but that's different from all religion holding back all mathematics.
Another way of putting this: If you're a truly successful tech team manager with technical skills, you're only rarely into the code or configs. As a tech manager, your technical skills are relevant, but they're relevant primarily in making sure each of your people has the skills they need to do the work, and evaluating them so they can get better (or fire them if they can't).
The other reason your people skills will be critical, of course, is that you have to manage upwards quite a bit to keep upper management out of your techie's hair enough so they can work. Otherwise, you'll get the phenomenon of some developer trying to fix a problem and 6 managers standing over their shoulder saying "fix it now!"
Actually, what they're saying is that Facebook and other major software development firms engage in illegal age discrimination, but that rather than complain about it or get the EEOC or other agencies to do something about it, we should just roll over and accept it.
We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in said, "All rise." We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down, we sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.
No, we should do things following the method of a traditional witch trial: Throw the suspect in the lake. If they don't sink to the bottom and drown, they're a witch and should be burned at the stake without delay.
Alternately, you might also weigh the suspect against a duck...
Most people have been raised with the notion that it's more important to appear competent than be competent.
There's a reason for that: Appearing competent is easier than being competent, and the rewards almost as great if not greater. For instance, a person who's able to get hired as an executive by appearing competent can protect themselves from the consequences of failure by blaming subordinates, blaming another department, blaming market conditions, or most drastically moving to another organization citing philosophical differences with the place they're at, to the point where they can "fail upwards" and reach the upper echelons of management without ever having done anything useful. Whereas a person who's good at the grunt work is often stuck at a senior foreman kind of level where he's still doing the grunt work with his team.
In other words, if we rewarded our scientists and teachers the same way we do our CEOs, we'd be a lot further along scientifically than we are now.
Zordak explained it: If my paper had sucked, I would have been fine with a bad grade and ideally some information on why it sucked so I could do better the next time. But instead what I got was "good work, I'm still giving you a bad grade for reasons I won't explain to you".
At the same time, I've seen significant flaws in the grading practices of human graders. For instance, I distinctly remember the paper I got back in my college years that said something along the lines of "Really interesting, well written, and insightful. B-". I also remember some essays that were pure unadulterated nonsense that got very high grades (including a 4-week project that I started on during school the day it was due and received an A).
Most of those are well-defined areas of academic study. For instance, most of the ______ Studies majors are all about studying the history, culture, and challenges of a particular society. There's some BS there, but there's BS in physics too (e.g. the Bogdanov Affair), and there's some valuable stuff that comes out of those departments.
The 3 music degrees make complete sense: Music Education is about teaching music and preparing students to work as school band directors and the like. A B.A. in music is about the academic study of music, including its theory, history, physics, and psychology. A B.M. in music is for those training to become better classical or jazz performers. My guess is that they overlap faculty and courses quite a bit.
Since when has violating the law deterred the actions of our government?
There'd be a good argument that the law made a difference on August 9, 1974. However, on September 8, 1974 the powers-that-be effectively put a stop to that kind of subversive precedent. (look it up)
Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way.
Actually, this wasn't younger employees who came up with what is now the Information Awareness Office, but a 65-year-old John Poindexter, former Navy admiral, national security advisor for Ronald Reagan, and likely felon (his convictions were reversed on appeal on the grounds that the word "corruptly" in the obstruction of justice statute since 1831 was too vague). Congress has defunded the agency at least once, but that hasn't stopped it yet.
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Actually, Linux projects and distros and companies have realized the advantage of installing the OS for the user, which is why they've tried to compete in the pre-installed OEM market. The reason they haven't succeeded there has nothing to do with technical quality or a desire to provide Linux installed already, and everything to do with Microsoft telling the OEMs that if they sell Linux pre-installed on any consumer systems Microsoft will make their life miserable with regards to all the Windows machines they're selling (In theory, this is illegal anticompetitive behavior, but in practice the US DoJ looks the other way). That's why the Linux netbook market, which had been going fairly strong a couple of years ago, is now almost non-existant.
No, it's not: The cake is a lie, and the 727 crash is just a variation of victory candescence.
Good point. In the words of Penn Jillette: "We need more atheists — and nothin' will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible."
The trouble is that one man's bloat is another man's absolutely essential feature.
A business can attempt to buy a politician to represent them. That is fine. Businesses and Unions do it all the time.
No it isn't fine: The majority of the country does not control a business nor have a vote in a union, so this bribery ensures that some people are not represented in government.
Line 5 should indicate exactly how seriously I was taking that, which is to say not at all.
Alternately, it's a symptom of the fairly easily documented fact that the US- and UK-backed governments throughout much of the Middle East fail to meet the needs of their population and regularly use repression and torture to maintain power. It's not uncommon for people who are under repressive political systems to turn to religious groups as a way to organize and maintain some sense of there being good in the world (e.g. Polish Catholics under Communism).
For example, the Egyptians who took down the Mubarak government were mostly young, highly educated but with no job prospects, and no welfare system, meaning that they were quite literally hungry for any sort of viable alternative.
Of course, if you really think about it, here's some fun logic:
1. An article says that if people analyze written articles and books, they won't believe them.
2. Ergo, If I analyze the this article, I won't believe it.
3. If I believe the article, I didn't analyze it. (contrapositive)
4. But if I didn't analyze it, it might not be complete BS, so I shouldn't believe the article.
5. Conclusion: Don't believe anything you read, including this analysis.
Or you can always look at Adolf Eichmann, who was just your regular family man, doing his job to the best of his ability, with his job including wiping out all the Jews in Europe. His ordinariness that serves as a warning to everyone else not to just follow orders and rules and assume that you will be morally correct.
It would be a big mistake to assume that the opportunities available for Cuban-American immigrants in Miami (which is what I'm guessing you are based on your post) are identical to the opportunities available for African-Americans in the worst neighborhoods in Detroit. I'm not saying drive doesn't count, but in order to succeed a person needs both drive and opportunity. Someone with no opportunities can't succeed no matter how much they're driven to do so.
You made the most of what you could do, and you have every right to be proud of it. But that doesn't mean everybody could have done what you did with the same talent and drive.
Yes, yes, of course taxing CO2 emissions, deploying alternative energy production, increasing the price of gas in the US to European levels, building high-speed rail connections between major cities, and encouraging conservation efforts would completely destroy Western civilization!
Actually, judges do take into account the intent of laws as well as the letter of the law. For instance, if there's a controversy about what a particular word or phrase means in a law, they look up what legislators or the executive said about it when they passed it.
For instance, with your bicycle law, the law might have been not "bicycles must have lights" but "bicyclists must make reasonable efforts to remain visible to other traffic." And then the question is what "reasonable efforts" constitutes, and why the legislators decided not to specify that bicycles have lights but might have been ok with reflectors or reflective clothing. So they look at the debate in the state legislature, discover that somebody was killed because they were hard to see while riding a bike but according to the letter of previous traffic law the driver was still at fault and a big controversy erupted over the ensuing vehicular homicide case, but the legislators didn't want to mandate particular ways of being visible. The judge then tells the police to stop going after people wearing reflective clothing but not having lights.
That's why law gets complicated, by the way - while in software the weird cases may comprise 5% of the problem, in law they comprise most of the problem, because the reason a case comes before a court is because something unusual happened.
Slightly paraphrasing Hubert Farnsworth: "Yes, there's no safer occupation than mining. Especially when you're on a rock whipping through space at a million miles an hour! Whoo whoo whoo whoooo! Safe!"
Well, the obvious course of action is to extradite them to the UK for trial, and if found guilty punish them by sending them to Australia!
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion.
That's not entirely true:
- Guys like Pythagoras (c 500 BCE) and Aristotle (c 400 BCE) were living in a polytheistic society where religion was not really the force that it became under Christianity. Everyone seems to have paid at least lip service to worshipping the official state gods, but it was nothing like an environment where if you didn't profess a particular faith you were killed. Roman documents were very clear that they were generally fine with people believing whatever they wanted unless that belief encouraged them to revolt against Rome (which Nero thought the Christians were doing). And the BC / AD split (now BCE / CE, of course) obviously wasn't something that happened until Christianity became fairly well established.
- The Abbasid Caliphate actively encouraged and funded the study of mathematics and science from about 750 CE to 1250 CE, in what has been termed the Islamic Golden Age. The difference between the math that was being used by the Romans and the math that was available for Isaac Newton to draw on are largely the result of Arabic mathematicians (who in turn drew from mathematicians in India) - they had codified writing of numbers including fractions and decimals, created algebra and trigonometry, and vastly improved understanding of irrational numbers.
- The aforementioned Isaac Newton was incredibly religious, writing a great deal about alchemy and metaphysics. Same with Renee Descartes: his magnum opus was a philosophical proof (in his mind at least) that God exists.
If you mean that mathematics was held back in Europe in the Middle Ages due to dogmatic Christianity, then you'd be somewhat right, but that's different from all religion holding back all mathematics.
Another way of putting this: If you're a truly successful tech team manager with technical skills, you're only rarely into the code or configs. As a tech manager, your technical skills are relevant, but they're relevant primarily in making sure each of your people has the skills they need to do the work, and evaluating them so they can get better (or fire them if they can't).
The other reason your people skills will be critical, of course, is that you have to manage upwards quite a bit to keep upper management out of your techie's hair enough so they can work. Otherwise, you'll get the phenomenon of some developer trying to fix a problem and 6 managers standing over their shoulder saying "fix it now!"
Actually, what they're saying is that Facebook and other major software development firms engage in illegal age discrimination, but that rather than complain about it or get the EEOC or other agencies to do something about it, we should just roll over and accept it.
Blind judges can cause problems though:
We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in said, "All rise." We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down, we sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the 27 8x10 colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.
No, we should do things following the method of a traditional witch trial: Throw the suspect in the lake. If they don't sink to the bottom and drown, they're a witch and should be burned at the stake without delay.
Alternately, you might also weigh the suspect against a duck ...
Most people have been raised with the notion that it's more important to appear competent than be competent.
There's a reason for that: Appearing competent is easier than being competent, and the rewards almost as great if not greater. For instance, a person who's able to get hired as an executive by appearing competent can protect themselves from the consequences of failure by blaming subordinates, blaming another department, blaming market conditions, or most drastically moving to another organization citing philosophical differences with the place they're at, to the point where they can "fail upwards" and reach the upper echelons of management without ever having done anything useful. Whereas a person who's good at the grunt work is often stuck at a senior foreman kind of level where he's still doing the grunt work with his team.
In other words, if we rewarded our scientists and teachers the same way we do our CEOs, we'd be a lot further along scientifically than we are now.
Zordak explained it: If my paper had sucked, I would have been fine with a bad grade and ideally some information on why it sucked so I could do better the next time. But instead what I got was "good work, I'm still giving you a bad grade for reasons I won't explain to you".
At the same time, I've seen significant flaws in the grading practices of human graders. For instance, I distinctly remember the paper I got back in my college years that said something along the lines of "Really interesting, well written, and insightful. B-". I also remember some essays that were pure unadulterated nonsense that got very high grades (including a 4-week project that I started on during school the day it was due and received an A).
Most of those are well-defined areas of academic study. For instance, most of the ______ Studies majors are all about studying the history, culture, and challenges of a particular society. There's some BS there, but there's BS in physics too (e.g. the Bogdanov Affair), and there's some valuable stuff that comes out of those departments.
The 3 music degrees make complete sense: Music Education is about teaching music and preparing students to work as school band directors and the like. A B.A. in music is about the academic study of music, including its theory, history, physics, and psychology. A B.M. in music is for those training to become better classical or jazz performers. My guess is that they overlap faculty and courses quite a bit.
Since when has violating the law deterred the actions of our government?
There'd be a good argument that the law made a difference on August 9, 1974. However, on September 8, 1974 the powers-that-be effectively put a stop to that kind of subversive precedent.
(look it up)
Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way.
Actually, this wasn't younger employees who came up with what is now the Information Awareness Office, but a 65-year-old John Poindexter, former Navy admiral, national security advisor for Ronald Reagan, and likely felon (his convictions were reversed on appeal on the grounds that the word "corruptly" in the obstruction of justice statute since 1831 was too vague). Congress has defunded the agency at least once, but that hasn't stopped it yet.