And Al Gore actually had a lot to do with changing the Internet from being a few universities, government agencies, and big businesses into a tool that gazillions of people use. Say what you will about his other political stances, but he deserves quite a bit of credit for his work in the Senate that makes it clear he thought the geeks had a very good thing going.
Back in the early 20th century, the classical world of music didn't know where to go, which is what led to atrocities like atonalism and serial music. I love nearly all kinds of music, but 12 tone rows really try my patience.
That's probably because the stuff you've heard that uses 12-tone rows sucks. Try Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, and just listen to it, don't try to read any of the analysis about pitch classes or what rows he used or any of that nonsense. The accusation is partially true, though. There was a period of about 30 years where some academic composers were trying to create mathematically perfect music. They failed utterly, and produced a lot of unlistenable junk, a lot of it sounding completely random.
At the same time, in most musical eras, a lot of unlistenable junk was written and played. It didn't last until the present-day, though, because it was unlistenable junk. The stuff that has lasted this long has done so mostly because they were the best of the best, and I think it's fair to say that the best of the best of 20th century stuff will be with us a very long time as well. Stravinsky's Rites of Spring and Copland's Appalachian Spring are both going to be with us for a very very long time, just like Beethoven's 5th is still very much a part of our culture.
(In the interests of disclosure: I studied composition with a student of Arnold Schoenberg, so I'm a bit biased towards 12-tone music)
You're missing something very very very important: in working-class professions, education in the sense that college-educated people usually talk about it doesn't actually help much. What really helps, and what actually gets kids who expect to be part of the working class interested in their schooling, is vocational programs.
Which is of more benefit to a future auto mechanic: The Tempest by William Shakespeare, or a practicum in how to replace an alternator? Similarly, future farmers who are working on the family farm typically get quite an education about farming from dad and/or granddad. Future electricians need to know more about how to properly connect up a breaker box than they do about Ohm's Law.
A good bricklayer, welder, or child care worker is not a failure. They might not be getting really rich, but they're usually earning decent money doing something that is beneficial to society. In fact, for a lot of the kids attracted to vocational training, skilled trades are a significant step up from the sorts of jobs their parents did, and are their best opportunity to make a good life for themselves. They take it, and well they should. It's a big improvement over, say, working at Walmart, and getting into those sorts of professions is usually much more possible for them than trying to become an astrophysicist.
If you have to turn to "Ask Slashdot" for what's likely THE most important decision your business could make (sale), then you really have no business farming this out to someone you've just met.
Drat, and I was just about to make a suggestion about emailing everyone on the Internet and then awaiting their joyous replies.
I'm absolutely certain that this story coming out right now has absolutely nothing to do with digging through Mr Southers' entire life story to come up with some dirt on him that will give Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) political cover for leaving the TSA with no director for nearly a year. I mean, one might almost think that the real problem with this guy was that he was open to the possibility of TSA workers unionizing.
I think we can answer the question pretty easily: Some guy who wanted to increase the Google rank of his blog and somehow made it through the firehose.
There's a real reason for this that has nothing to do with any biases: There wasn't much by way of feminist literature being written in 1954. This was a full decade before such classics as The Feminine Mystique, and in the realm of speculative fiction predates McCaffrey or LeGuin.
I respectfully disagree, for several key reasons: 1. There are still some geek celebrities that pop in here from time to time. If we're talking Star Trek, it's not totally uncommon for CleverNickName to show up. Bruce Perens will not infrequently make an appearance on issues he knows about (or when the article is about something he did). And so forth.
2. There are still some comments that are insightful / interesting / informative that are modded as such. It ain't universal, but it's there. And plus, some of the funny comments really are funny.
3. There's a lot less spam-type articles. Roland and * * Beatles Beatles are both not showing up anymore. There's still the occasional slashvertisement, but they're less common than they used to be.
It's not, and hasn't been for a really long time, just about reporting technology news.
I'm not suggesting that "alternative medicine" cures everything. And I've know plenty of folks like your mother who completely misuse herbal remedies. In addition, I'm not someone who'd suggest a $3000 "alternative treatment" instead of a $30 pill.
At the same time, there are a lot of very minor issues that are getting very expensive pills right now, and I'd think alternative treatments should at least be considered. In a lot of cases, there is science behind it. In a lot of other cases, there isn't a formal scientific study, but a lot of anecdotal success. I'm in agreement that you should probably go over these sorts of things with an actual doctor, though, because the doctor will at the very least need to know about it.
Seriously. The integration with gdb, gcc, etc is where Emacs really shines. Yes, the Control-Meta-cokebottle commands are a bit annoying, but there's worthwhile tradeoffs there.
The first post was also quite useful. And to be fair, I like vim too.
Let's say you're dealing with a fairly mild case of insomnia. You and your doctor have some options: 1. Prescribe a sleeping pill of some kind. 2. Recommend drinking a cup of a soporific tea such as camomile.
Option 2 has been used for centuries, and is known to work for a lot of people, and is probably much less expensive than option 1. However, since option 2 isn't part of the doctor's training, and thanks to the patient being bombarded with TV ads, they're more likely to try option 1 first. Is option 2 a placebo that just happens to work? Possibly. But a placebo costing $0.15 a dose beats a pill costing $3 a dose if they have roughly the same effect.
The Cuban medical system in particular makes extensive use of herbal remedies as a way to keep costs down, while maintaining similar health care stats as, say, the United States.
More to the point, not all members of religiously based terrorist groups are motivated primarily by religion either.
For instance, in Northern Ireland, "Catholic" and "Protestant" had a lot more to do with who represented the sort-of native Irish versus the remnant of the English takeover of Ireland. The religious differences had very little to do with it: the real problem was political.
Similarly, in Israel, the biggest motivator for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah is not so much the religious stuff as it is the fact that the British gave Israel to the Israelis without consulting the people who lived there. The religious differences exacerbated the problem (as they have in that region for at least 2 millennia), but the fundamental problem was a bunch of people moving in and taking over land that had been occupied by a different group for centuries. (On the flip side, one could argue that the diaspora Jews who were moving in had fallen victim to much the same thing several centuries before Palestine ever existed.) Again, the real problem is politics and economics, and religious differences are more a stand-in for which group you belong to than the real source of the problem.
As a CS grad from a liberal arts school, I got to deal with the liberal arts types that parent is referring to quite a bit.
There were generally 3 modes of thinking for the less bright liberal arts students: 1. "I'm right, because I'm morally right, and anyone who disagrees with me is mysogynistic / racist / classist / homophobic." This would be found most commonly in the [insert historically disadvantaged group here] Studies departments. They also tend to join up with identity-based groups on campus. 2. "On the other hand..." These folks are easy to find in the English or psychology departments, and by avoiding ever drawing any conclusions avoid having their conclusions being demonstrated incorrect. Often, they were extremely good students in high school, because their high school classes emphasized memorize-regurgitate over critical thinking. 3. "These 'facts' make me feel like I'm right" This is where truthiness trumps facts. You find these people in the political science and history departments. They also spend a lot of their time in on-campus activism, and are often humorously misinformed.
All of them have real trouble in fields like math and science because in those fields there are correct and incorrect answers, and incorrect answers cannot be met by "that's just, like, your opinion, man". Of course, xkcd shows it far better than I ever could.
Worth mentioning is that the smarter liberal arts types aren't like this at all. For instance, smart English majors can point out the structures of literature that make it all tick, or exactly how a sentence can be better phrased. Smart history majors can provide all the major sources for a historical event, explain what biases each source had and how that affected their description of the event, piece together what probably actually happened, and are probably some of the best BS detectors out there.
Whether or not the guy recognized the green light, the very first rule of driving in most states is that your obligation to take reasonable measures prevent accidents trumps most other traffic laws. If you have a green light, and someone is in the way, that doesn't give you permission to slam into him.
And if he couldn't slow down or stop enough to make the turn possible, he was driving way too fast.
You don't say. I was wondering how all those people ended up getting born there. Next thing you're going to point out that sex isn't new to Iran either.
I've studied the 5th Symphony in great depth, and I'm guessing you're referring to the last movement, particularly the opening theme, which is loud, bombastic, and designed primarily to keep the Communist Party apparatchiks happy.
Actually, right now there really isn't a head of the TSA, because Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC) is doing his best to stop Obama's nominee (Errol Southers) from ever getting confirmed. The reason: he has refused to guarantee that he will fight any attempts by TSA employees to unionize.
But hey, obviously stopping unionization is way more important than stopping terrorism.
My point was that for many many decades, airline hijackings were more or less the same sort of situation: the hijackers wanted money, wanted to get to someplace, and get the heck out of there.
As a derivative work, I do. However, since I'm neither rich nor a jerk, I'm more than happy to make both versions available under Creative Commons licensing.
Really, now -- if you had the knife in your hand, which option would you pick? Wait for death, or meet it head on?
Before 9/11, the standard script for hijackings was option C: take the hijackers to Elbonia, give them the money they want, Elbonian police arrest them (if not a state-sanctioned hijacking), and while you may be delayed a few days no one is actually seriously hurt.
The options "attack" or "be killed" tend to show a lack of creative thinking and misplaced priorities. Discretion is the better part of valor for a reason. For instance, if someone puts a gun to your head and says "gimme your wallet", the smartest thing to do is almost definitely to give 'em your wallet, because your life isn't worth whatever's in the wallet. Even if you've mastered the martial arts techniques designed to help you deal with a gun against your head, that's still almost definitely your best option. Does that mean the bad guy will get away? Yes. But so will you, and since the bad guy has the upper hand (surprise, superior firepower, and superior positioning) that's not a fight you want to get into.
What about the very common situation where a woman wants a particular man to approach her, but the man doesn't appear to be paying any attention to her, and she thinks she can't go over and approach him (for a whole lot of reasons, including her mom's advice, books like The Rules, Cosmo, societal norms, and fear of scaring him off)? Again, listen to women or read what they say about the subject, and take their point of view seriously. It's quite enlightening.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear the gooseberries are doing well this year, and so are the mangos.
And Al Gore actually had a lot to do with changing the Internet from being a few universities, government agencies, and big businesses into a tool that gazillions of people use. Say what you will about his other political stances, but he deserves quite a bit of credit for his work in the Senate that makes it clear he thought the geeks had a very good thing going.
Back in the early 20th century, the classical world of music didn't know where to go, which is what led to atrocities like atonalism and serial music. I love nearly all kinds of music, but 12 tone rows really try my patience.
That's probably because the stuff you've heard that uses 12-tone rows sucks. Try Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, and just listen to it, don't try to read any of the analysis about pitch classes or what rows he used or any of that nonsense. The accusation is partially true, though. There was a period of about 30 years where some academic composers were trying to create mathematically perfect music. They failed utterly, and produced a lot of unlistenable junk, a lot of it sounding completely random.
At the same time, in most musical eras, a lot of unlistenable junk was written and played. It didn't last until the present-day, though, because it was unlistenable junk. The stuff that has lasted this long has done so mostly because they were the best of the best, and I think it's fair to say that the best of the best of 20th century stuff will be with us a very long time as well. Stravinsky's Rites of Spring and Copland's Appalachian Spring are both going to be with us for a very very long time, just like Beethoven's 5th is still very much a part of our culture.
(In the interests of disclosure: I studied composition with a student of Arnold Schoenberg, so I'm a bit biased towards 12-tone music)
You're missing something very very very important: in working-class professions, education in the sense that college-educated people usually talk about it doesn't actually help much. What really helps, and what actually gets kids who expect to be part of the working class interested in their schooling, is vocational programs.
Which is of more benefit to a future auto mechanic: The Tempest by William Shakespeare, or a practicum in how to replace an alternator? Similarly, future farmers who are working on the family farm typically get quite an education about farming from dad and/or granddad. Future electricians need to know more about how to properly connect up a breaker box than they do about Ohm's Law.
A good bricklayer, welder, or child care worker is not a failure. They might not be getting really rich, but they're usually earning decent money doing something that is beneficial to society. In fact, for a lot of the kids attracted to vocational training, skilled trades are a significant step up from the sorts of jobs their parents did, and are their best opportunity to make a good life for themselves. They take it, and well they should. It's a big improvement over, say, working at Walmart, and getting into those sorts of professions is usually much more possible for them than trying to become an astrophysicist.
If you have to turn to "Ask Slashdot" for what's likely THE most important decision your business could make (sale), then you really have no business farming this out to someone you've just met.
Drat, and I was just about to make a suggestion about emailing everyone on the Internet and then awaiting their joyous replies.
I'm absolutely certain that this story coming out right now has absolutely nothing to do with digging through Mr Southers' entire life story to come up with some dirt on him that will give Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) political cover for leaving the TSA with no director for nearly a year. I mean, one might almost think that the real problem with this guy was that he was open to the possibility of TSA workers unionizing.
I think we can answer the question pretty easily: Some guy who wanted to increase the Google rank of his blog and somehow made it through the firehose.
There's a real reason for this that has nothing to do with any biases: There wasn't much by way of feminist literature being written in 1954. This was a full decade before such classics as The Feminine Mystique, and in the realm of speculative fiction predates McCaffrey or LeGuin.
I respectfully disagree, for several key reasons:
1. There are still some geek celebrities that pop in here from time to time. If we're talking Star Trek, it's not totally uncommon for CleverNickName to show up. Bruce Perens will not infrequently make an appearance on issues he knows about (or when the article is about something he did). And so forth.
2. There are still some comments that are insightful / interesting / informative that are modded as such. It ain't universal, but it's there. And plus, some of the funny comments really are funny.
3. There's a lot less spam-type articles. Roland and * * Beatles Beatles are both not showing up anymore. There's still the occasional slashvertisement, but they're less common than they used to be.
It's not, and hasn't been for a really long time, just about reporting technology news.
Actually, a major reason the Brits keep the monarchy around is that it makes about as much in tourism as it costs them. It's not just silly tradition.
That and you can give people cool titles, which by contrast the US Constitution strictly forbids.
I'm not suggesting that "alternative medicine" cures everything. And I've know plenty of folks like your mother who completely misuse herbal remedies. In addition, I'm not someone who'd suggest a $3000 "alternative treatment" instead of a $30 pill.
At the same time, there are a lot of very minor issues that are getting very expensive pills right now, and I'd think alternative treatments should at least be considered. In a lot of cases, there is science behind it. In a lot of other cases, there isn't a formal scientific study, but a lot of anecdotal success. I'm in agreement that you should probably go over these sorts of things with an actual doctor, though, because the doctor will at the very least need to know about it.
Try Emacs.
Seriously. The integration with gdb, gcc, etc is where Emacs really shines. Yes, the Control-Meta-cokebottle commands are a bit annoying, but there's worthwhile tradeoffs there.
The first post was also quite useful. And to be fair, I like vim too.
It's not quite as simple as that.
Let's say you're dealing with a fairly mild case of insomnia. You and your doctor have some options:
1. Prescribe a sleeping pill of some kind.
2. Recommend drinking a cup of a soporific tea such as camomile.
Option 2 has been used for centuries, and is known to work for a lot of people, and is probably much less expensive than option 1. However, since option 2 isn't part of the doctor's training, and thanks to the patient being bombarded with TV ads, they're more likely to try option 1 first. Is option 2 a placebo that just happens to work? Possibly. But a placebo costing $0.15 a dose beats a pill costing $3 a dose if they have roughly the same effect.
The Cuban medical system in particular makes extensive use of herbal remedies as a way to keep costs down, while maintaining similar health care stats as, say, the United States.
More to the point, not all members of religiously based terrorist groups are motivated primarily by religion either.
For instance, in Northern Ireland, "Catholic" and "Protestant" had a lot more to do with who represented the sort-of native Irish versus the remnant of the English takeover of Ireland. The religious differences had very little to do with it: the real problem was political.
Similarly, in Israel, the biggest motivator for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah is not so much the religious stuff as it is the fact that the British gave Israel to the Israelis without consulting the people who lived there. The religious differences exacerbated the problem (as they have in that region for at least 2 millennia), but the fundamental problem was a bunch of people moving in and taking over land that had been occupied by a different group for centuries. (On the flip side, one could argue that the diaspora Jews who were moving in had fallen victim to much the same thing several centuries before Palestine ever existed.) Again, the real problem is politics and economics, and religious differences are more a stand-in for which group you belong to than the real source of the problem.
As a CS grad from a liberal arts school, I got to deal with the liberal arts types that parent is referring to quite a bit.
There were generally 3 modes of thinking for the less bright liberal arts students: ..." These folks are easy to find in the English or psychology departments, and by avoiding ever drawing any conclusions avoid having their conclusions being demonstrated incorrect. Often, they were extremely good students in high school, because their high school classes emphasized memorize-regurgitate over critical thinking.
1. "I'm right, because I'm morally right, and anyone who disagrees with me is mysogynistic / racist / classist / homophobic." This would be found most commonly in the [insert historically disadvantaged group here] Studies departments. They also tend to join up with identity-based groups on campus.
2. "On the other hand
3. "These 'facts' make me feel like I'm right" This is where truthiness trumps facts. You find these people in the political science and history departments. They also spend a lot of their time in on-campus activism, and are often humorously misinformed.
All of them have real trouble in fields like math and science because in those fields there are correct and incorrect answers, and incorrect answers cannot be met by "that's just, like, your opinion, man". Of course, xkcd shows it far better than I ever could.
Worth mentioning is that the smarter liberal arts types aren't like this at all. For instance, smart English majors can point out the structures of literature that make it all tick, or exactly how a sentence can be better phrased. Smart history majors can provide all the major sources for a historical event, explain what biases each source had and how that affected their description of the event, piece together what probably actually happened, and are probably some of the best BS detectors out there.
Whether or not the guy recognized the green light, the very first rule of driving in most states is that your obligation to take reasonable measures prevent accidents trumps most other traffic laws. If you have a green light, and someone is in the way, that doesn't give you permission to slam into him.
And if he couldn't slow down or stop enough to make the turn possible, he was driving way too fast.
Sex is not new to India
You don't say. I was wondering how all those people ended up getting born there. Next thing you're going to point out that sex isn't new to Iran either.
Well, give it a listen and tell me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0iqZbM1Pdc
I've studied the 5th Symphony in great depth, and I'm guessing you're referring to the last movement, particularly the opening theme, which is loud, bombastic, and designed primarily to keep the Communist Party apparatchiks happy.
Actually, right now there really isn't a head of the TSA, because Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC) is doing his best to stop Obama's nominee (Errol Southers) from ever getting confirmed. The reason: he has refused to guarantee that he will fight any attempts by TSA employees to unionize.
But hey, obviously stopping unionization is way more important than stopping terrorism.
My point was that for many many decades, airline hijackings were more or less the same sort of situation: the hijackers wanted money, wanted to get to someplace, and get the heck out of there.
As a derivative work, I do. However, since I'm neither rich nor a jerk, I'm more than happy to make both versions available under Creative Commons licensing.
Really, now -- if you had the knife in your hand, which option would you pick? Wait for death, or meet it head on?
Before 9/11, the standard script for hijackings was option C: take the hijackers to Elbonia, give them the money they want, Elbonian police arrest them (if not a state-sanctioned hijacking), and while you may be delayed a few days no one is actually seriously hurt.
The options "attack" or "be killed" tend to show a lack of creative thinking and misplaced priorities. Discretion is the better part of valor for a reason. For instance, if someone puts a gun to your head and says "gimme your wallet", the smartest thing to do is almost definitely to give 'em your wallet, because your life isn't worth whatever's in the wallet. Even if you've mastered the martial arts techniques designed to help you deal with a gun against your head, that's still almost definitely your best option. Does that mean the bad guy will get away? Yes. But so will you, and since the bad guy has the upper hand (surprise, superior firepower, and superior positioning) that's not a fight you want to get into.
Well, I'm glad you two figured out what I was doing, even if one of the mods didn't.
What about the very common situation where a woman wants a particular man to approach her, but the man doesn't appear to be paying any attention to her, and she thinks she can't go over and approach him (for a whole lot of reasons, including her mom's advice, books like The Rules, Cosmo, societal norms, and fear of scaring him off)? Again, listen to women or read what they say about the subject, and take their point of view seriously. It's quite enlightening.