Give it a military agenda, and the Air Force is ready and willing to take over.
Well, without being to knowledgeable -- (D)ARPA seems to eat raw meat. As far as I know, a real success story historically.
Give the military space research projects. But you probably want to have a civilian side, too. Maybe not NASA.
Military and civilian research do different kinds of work and you want both in the long run (and if the military research is never needed, so much the better.)
Cut all funding from NASA except the bare minimum [and launch] a new and improved NASA in 15-20 years
You are the kind of guy that would happily eat your seed potatoes if you get a bit hungry in the winter.
Today, you have to do research or your grand children will be poor farmers. Sure, NASA is FUBAR. Start another agency and give the money to them. If you stop space research for a couple of decades, China will own you.
Cut something less important. Say, only start serious wars. Sure, a democratic arab country would make the world a better place -- but there has to be a cheaper way!
Ikea hires designers, and some of them are very very good designers. Sure the aesthetic is spare, but if you like that you will probably appreciate the designs.
I have to comment on that.
Complex designs hurts our eyes here in Sweden. With e.g. two lines in a house, we think it is totally overloaded. Three? We scream about ugly rococo garbage and run for water to bathe our smoking eyes.
Once I saw a Russian orthodox church with a humongous number of small details everywhere -- and it still looked good, even beautiful! I felt like I was in a sex act with other men, animals, axes and power drills -- and enjoyed it. Shudder.:-(
For the humorless: The above was a bit tounge in cheek. There are people in Sweden with taste, too.
On topic:
Regarding good/bad programmers and design/programming...
You can get it to work with new programmers (not designers) if you put experienced guys reviewing the code of them. It quickly improves the quality of both the code and the programmers.
It it was pure painm though.:-( And, yes, my exact work description weren't explained until I had signed a paper with a long time to quit.
I think Joel's thesis in the article is true. But it isn't exactly news. He writes well, though. Paul Graham light, to be nasty.
My personal belief is that USA works as a democracy because of the quality of their digging press. I believe my country, Sweden, would be a better place if our media were half as independent and competent.
NY Times and Washington Post seems to find more scandals in the US president administration than the rest of the world's media find in the rest of the world's governments.
(-: They seem to be as good at news as the English press is at digging into the private lives of football (sorry, socker) stars.:-)
Locally, most newspapers can't survive without big handouts from the state (a large part of that problem is the heavy taxation of work time. Give with one hand, take back with the other -- with the axe always ready to fall if they become too problematic...)
One of the (probably few) places where Sweden seems superior, is that it is illegal for public departments or employees to inquire for sources.
So NY Times et al could just start a local Swedish magazine, tell all people with sensitive information to call here -- and buy stories from the Swedish magazine, which would be their only source of income.:-)
(I guess the local magazine would have to publish something, too, to keep the rights as a paper magazine. They could always charge $100 a magazine to stop having to print many newspapers.:-)
There's a difference between taking a life, and a spontaneous abortion. Much as there's a difference between a natural disaster blowing away a school, killing everyone verses columbine.
Again:
The religious people argue that the embryos are people. You are arguing that it is totally ok not to help millions of people dying from disasters?! These are people with the potential to be citizens in your country -- and they die by the millions.
I assume you are not that incredible an a..hole to really think that there is no need to help the biggest mass death in human history (according to the religious position).
You just have an opinion that is self contradictory and lack the integrity to look on the facts and build your opinions from them.
That pre-denucleated zygote could have been the next Einstein, or Linuz Torvalds, but we'll never know, because it's outside the scope of science.
The point was (also) that there are lots of potentials thrown away every day. Consider the number of sperm an average man create every day with the number of children conceived...
Your position is that Monty Python is right -- Every sperm is sacred?:-)
Uhm... first, you really feel serious if you remove the ":-)" around a comment when you quote it?
Second, in what way do those quotes imply that the pre-birth embryo is a person? (-: Wombs are post-lizard versions of eggs; of course the first growth phase is there.:-)
(I'm not claiming that an embryo isn't life, I just wonder what makes it more life than my skin sloughing off right now.)
Since you have been (correctly, IMHO) modded a Troll it is meaningless to answer, but I can't resist pointing out a logic error.
The "Compare to Hitler" point is not relevant, since I did not compare my opponents to anything!
First, I pointed out that -- according to the religious people's position -- there is a mass dying of people every year that makes Rwanda, 2nd World War, etc look like small potatoes. But from the religious people's actions, they don't really think that either. So I'm not compairing anyone (or their opinions) with Hitler -- just discussing sizes of mass deaths.
(Obviously, the religious people hardly really believe what they claim to believe. I doubt most of them are idiots, "just" dishonest.)
My second point is that the Hitler comparision is something nonserious debaters use when they lack arguments. I presented an argument -- and you obviously have no answer to it.
Third, my point was also written much clearer and better by others in the thread. So I could even accept your "argument" -- you still need to answer my argument.
If you should answer, please give a serious counter argument to my original point, troll.
Yes, this is OT, dear moderators. If you don't have anything better to do -- mod me down.:-)
First, your writing gives me hope. Iran will probably come through its difficulties. Also, the argument re poor from the countryside taught me something about the importance for making education and possibilites equal in a society.
Made my day, in short.
As an aside, there is local news today in Sweden that a concert in support of political prisoners in Iran will probably have to stop, because of threats against the musicians. Probably originating from the Iranian embassy.
Second, I'm not American. And even if I were, it's hard to discuss USA since, like India or China, it is more of a continent than a country. Hard to generalize. (The US election problems were hardly critical and will probably be solved in the next one.)
The size of USA makes the West Europeans solutions unworkable (I'm not even sure it works here). I don't know if they can really do much to change their society, really.
But you can't say USA is an opressed country. I tend to agree with the statement that you should grade a country after how well different people are tolerated. No place is perfect, but the west is getting there.
Third, I'm a computer guy. I try to be clear and honest in my opinions. My goal is to understand the world and I despise dishonesty -- religious people are arguably intellectually dishonest. I'm not writing with hidden meanings (looked up Leo Strauss; my modern philosophy is weak).
eveloution is taught in school as the best possible theory
The muslims from the Middle East I've spoken with were taught creationism. Not so in Iran?
So... Iran is a relatively nice place except for being a dictatorship with faked elections?
OK, ok, it fits with what I've read. Next time I want to compare the US' midwest with something insulting, I'll pick Saudi Arabia. Happy?:-)
And I was being insulting. Even in the bible belt, they have different churches and more or less tolerate different opinions.
Since you're from Iran, I have two questions.
a) I've heard the argument that the longer the Iran's priests keep the population down, the better. When the religious nuts then lose power, they will be so hated that Iran will treat religion as we north europeans. Comments?
b) Is this really part of the dogma? I heard a muslim guy argue that:
To blaspheme against is punishable by death for a muslim (Rushdie, etc)
Islam is obviously true, because muslim scholars never publish anything contradicting the religion!
I still laugh when I think about "b)", almost fifteen years later.
there IS the question of when life begins. You can't have seen any discussion of embryonic stem cell research without encountered that aspect.
Well, in the bible belt and in Teheran, there might be a discussion.:-)
I've never seen credible evidence that a person with a personality gets created before there is a working brain. Would love to be contradicted here with a few references to e.g. Nature? (-: Or even a few bible verses with claims that life start at conception...?:-)
I am, frankly, not holding my breath.
Now, someone might argue that a process is started at conception which would end up with a functioning human. The potential is critical. There are a few problems with that position:
When a fertile woman smiles back at me (-: it has happened:-), there is a potential for a new human
Soon, all our cells will be potential humans with a little "twist"...
Half of all conceptions ends soon with a spontaneous abortion. That means, according to the bible belt, that half of all people dies at an age of a few days. To be consistent, the believers should argue that half of all medical research should try to stop this mass death!
I could go on. (The potential argument is pathetically blurry and compare amateurs like Stalin and Hitler with tens of millions dying from spontaneous abortions... every year.)
Your correct (IMHO) point is that given the assumption that life starts at conception, the rest of the religious people's position is logical. My point is that they are quite easily described as fuckwits with the same basis as "Son of Sam" had for his world view.
Can you present any reason why there is some new, metaphysical stuff needed to explain the next thing we don't understand yet in biology? (This decade it is consciousness.)
It seems just more wishful thinking by theists.
Ok, I asked a question I know the answer to -- there isn't. I'll make it easier.
Has there ever been any religious inspirations that has given a scientific insight into anything?
you should take the rantings of Joel, ESR, and any other pointless windbag and send them to the bit bucket.
But they are funny!
Those trying to integrate and make good GUIs on Linux are the distros. Some are quite good and they are getting better.
Joel is judging the GUI people at the distros after a book about programming philosophy!
The argument is so stupid that you really wonder if he is honest.
Also, consider when Joel wrote this:
At the very least, Windows programmers will concede the faults of their culture and say pragmatically, "Look, if you want to sell a word processor to a lot of people, it has to run on their computers, and if that means we use the Evil Registry instead of elegant ~/.rc files to store our settings, so be it."
He doesn't even mention that anyone which sells a lot of new word processors on Windows will get his oxygen supply cut off like Netscape. There are many well documented examples.
AppleScript and Perl generally are [the traditional point of entry for a hobbyist coder]
Is Perl really the hobbyist point of entry? Why?
I am, for all practical purposes, a Perl fanatic. I love the language. The combination of power and breaking all "normal" language rules is, in a word, fun!
But to really learn the culture etc, was more work than when I learned assembly (68k, regular though) and C in the.. hrm, let us say -- a long time ago.
The disadvantage to Wall's linguistic influences is a quite steep learning curve. It is hard to not use for for even half a year and pick up again.
He is a brain researchers that write about (amongs other things) the evolution of human intelligence. (He even wrote a book about Neanderthals.) One of his theses is that throwing might have been a driver for human intelligence.
If I remember correctly...
To hit something you have to send more or less a symphony of nerve signals down the arm without waiting for feedback. Because the exact time of release is shorter than the average time random wait for nerve signals, they even have to go parallell and be averaged in the muscles.
Then there is distance measurements that needs to be done well in the visual system. Etc.
In short, it is a complex problem that needs lots of evolved specialized circuitry.
(I always wondered about fast running animals, here. The way they set their feet down while running should be as complex a problem as throwing? But those that run fast on the planet don't have hands.)
I think I can safely say that Calvin thinks the Neanderthals would have been hard pressed to learn to throw.
None of this addresses *MY* original point: that the per capita calculations re: Norway are irrelevant.
WTF are you on?! In what you commented I wrote: You ignored my argument and just reiterated your original point (i.e. in the short term, all of Norway isn't important to Microsoft's profit).
I did not argue against that obvious fact!
So I noted your "point" as a trivial fact uninteresting for Microsoft (according to their behaviour). Which makes a liar out of you. Or an idiot. Or a troll.
The two well known examples I gave that Microsoft is scared of Domino effects do weigh heavier than your opinion!
(Hard to know what you think about the examples I base my opinion on, since you haven't discussed them -- just repeated your trivial "point" a third(!) time. That stupidity makes your opinion quite uninteresting, really.)
Flame tasteless jokes if you want -- but don't just ignore the content.
You ignored my argument and just reiterated your original point (i.e. in the short term, all of Norway isn't important to Microsoft's profit).
I did not argue against that obvious fact!
Here is another examples of my original point with the same mechanism:
The (judged illegal) contracts Microsoft used their monopoly to force onto PC manufacturers that made it impossible to preinstall anything but Windows.
Gates said that they didn't want to give an alternative O/S a positive growth spiral (when BeOS offered preinstalls for free to manufacturers). It is the same thing with Norway; BeOS wasn't exactly big then...
This discussion is over. You made a stupid argument -- and then repeated it while ignoring the counterargument.
Slashdot Mirror
Give the military space research projects. But you probably want to have a civilian side, too. Maybe not NASA.
Military and civilian research do different kinds of work and you want both in the long run (and if the military research is never needed, so much the better.)
Today, you have to do research or your grand children will be poor farmers. Sure, NASA is FUBAR. Start another agency and give the money to them. If you stop space research for a couple of decades, China will own you.
Cut something less important. Say, only start serious wars. Sure, a democratic arab country would make the world a better place -- but there has to be a cheaper way!
Complex designs hurts our eyes here in Sweden. With e.g. two lines in a house, we think it is totally overloaded. Three? We scream about ugly rococo garbage and run for water to bathe our smoking eyes.
Once I saw a Russian orthodox church with a humongous number of small details everywhere -- and it still looked good, even beautiful! I felt like I was in a sex act with other men, animals, axes and power drills -- and enjoyed it. Shudder. :-(
For the humorless: The above was a bit tounge in cheek. There are people in Sweden with taste, too.
On topic:
Regarding good/bad programmers and design/programming...
You can get it to work with new programmers (not designers) if you put experienced guys reviewing the code of them. It quickly improves the quality of both the code and the programmers.
It it was pure painm though. :-( And, yes, my exact work description weren't explained until I had signed a paper with a long time to quit.
I think Joel's thesis in the article is true. But it isn't exactly news. He writes well, though. Paul Graham light, to be nasty.
NY Times and Washington Post seems to find more scandals in the US president administration than the rest of the world's media find in the rest of the world's governments.
(-: They seem to be as good at news as the English press is at digging into the private lives of football (sorry, socker) stars. :-)
Locally, most newspapers can't survive without big handouts from the state (a large part of that problem is the heavy taxation of work time. Give with one hand, take back with the other -- with the axe always ready to fall if they become too problematic...)
One of the (probably few) places where Sweden seems superior, is that it is illegal for public departments or employees to inquire for sources.
So NY Times et al could just start a local Swedish magazine, tell all people with sensitive information to call here -- and buy stories from the Swedish magazine, which would be their only source of income. :-)
(I guess the local magazine would have to publish something, too, to keep the rights as a paper magazine. They could always charge $100 a magazine to stop having to print many newspapers. :-)
The religious people argue that the embryos are people. You are arguing that it is totally ok not to help millions of people dying from disasters?! These are people with the potential to be citizens in your country -- and they die by the millions.
I assume you are not that incredible an a..hole to really think that there is no need to help the biggest mass death in human history (according to the religious position).
You just have an opinion that is self contradictory and lack the integrity to look on the facts and build your opinions from them.
The point was (also) that there are lots of potentials thrown away every day. Consider the number of sperm an average man create every day with the number of children conceived...Your position is that Monty Python is right -- Every sperm is sacred? :-)
Second, in what way do those quotes imply that the pre-birth embryo is a person? (-: Wombs are post-lizard versions of eggs; of course the first growth phase is there. :-)
(I'm not claiming that an embryo isn't life, I just wonder what makes it more life than my skin sloughing off right now.)
I just wish your literacy had won.That is the obvious answer to why religious people think that a life need no functioning brain!
Obviously, it is just introspection!
The "Compare to Hitler" point is not relevant, since I did not compare my opponents to anything!
First, I pointed out that -- according to the religious people's position -- there is a mass dying of people every year that makes Rwanda, 2nd World War, etc look like small potatoes. But from the religious people's actions, they don't really think that either. So I'm not compairing anyone (or their opinions) with Hitler -- just discussing sizes of mass deaths.
(Obviously, the religious people hardly really believe what they claim to believe. I doubt most of them are idiots, "just" dishonest.)
My second point is that the Hitler comparision is something nonserious debaters use when they lack arguments. I presented an argument -- and you obviously have no answer to it.
Third, my point was also written much clearer and better by others in the thread. So I could even accept your "argument" -- you still need to answer my argument.
If you should answer, please give a serious counter argument to my original point, troll.
First, your writing gives me hope. Iran will probably come through its difficulties. Also, the argument re poor from the countryside taught me something about the importance for making education and possibilites equal in a society.
Made my day, in short.
As an aside, there is local news today in Sweden that a concert in support of political prisoners in Iran will probably have to stop, because of threats against the musicians. Probably originating from the Iranian embassy.
Second, I'm not American. And even if I were, it's hard to discuss USA since, like India or China, it is more of a continent than a country. Hard to generalize. (The US election problems were hardly critical and will probably be solved in the next one.)
The size of USA makes the West Europeans solutions unworkable (I'm not even sure it works here). I don't know if they can really do much to change their society, really.
But you can't say USA is an opressed country. I tend to agree with the statement that you should grade a country after how well different people are tolerated. No place is perfect, but the west is getting there.
Third, I'm a computer guy. I try to be clear and honest in my opinions. My goal is to understand the world and I despise dishonesty -- religious people are arguably intellectually dishonest. I'm not writing with hidden meanings (looked up Leo Strauss; my modern philosophy is weak).
So... Iran is a relatively nice place except for being a dictatorship with faked elections?
OK, ok, it fits with what I've read. Next time I want to compare the US' midwest with something insulting, I'll pick Saudi Arabia. Happy? :-)
And I was being insulting. Even in the bible belt, they have different churches and more or less tolerate different opinions.
Since you're from Iran, I have two questions.
a) I've heard the argument that the longer the Iran's priests keep the population down, the better. When the religious nuts then lose power, they will be so hated that Iran will treat religion as we north europeans. Comments?
b) Is this really part of the dogma? I heard a muslim guy argue that:
- To blaspheme against is punishable by death for a muslim (Rushdie, etc)
- Islam is obviously true, because muslim scholars never publish anything contradicting the religion!
I still laugh when I think about "b)", almost fifteen years later.I've never seen credible evidence that a person with a personality gets created before there is a working brain. Would love to be contradicted here with a few references to e.g. Nature? (-: Or even a few bible verses with claims that life start at conception...? :-)
I am, frankly, not holding my breath.
Now, someone might argue that a process is started at conception which would end up with a functioning human. The potential is critical. There are a few problems with that position:
- When a fertile woman smiles back at me (-: it has happened
:-), there is a potential for a new human
- Soon, all our cells will be potential humans with a little "twist"...
- Half of all conceptions ends soon with a spontaneous abortion. That means, according to the bible belt, that half of all people dies at an age of a few days. To be consistent, the believers should argue that half of all medical research should try to stop this mass death!
I could go on. (The potential argument is pathetically blurry and compare amateurs like Stalin and Hitler with tens of millions dying from spontaneous abortions... every year.)Your correct (IMHO) point is that given the assumption that life starts at conception, the rest of the religious people's position is logical. My point is that they are quite easily described as fuckwits with the same basis as "Son of Sam" had for his world view.
All animism theories tested has been wrong.
Can you present any reason why there is some new, metaphysical stuff needed to explain the next thing we don't understand yet in biology? (This decade it is consciousness.)
It seems just more wishful thinking by theists.
Ok, I asked a question I know the answer to -- there isn't. I'll make it easier.
Has there ever been any religious inspirations that has given a scientific insight into anything?
Not only good content, but well written.
Those trying to integrate and make good GUIs on Linux are the distros. Some are quite good and they are getting better.
Joel is judging the GUI people at the distros after a book about programming philosophy!
The argument is so stupid that you really wonder if he is honest.
Also, consider when Joel wrote this:
He doesn't even mention that anyone which sells a lot of new word processors on Windows will get his oxygen supply cut off like Netscape. There are many well documented examples.I am, for all practical purposes, a Perl fanatic. I love the language. The combination of power and breaking all "normal" language rules is, in a word, fun!
But to really learn the culture etc, was more work than when I learned assembly (68k, regular though) and C in the .. hrm, let us say -- a long time ago.
The disadvantage to Wall's linguistic influences is a quite steep learning curve. It is hard to not use for for even half a year and pick up again.
Hmm... I would guess that guy is even older than me. Or drinks too much.
Or he needs to buy some famous blue pills that have become popular the last few years.
:-)
Also, thanks to first Anon. Mod that up, too, plz.
Second Anon comment -- I think we safely can assume that there were quite a few critical mutations... :-)
He is a brain researchers that write about (amongs other things) the evolution of human intelligence. (He even wrote a book about Neanderthals.) One of his theses is that throwing might have been a driver for human intelligence.
If I remember correctly...
To hit something you have to send more or less a symphony of nerve signals down the arm without waiting for feedback. Because the exact time of release is shorter than the average time random wait for nerve signals, they even have to go parallell and be averaged in the muscles.
Then there is distance measurements that needs to be done well in the visual system. Etc.
In short, it is a complex problem that needs lots of evolved specialized circuitry.
(I always wondered about fast running animals, here. The way they set their feet down while running should be as complex a problem as throwing? But those that run fast on the planet don't have hands.)
I think I can safely say that Calvin thinks the Neanderthals would have been hard pressed to learn to throw.
IANAA (I am not an anthropologist), but a chimpanzee that can more or less tear your arm off! But this would be much larger...
You ignored my argument and just reiterated your original point (i.e. in the short term, all of Norway isn't important to Microsoft's profit).
I did not argue against that obvious fact!
So I noted your "point" as a trivial fact uninteresting for Microsoft (according to their behaviour). Which makes a liar out of you. Or an idiot. Or a troll.
The two well known examples I gave that Microsoft is scared of Domino effects do weigh heavier than your opinion!
(Hard to know what you think about the examples I base my opinion on, since you haven't discussed them -- just repeated your trivial "point" a third(!) time. That stupidity makes your opinion quite uninteresting, really.)
Flame tasteless jokes if you want -- but don't just ignore the content.
You ignored my argument and just reiterated your original point (i.e. in the short term, all of Norway isn't important to Microsoft's profit).
I did not argue against that obvious fact!
Here is another examples of my original point with the same mechanism:
The (judged illegal) contracts Microsoft used their monopoly to force onto PC manufacturers that made it impossible to preinstall anything but Windows.
Gates said that they didn't want to give an alternative O/S a positive growth spiral (when BeOS offered preinstalls for free to manufacturers). It is the same thing with Norway; BeOS wasn't exactly big then...
This discussion is over. You made a stupid argument -- and then repeated it while ignoring the counterargument.
Not a troll, but sure... mod me down if you think so. (Just wait until someone answered, plz! :-)
Ballmer and his top managers has travelled around the world trying to stop even cities from switching to open software.
Microsoft seems to be scared of a domino effect.
You are either an idiot or working for a Redmond company? :-)