Otherwise its inner monologue might be "Here I am, I just got sent 200 million kilometers, flew down on a really cool rocket, and what do they have me do? Scrub a rock. And with all the pain my diodes down the left side... I think I'll tell those NASA guys I found bacteria just to confuse 'em for a while, maybe they'll send another probe to chill out with, eh?"
What exact tax rate would balance the budget smart guy?
That's easy. Spending: $3.6 trillion. US GDP: $15.8 trillion. Based on that, the average tax rate for a balanced budget (if we're doing it all with tax increases) should be approximately 23%. Actual average tax rate: 17.4%.
Republicans traditionally have support in far more geographical areas (break it down by states, or counties or whatever) than Democrats
That shouldn't matter - the House is supposed to represent people, not land. For example, there are about 550,000 people in the entirety of Wyoming, and approximately 8,300,000 people in New York City, so New York City should have far more voting power than Wyoming, regardless of its geographical diversity or lack thereof. And this is in fact reflected in their Congressional representation: Wyoming gets 1 representative for its 550,000 people, New York City gets 12 for its 8,300,000 people (about 670,000 per representative).
The people in the middle (like me, and mine) get just about nothing from the government
Nonsense. Some of the things you were likely to have gotten from the government today: 1. Your parents may have gotten a Social Security payment, which either reduces how much you need to spend to support them or increases your future inheritance, depending on their finances. I mean, I guess you could just let 'em die, but most people have a bit of a moral problem with that. 2. Your kids probably went to a public school. If they went to a private school, they might have used a publicly funded bus to get there. 3. You almost definitely drove to work on government-funded roads, using a car that has been tested by the government to ensure it probably won't explode if somebody hits you. You know what all the signs and signals mean because of federal highway standards. 4. You almost definitely ate and drank foods that have been tested and inspected by the government to ensure that they aren't likely to kill you. 5. You're posting on the Internet, which was the result of decades of government-funded research and substantial public spending on improving the backbone. 6. You may have been hooked up to a municipal water supply, which is regularly tested by the EPA so your tap water won't kill you. 7. If you're taking any kind of prescription or over-the-counter medication, you depend on the FDA to ensure that what you're taking is what it says it is. 8. If you're not white, heterosexual, and male, you benefit from labor laws that make it illegal to discriminate against you in the workplace. 9. Thanks to the EPA, you can breathe without getting lung-fulls of really nasty chemicals that will give you asthma or cancer. 10. You can use a cell phone or radio without fear of somebody else's radio signal overpowering the one you care about, thanks to the FCC.
So this is what the Republicans in Congress were demanding of the President in 2011 during the whole "fiscal cliff" negotiations: Revenues: no more than $2.3 trillion Spending: no less than $3.6 trillion Debt added: no more than $0.
Contrary to popular belief, the president has very little discretion about how much money will be spent or taxed. Having a debt ceiling problem was a matter of simple arithmetic. Putting John McCain or Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin or Paul Ryan in the hot seat wouldn't have changed the math (even if it changed the politics).
And if you're going to just say "cut spending", you're going to have to pick something significant to absorb the hit. In order to balance the budget with just spending cuts, you have to pick from these and come up with $1.3 trillion: - No more Social Security ($700 billion) or Medicare ($600 billion). Congratulations, you just killed millions of old and disabled people. - No more Medicaid, food stamps, TANF, etc ($700 billion). Congratulations, you just killed millions of poor people. - No more unemployment insurance ($300 billion). Congratulations, you just killed millions of people who weren't poor before they lost their jobs. - No more military ($700 billion). Congratulations, you just threw millions of people onto the unemployment rolls, and invited attacks from any foreign country that feels like it. - No more of any other government activity ($650 billion). Congratulations, you just threw about 2.5 million people onto the unemployment rolls, and now have basically complete anarchy because the federal government can undertake no domestic action whatsoever.
(3) You won't find many accountants on slashdot since they tend not to be among the intellectually/technologically curious types in my experience.
Ah yes, this old problem again: Counsellor: Well I now have the results here of the interviews and the aptitude tests that you took last week, and from them we've built up a pretty clear picture of the sort of person that you are. And I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that the ideal job for you is chartered accountancy. Anchovy: But I am a chartered accountant. Counsellor: Jolly good. Well back to the office with you then. Anchovy: No! No! No! You don't understand. I've been a chartered accountant for the last twenty years. I want a new job. Something exciting that will let me live. Counsellor: Well chartered accountancy is rather exciting isn't it? Anchovy: Exciting? No it's not. It's dull. Dull. Dull. My God it's dull, it's so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL. Counsellor: Well, er, yes Mr Anchovy, but you see your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.
If we're not, there's a good chance that the aliens are too far away for it to matter. That whole "1 light-year per year" speed limit and all tends to keep 'em away.
While distributions can pick what we hope are sensible defaults
That solves the "good enough" problem. You don't need to jail your platform to satisfy the "good enough" user. For those that don't care, the default reigns supreme. For those that do care, they can tweak it any way their heart desires. And everybody gets what they want.
I give it until the next presidential election before PBS and NPR are just plain auctioned off.
That would be really really stupid for anyone in government to demand - with PBS and NPR cut loose from the federal government, they'd have no reason to continue pussyfooting around the criminals in Washington or Wall Street.
Now, of course, the fact that it would be really stupid is no protection from it actually happening.
Verifiability: you can trace the source code and know precisely what is being done in your analysis.
That one is only mostly true: You can trace the source code, which is great most of the time, but if you have a "creative" compiler, it might do something different than what you'd expect, and if you run on "creative" hardware, it might do something different than what the source code and compiler expect. This is the old Reflections on Trusting Trust argument.
You can argue that those "jails" aren't needed but unfortunately a lot of developers (and FOSS developers are even worse) couldn't design a good usable interface when somebody doesn't hold hands. Give them too much freedom and you will get things like The Gimp.
Here's the very obvious counterargument: If somebody puts a really bad UI out there, nobody will use that program, and the bad UI will die. If they put a kind of bad UI out there, some people will use it, some won't, but either way it's their choice.
Using your example of the GIMP: Those who like the current GIMP interface can use it, and those that don't will continue to use Photoshop or whatever other image editor they'd like. And because it's Free Software, anyone who is sufficiently motivated and/or funded could leverage the same basic features and slap a different UI on it. What's the problem?
Or another example: Gnome 2, Unity, and Gnome 3. Some people like Gnome 2 or its descendents Cinnamon and MATE, some like Unity, some like Gnome 3. While distributions can pick what we hope are sensible defaults, ultimately the users can decide to use something else, and the ones users like will do well while the ones users hate will do badly. Again, what's the problem?
The difference in models is this: You think that the way you get the best UI is to have some Poobah of Interface Design dictating to all applications what an acceptable UI is. I think that the way you get the best UI is to try different approaches and see what the users actually like using, making it as easy as possible for people to make their own decisions and create variations and otherwise monkey with it.
FIRST has never been about weaponry, but rather rewards good engineering and creative problem-solving. Its goal has always been to encourage kids to get excited about technology and engineering.
The guy who started it, Dean Kamen, is a prolific inventor (including wheelchairs that can climb stairs, the Segway PT, some medical devices, water purification pumps, and is now working on solar panel improvements), but has had a significant interest in science education throughout his career. Before he started FIRST, he spent a lot of his time starting a small science museum near where his company is based.
Actually, by far the most questionable GM that I'm aware of is the terminator gene, in which plants are designed to not produce a viable seed. The sole reason for that is to prevent a farmer from doing what farmers everywhere used to do (and many still do) of saving some of the crop to plant next year, forcing the farmer to buy more seed than they otherwise would.
Yes, occasionally a nifty new technology gets announced or demonstrated, but until it is (A) demonstrably useful, (B) available for purchase, and (C) within the price range of people it's useful for, it might as well not exist. The CES, like other similar events, is just a giant hype-fest who's sole purpose is to convince me to part with my cash to get something I don't actually need or even want.
And for everyone saying "booth babes", there are a lot of cheaper and more readily available ways for you to go look at pretty women.
The basic explanation described there is that the difference is in how teachers rate their classroom behavior: During ages 6-12, girls on average have an easier time sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention to the teacher than boys do. Since sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention are part of an elementary school students' grade, the girls grade better. That matches my own experiences in that age group, and also when working with kids in that age group: There are more boys than girls that have a hard time sitting still for longer than about 10 minutes at a stretch (although they both have to work at it). The correct solution, which no public school comes even close to embracing due to the expense, would be to provide ways for kids to learn that allows them to be physically active e.g. teach math by using it to build things in a woodworking shop.
The only part that feminism plays in any of this is that it is now worth a girl's time to learn things in school. Before second-wave feminism (which is probably the era you're complaining about), girls being smart and educated helped them only insofar as it helped them snag Mr Right. So most girls, acting very much on the advice of all the women around them, focused more on what would help them snag Mr Right than on what would help them design fighter jets. The basic trends that everyone's been observing have not been men's educational achievement dropping, but rather women's achievements increasing faster than men's achievements to the point where the lines have crossed.
And with this, like every other documented gender difference, the variation within a gender is much much greater than the difference between genders.
Instead of criticizing the code he writes, do a training exercise where a group goes through bad code that someone not (currently) working at the company wrote, and have people who write good code point out the flaws. The idea is that this way, you've taken his ego out of the equation, but still showing him the difference between good and bad code.
Though I'm not sure how much faith one can put into this article.
I would have approximately no faith in that article, because the way that the company who wrote it makes its money is by convincing people to buy precious metals, which means it's in their financial interest to spread stories that create a potentially false impression that US currency is worthless.
No one really wants to do hard work for a shitty living, stop romanticizing it. I think it is an offshoot of the Noble Savage BS.
If you were an average guy living in Norse society (or anywhere else in Europe) circa 1000 CE, your likely career options were: - soldier or military sailor (that's where the big bucks were) - fishing - farming (these folks were likely to be at the bottom of the social structure) - shipbuilding - smithing - merchant shipping
None of those activities is particularly safe or pleasant.
Not sure about student athletes, but there was the recent case of Jovan Belcher, a professional football player who killed his girlfriend, drove to the team headquarters, and killed himself in front of his head coach and GM. Also relevant is that the jocks are much more likely to be involved in assaults, rapes, vehicular homicides, and other violent acts other than shooting up a school.
George Carlin had this one right: ""They say it's the quiet ones you have to watch. Yeah, and while you're watching a quiet one, a noisy one will kill ya!"
I disagree: - These kinds of wounds don't heal quickly: We're still dealing with the after-effects of American slavery 150 years after it was outlawed, American Indian nations have never recovered from being conquered by Europeans, Ireland is still dealing with the after-effects of English rule, etc.
- One of the effects of colonial rule is that the borders of African nations sometimes bear no relationship whatsoever to who's living there. That's exactly the kind of setup that leads to internal revolts and territorial battles. For an example of another area of the world still dealing with that problem, look at Iraq, where the Kurds have been trying to separate themselves off from the rest of the country for decades because they don't really have a relationship with the Sunni and Shia in the south.
- Another effect of colonial rule is that all the really valuable natural resources are owned by foreign companies. For example, the vast majority of the profits from the Nigerian oil industry go not to Nigeria or anyone living there, but to Royal Dutch Shell. There's a similar story for most of the South African mining interests.
- During the Cold War, the US and USSR were both propping up brutal and crazy dictators (e.g. Idi Amin) in post-colonial Africa as a way to prevent the other side from taking over the country. Generally speaking, the longer a country has been a functioning democracy post-colonial, the better shape it's in.
- We're not exactly a handful of generations out. Many countries in Africa became independent in the 1960's. In other words, they're younger than American Baby Boomers.
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise its inner monologue might be "Here I am, I just got sent 200 million kilometers, flew down on a really cool rocket, and what do they have me do? Scrub a rock. And with all the pain my diodes down the left side ... I think I'll tell those NASA guys I found bacteria just to confuse 'em for a while, maybe they'll send another probe to chill out with, eh?"
What exact tax rate would balance the budget smart guy?
That's easy. Spending: $3.6 trillion. US GDP: $15.8 trillion. Based on that, the average tax rate for a balanced budget (if we're doing it all with tax increases) should be approximately 23%. Actual average tax rate: 17.4%.
Republicans traditionally have support in far more geographical areas (break it down by states, or counties or whatever) than Democrats
That shouldn't matter - the House is supposed to represent people, not land. For example, there are about 550,000 people in the entirety of Wyoming, and approximately 8,300,000 people in New York City, so New York City should have far more voting power than Wyoming, regardless of its geographical diversity or lack thereof. And this is in fact reflected in their Congressional representation: Wyoming gets 1 representative for its 550,000 people, New York City gets 12 for its 8,300,000 people (about 670,000 per representative).
The people in the middle (like me, and mine) get just about nothing from the government
Nonsense. Some of the things you were likely to have gotten from the government today:
1. Your parents may have gotten a Social Security payment, which either reduces how much you need to spend to support them or increases your future inheritance, depending on their finances. I mean, I guess you could just let 'em die, but most people have a bit of a moral problem with that.
2. Your kids probably went to a public school. If they went to a private school, they might have used a publicly funded bus to get there.
3. You almost definitely drove to work on government-funded roads, using a car that has been tested by the government to ensure it probably won't explode if somebody hits you. You know what all the signs and signals mean because of federal highway standards.
4. You almost definitely ate and drank foods that have been tested and inspected by the government to ensure that they aren't likely to kill you.
5. You're posting on the Internet, which was the result of decades of government-funded research and substantial public spending on improving the backbone.
6. You may have been hooked up to a municipal water supply, which is regularly tested by the EPA so your tap water won't kill you.
7. If you're taking any kind of prescription or over-the-counter medication, you depend on the FDA to ensure that what you're taking is what it says it is.
8. If you're not white, heterosexual, and male, you benefit from labor laws that make it illegal to discriminate against you in the workplace.
9. Thanks to the EPA, you can breathe without getting lung-fulls of really nasty chemicals that will give you asthma or cancer.
10. You can use a cell phone or radio without fear of somebody else's radio signal overpowering the one you care about, thanks to the FCC.
So this is what the Republicans in Congress were demanding of the President in 2011 during the whole "fiscal cliff" negotiations:
Revenues: no more than $2.3 trillion
Spending: no less than $3.6 trillion
Debt added: no more than $0.
Contrary to popular belief, the president has very little discretion about how much money will be spent or taxed. Having a debt ceiling problem was a matter of simple arithmetic. Putting John McCain or Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin or Paul Ryan in the hot seat wouldn't have changed the math (even if it changed the politics).
And if you're going to just say "cut spending", you're going to have to pick something significant to absorb the hit. In order to balance the budget with just spending cuts, you have to pick from these and come up with $1.3 trillion:
- No more Social Security ($700 billion) or Medicare ($600 billion). Congratulations, you just killed millions of old and disabled people.
- No more Medicaid, food stamps, TANF, etc ($700 billion). Congratulations, you just killed millions of poor people.
- No more unemployment insurance ($300 billion). Congratulations, you just killed millions of people who weren't poor before they lost their jobs.
- No more military ($700 billion). Congratulations, you just threw millions of people onto the unemployment rolls, and invited attacks from any foreign country that feels like it.
- No more of any other government activity ($650 billion). Congratulations, you just threw about 2.5 million people onto the unemployment rolls, and now have basically complete anarchy because the federal government can undertake no domestic action whatsoever.
So what combination of things do you pick?
(3) You won't find many accountants on slashdot since they tend not to be among the intellectually/technologically curious types in my experience.
Ah yes, this old problem again:
Counsellor: Well I now have the results here of the interviews and the aptitude tests that you took last week, and from them we've built up a pretty clear picture of the sort of person that you are. And I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that the ideal job for you is chartered accountancy.
Anchovy: But I am a chartered accountant.
Counsellor: Jolly good. Well back to the office with you then.
Anchovy: No! No! No! You don't understand. I've been a chartered accountant for the last twenty years. I want a new job. Something exciting that will let me live.
Counsellor: Well chartered accountancy is rather exciting isn't it?
Anchovy: Exciting? No it's not. It's dull. Dull. Dull. My God it's dull, it's so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL.
Counsellor: Well, er, yes Mr Anchovy, but you see your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.
If we're not, there's a good chance that the aliens are too far away for it to matter. That whole "1 light-year per year" speed limit and all tends to keep 'em away.
Quoting me above:
While distributions can pick what we hope are sensible defaults
That solves the "good enough" problem. You don't need to jail your platform to satisfy the "good enough" user. For those that don't care, the default reigns supreme. For those that do care, they can tweak it any way their heart desires. And everybody gets what they want.
I give it until the next presidential election before PBS and NPR are just plain auctioned off.
That would be really really stupid for anyone in government to demand - with PBS and NPR cut loose from the federal government, they'd have no reason to continue pussyfooting around the criminals in Washington or Wall Street.
Now, of course, the fact that it would be really stupid is no protection from it actually happening.
Verifiability: you can trace the source code and know precisely what is being done in your analysis.
That one is only mostly true: You can trace the source code, which is great most of the time, but if you have a "creative" compiler, it might do something different than what you'd expect, and if you run on "creative" hardware, it might do something different than what the source code and compiler expect. This is the old Reflections on Trusting Trust argument.
You can argue that those "jails" aren't needed but unfortunately a lot of developers (and FOSS developers are even worse) couldn't design a good usable interface when somebody doesn't hold hands. Give them too much freedom and you will get things like The Gimp.
Here's the very obvious counterargument: If somebody puts a really bad UI out there, nobody will use that program, and the bad UI will die. If they put a kind of bad UI out there, some people will use it, some won't, but either way it's their choice.
Using your example of the GIMP: Those who like the current GIMP interface can use it, and those that don't will continue to use Photoshop or whatever other image editor they'd like. And because it's Free Software, anyone who is sufficiently motivated and/or funded could leverage the same basic features and slap a different UI on it. What's the problem?
Or another example: Gnome 2, Unity, and Gnome 3. Some people like Gnome 2 or its descendents Cinnamon and MATE, some like Unity, some like Gnome 3. While distributions can pick what we hope are sensible defaults, ultimately the users can decide to use something else, and the ones users like will do well while the ones users hate will do badly. Again, what's the problem?
The difference in models is this: You think that the way you get the best UI is to have some Poobah of Interface Design dictating to all applications what an acceptable UI is. I think that the way you get the best UI is to try different approaches and see what the users actually like using, making it as easy as possible for people to make their own decisions and create variations and otherwise monkey with it.
FIRST has never been about weaponry, but rather rewards good engineering and creative problem-solving. Its goal has always been to encourage kids to get excited about technology and engineering.
The guy who started it, Dean Kamen, is a prolific inventor (including wheelchairs that can climb stairs, the Segway PT, some medical devices, water purification pumps, and is now working on solar panel improvements), but has had a significant interest in science education throughout his career. Before he started FIRST, he spent a lot of his time starting a small science museum near where his company is based.
Not the first example - Ken Thompson predates that with his "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
Actually, by far the most questionable GM that I'm aware of is the terminator gene, in which plants are designed to not produce a viable seed. The sole reason for that is to prevent a farmer from doing what farmers everywhere used to do (and many still do) of saving some of the crop to plant next year, forcing the farmer to buy more seed than they otherwise would.
Yes, occasionally a nifty new technology gets announced or demonstrated, but until it is (A) demonstrably useful, (B) available for purchase, and (C) within the price range of people it's useful for, it might as well not exist. The CES, like other similar events, is just a giant hype-fest who's sole purpose is to convince me to part with my cash to get something I don't actually need or even want.
And for everyone saying "booth babes", there are a lot of cheaper and more readily available ways for you to go look at pretty women.
You're right, you should RTFA.
The basic explanation described there is that the difference is in how teachers rate their classroom behavior: During ages 6-12, girls on average have an easier time sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention to the teacher than boys do. Since sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention are part of an elementary school students' grade, the girls grade better. That matches my own experiences in that age group, and also when working with kids in that age group: There are more boys than girls that have a hard time sitting still for longer than about 10 minutes at a stretch (although they both have to work at it). The correct solution, which no public school comes even close to embracing due to the expense, would be to provide ways for kids to learn that allows them to be physically active e.g. teach math by using it to build things in a woodworking shop.
The only part that feminism plays in any of this is that it is now worth a girl's time to learn things in school. Before second-wave feminism (which is probably the era you're complaining about), girls being smart and educated helped them only insofar as it helped them snag Mr Right. So most girls, acting very much on the advice of all the women around them, focused more on what would help them snag Mr Right than on what would help them design fighter jets. The basic trends that everyone's been observing have not been men's educational achievement dropping, but rather women's achievements increasing faster than men's achievements to the point where the lines have crossed.
And with this, like every other documented gender difference, the variation within a gender is much much greater than the difference between genders.
Instead of criticizing the code he writes, do a training exercise where a group goes through bad code that someone not (currently) working at the company wrote, and have people who write good code point out the flaws. The idea is that this way, you've taken his ego out of the equation, but still showing him the difference between good and bad code.
Though I'm not sure how much faith one can put into this article.
I would have approximately no faith in that article, because the way that the company who wrote it makes its money is by convincing people to buy precious metals, which means it's in their financial interest to spread stories that create a potentially false impression that US currency is worthless.
No one really wants to do hard work for a shitty living, stop romanticizing it. I think it is an offshoot of the Noble Savage BS.
If you were an average guy living in Norse society (or anywhere else in Europe) circa 1000 CE, your likely career options were:
- soldier or military sailor (that's where the big bucks were)
- fishing
- farming (these folks were likely to be at the bottom of the social structure)
- shipbuilding
- smithing
- merchant shipping
None of those activities is particularly safe or pleasant.
But the Bible doesn't have any filthy language, just lots of horrific violence and kinky sex.
pubs HATE helping people
I strongly disagree with that: My local pub happily helps me get beer!
Not sure about student athletes, but there was the recent case of Jovan Belcher, a professional football player who killed his girlfriend, drove to the team headquarters, and killed himself in front of his head coach and GM. Also relevant is that the jocks are much more likely to be involved in assaults, rapes, vehicular homicides, and other violent acts other than shooting up a school.
George Carlin had this one right: ""They say it's the quiet ones you have to watch. Yeah, and while you're watching a quiet one, a noisy one will kill ya!"
I'm sure The Who would approve of that.
People who own guns legally almost never commit crimes.
People who don't own any guns almost never commit crimes. What's your point?
I disagree:
- These kinds of wounds don't heal quickly: We're still dealing with the after-effects of American slavery 150 years after it was outlawed, American Indian nations have never recovered from being conquered by Europeans, Ireland is still dealing with the after-effects of English rule, etc.
- One of the effects of colonial rule is that the borders of African nations sometimes bear no relationship whatsoever to who's living there. That's exactly the kind of setup that leads to internal revolts and territorial battles. For an example of another area of the world still dealing with that problem, look at Iraq, where the Kurds have been trying to separate themselves off from the rest of the country for decades because they don't really have a relationship with the Sunni and Shia in the south.
- Another effect of colonial rule is that all the really valuable natural resources are owned by foreign companies. For example, the vast majority of the profits from the Nigerian oil industry go not to Nigeria or anyone living there, but to Royal Dutch Shell. There's a similar story for most of the South African mining interests.
- During the Cold War, the US and USSR were both propping up brutal and crazy dictators (e.g. Idi Amin) in post-colonial Africa as a way to prevent the other side from taking over the country. Generally speaking, the longer a country has been a functioning democracy post-colonial, the better shape it's in.
- We're not exactly a handful of generations out. Many countries in Africa became independent in the 1960's. In other words, they're younger than American Baby Boomers.