Bingo! I take it you mean the Al Qaeda _leadership_.
Actually, I mean "members of Al Qaeda" versus the people they disagree with.
It seems that our major point of contention is whether it's the case that freedom-minded members of Al Qaeda are being manipulated by extremists, or that Al Qaeda's tenets are transparent and basically oppressive.
I believe the latter, and if I interpret you correctly, you believe the former. I believe my opinion is borne out by the company that Al Qaeda kept in Afghanistan, a nation happily referred to by it's opressors as the "most perfect muslim nation on earth", and who regularly killed such people as:
People accused of petty crime
Dissenters
Members of wrong religion
Members of the wrong political persuasion
Members of the wrong race
Women with a job
Women who left the house
Women who begged for food because they weren't allowed to work
Women who stole food because they weren't allowed to work
Women who were raped and thereby dishonored their family
And who banned such items as:
caged songbirds
kites
radios
Books unrelated to Quuranic study
That Al Qaeda is happy to keep such company is telling. Compare and contrast this version of freedom with our own.
Nice debate, however. One of the most civil ones I've had on Slashdot.
It may just be your video stabilizer. I picked one up a few years back, and it works perfectly. It's a Sima Video Copymaster, Model SED-CM.
Incidentally, there's another post that recommends a Time Base Corrector, but while it will remove Macrovision, its not going to improve your copy quality considerably unless you already have a nice VCR. TBCs are professional equipment (I want a new one! mine broke!) and are probably totally beyond how much money you want to spend to copy a few video tapes. On the other hand, a WORKING video stabilizer will cost around 50 USD. I made sure I could return it if it didn't do what I wanted, so it was risk free.
Like the Ku Klux Klan stringing up black people for not realizing their place, Al Qaeda is fighting for the "peace" and prosperity of a select few at the expense of many. The number of people that Al Qaeda wish to deprive of basic human rights as part of their belief system far outnumbers the people who benefit.
When I said I did not want to understand them, I meant that I never want to be the kind of person who believes in such ideals. Not all ideals are equal in merit.
Lastly, I misspoke. I meant to say Al Qaeda's type of extremism was keeping Afghanistan in its current state. Again, the type of values that the Taliban kept in good company with their "honored guests" Al Qaeda are not the kinds that I am willing to promote as equal to anything that's in the UN human rights charter.
To say that Al Qaeda is interested in "freedom" or "peace" is a semantic flaw. Their definition of these terms are incompatible with the western world's at all.
With countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq, I think a case can be made that people in these countries want to be left alone, but hardly in "peace". The "terrorists" coming from these countries have no interest in peace or justice; I duspute your characterization that they do.
The kind of extremism that made Afghanistan the most primitive and backwards nation on earth is the same thing Al Qaeda is is fighting for. Please do not assume these people are altruistic!
I do not want to "Understand" that kind of fucked -up thinking. As you say, I am interested in changing US foreign policy to avoid pissing them off, but who knows what pisses off crazy people, when you get down to it. Tomorrow it can change.
I can't help thinking...If Al Qaeda is attacking us for our support of the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia, why haven't they been focusing on replacing the house of Saud? They are more interested in getting the USA out of the middle east, which basically makes them just racist.
I see this argument, but its by the less sophisticated creationists. Their main beef is not so much with legs to wings (or fins to arms), but things like scales to feathers. We see animals with scales, we see animals with feathers, we see animals with scales AND feathers. the argument is, where are the animals that are covered with something that's BETWEEN a scale and a feather?
I think it's a valid question, but I wonder if the problem is with classification, not that these intermediate animals exist or not. These things exist, but based on what we have now, would they be classified as "freaks"? So basically, I'd assume there are fossils all over the place that are intermediate forms, but they don't get as much attention because they are not strictly classifiable? But then, the creationist argument is that we aren't finding fossils of these intermediate forms at all, so who knows.
I'm not a scientist or a creationist, so I don't know how to validate their claims in the context of this discovery. I don't think smarter creationists would be bothered by a fish with underdeveloped arms, but I could be wrong.
You made your point, but there's a disconnect between your point and why its relevant to the original statement. If someone said to me "isn't it time we ditched floppy disks for something better?" I'd probably say "yeah", not jump all over their ass because someone somewhere uses floppy disks.
April Fool's day has only been around for about 400 years, it's time to start coping with the fact that it's not going away. You people sound like a senior citizen mad about loud fireworks on the fourth of july, or someone pissed that a Christmas walk has main street closed off.
lol, apparently no one downloaded the "floppies" before you got your "informative" mod. Even if you guys don't have an Apple IIc, check out the disk images.
This is one of the few "holidays" that hasn't been absurdly sanitized, probably because it's pretty low-impact as far as ritual is concerned. I want to see April Fool's jokes everywhere the entire day of April 1. Tradition and festivity are some of the things that make life rich.
I guess OJ was found liable for "wrongful death" which could mean anything, so long as he was somehow involved in their deaths. Of course any rational human being would derive that nearly any involvement he would have had in the murders would imply criminal guilt, save for finding their writhing bodies and doing nothing about it.
I wonder if a context was established in the wrongful death ruling. I'd like to hear how he was supposedly liable for their deaths if he didn't do it. I'd hope that it wasn't sufficient to not qualify "wrongful death" with how he was actually liable.
You are referring to RATING according to performance. I (and the original article) am referring to RANKING according to performance.
if there is a company that ranks on a 5 point scale and the company has (for the sake of simplicity) 5 employees, they will be ranked 1 through 5 according to their performance relative to the other workers. This is bullshit because it gives you no useful information. If everyone at the company sucks, someone is still going to get ranked higher than everyone else. If everyone is great, then half of your staff are still going to get "below average" ratings. Obviously it makes no sense to fire all the "5"s. Next evaluation period, a bunch of people are pissed off they dropped a grade.
This system has a huge advantage for management though, because the only way for an employee to "not lose" is to work his ass off. Even if everyone at a small company got together and tried to all slack off (since a low-productivity office gold star rating employee is equivalent to a high productivity office gold-star employee), everyone would feel at huge risk that they will slack too far and lose their place to someone who put in just a little more effort. So then it turns right around into the other extreme again, each person trying to outdo the other, fighting madly to avoid a below-average slot.
My reasoning against this system is: 1) it tells you nothing about actual job performance, neither in terms of task requirement fulfillment nor how your employees perform against professionals in their field. 2) it can be used as a management crutch to keep productivity high in spite of bad morale. 3) it relies on fear rather than reward or personal achievement as a motivator. This is neither healthy for the employee nor the company in the long run. 4) it discourages teamwork because all coworkers are viewed as competitors. Relationships between coworkers and superiors are seen as combative rather than cooperative. 5) rating half of your highly skilled professional staff as "below average" is a great motivator all right. It's great for motivating them to quit and get a job where they are appreciated.
The sane alternative is really simple: it's the exact rating system you yourself are talking about. Rate how good someone has accomplished the tasks given to her! Appropriate adjustments made for professional and perhaps local standards of quality (programmers in IA may not be as educated or productive as silicon valley programmers.) I am not against working hard or doing a good job. I am against policies that are harmful to employees. Hard work should be rewarded.
You are the one who is ultimately responsible for your rating
We'd all be filling out our own evaluations if this were true.
I'm not bitter or anything, I get very good evaluations. The fact that you can do things to improve your rating is not the point.
The competitive rating system is how management compensates for lack of productivity due to a terrible work environment and the corresponding low morale. It's not sufficient to do your job to the best of your abilities, you have to kill yourself to work your way above the next guy so you don't get fired. So basically you are working overtime to get ahead, so the next guy has to work more overtime to beat you out. Maybe I worry that I screwed up on that last project, so I start taking work home so maybe I can bump myself up past the next guy on the chain.
If people are put in a low-morale environment, they will do less and less until they are only doing the bare minimum they need to do to not get fired. This system is how management gets around that without actually fixing the problem.
I have no evidence of this, but I suspect this system is more popular when jobs are scarce and your chance of saying "fuck it" and quitting are low.
U.S. news agencies stopped broadcasting Bin Laden's speeches at the request of the U.S. government.
They requested it, and some agencies ignored this request. That's not censorship.
The U.S. government made the absurd claim that Bin Laden was "sending secret messages to his supporters" through his speeches, when it was blatantly obvious that the U.S. was simply interested in suppressing him.
It is the policy of every sane government to disincentivize the publishing of terrorist demands/manifestos, as publicity is one of the goals of terrorism. Absurd claim? I doubt you are a terrorism expert, so stop characterizing as "absurd" the professional opinion of people who are.
Understandably in fact. Bin Laden was making a whole lot of sense and sounded extremely reasonable when compared to Bush.
How do you evaluate the reasonableness of an argument by a person who rams commuter airplanes full of people into skyscrapers?
The U.S. does not have the moral standing to criticise other nations. To do so is the height of hypocrisy.
If I believed it was better to avoid hypocricsy than to address injustice, I'd agree with that. I guess we'd better just dissolve the United Nations then, because I don't see any members with clean hands.
You can't reach a lesser charge of civil liability for wrongful death as the result of murder without finding him guilty of the greater charge of murder first, right? By issuing a not-guilty verdict, the government was stating there was not enough evidence to prove he commited murder, so enlighten me how a civil court could sanely find him liable for an act he couldn't legally be found to have actually done?
The civil court made an assumption of guilt for the crime of murder using only enough evidence to find legal liability if the act ACTUALLY OCCURED. The act was never legally proven to have accured (otherwise he would have been guilty!) so I don't see where the civil court gets off deciding unilaterally if someone is guilty or innocent of a criminal charge in making their decisions, let alone deciding the OPPOSITE of the outcome of the actual criminal case in question.
Now like 50,000 VAR's were just put on notice that Microsoft is taking OpenOffice.org seriously and that its a worthy product
A significant chunk of those 50,000 VARs who might have been considering OO.o before have just received orders from Microsoft to engage the enemy. Never underestimate the number of people who are completely uncritical of anything microsoft says.
I believe it's only going to get harder once MS takes OO.o seriously. That's when they start strongarming their OEMs and breaking document compatibility.
I don't understand how a civil court can base liability on a criminal act that the defendant was found not guilty of. This of course could be done if he was found guilty, but it would seem to me that if you are not GUILTY of murder, you are by default not LIABLE for murder.
I understand if you use the same evidence you could reach different conclusions by applying a different threshold. However the civil court basically reevaluated evidence from a criminal proceeding while ignoring the conclusion, and de facto found someone guilty of murder by finding liability. (I realize a wrongful death suit doesn't imply murder, but in this case it does.)
My question is, does the civil court have the authority to evaluate guilt in a criminal act on the way to proving liability? Is this common?
When GIMP people who have never even used Photoshop stop talking about how this version is going to be the Photoshop killer, Photoshop users will stop pointing out why that's wrong.
Every "GIMP is gonna take over graphic design like a storm!" comment is the equivalent of Microsoft astroturfing to us. It's platform evangelism, with no basis in fact.
"Conspirator" in US Law doesn't imply more than one person, interestingly. For example, Counterfeiting is automatically conspiracy even if you were the only one involved.
Maybe not. It's hard to trace email, so its hard to catch spammers. The death penalty in the USA doesn't tend to be a real effective deterrent to crime because people don't think they are going to be caught.
Minor quibble, you probably don't even need to be convicted before you're dispatched in China.
You know, I can't actually disagree with you there. Most code I see/maintain probably couldn't even be described as "procedural" let alone OO. It's hard enough to get some people even to put stuff in methods.
My only issue is that its quite easy to pass off bad C++ skills as bad OO skills, when in fact if the same code was programmed in java would be perfectly OO simply because its more straighforward.
Unfortunately you are right, and most java programmers can't do OO in either language, because they don't even have the concepts down.
No. Many Java programmers understand Object Orientation quite well. It's C++'s mangled OO-with-crutches syntax that trips them up. You could write an entire book on OO examples in C++ that look plausible and compile, but don't work at all like you'd expect at first glance. This is because C++ has to accommodate more programming styles than just OO. C++ doesn't assume that just because you are using objects that you want to use every OO feature.
Method overriding and hiding, assigning derived objects to a base class instead of using pointers, using derived methods when on a base class when the base method isn't virtual, not declaring your namespace in your class to call base methods. OO is not hard to understand. OO in C++ is hard to understand. There's a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I mean "members of Al Qaeda" versus the people they disagree with.
It seems that our major point of contention is whether it's the case that freedom-minded members of Al Qaeda are being manipulated by extremists, or that Al Qaeda's tenets are transparent and basically oppressive.
I believe the latter, and if I interpret you correctly, you believe the former. I believe my opinion is borne out by the company that Al Qaeda kept in Afghanistan, a nation happily referred to by it's opressors as the "most perfect muslim nation on earth", and who regularly killed such people as:
And who banned such items as:
That Al Qaeda is happy to keep such company is telling. Compare and contrast this version of freedom with our own.
Nice debate, however. One of the most civil ones I've had on Slashdot.
It may just be your video stabilizer. I picked one up a few years back, and it works perfectly. It's a Sima Video Copymaster, Model SED-CM.
Incidentally, there's another post that recommends a Time Base Corrector, but while it will remove Macrovision, its not going to improve your copy quality considerably unless you already have a nice VCR. TBCs are professional equipment (I want a new one! mine broke!) and are probably totally beyond how much money you want to spend to copy a few video tapes. On the other hand, a WORKING video stabilizer will cost around 50 USD. I made sure I could return it if it didn't do what I wanted, so it was risk free.
Like the Ku Klux Klan stringing up black people for not realizing their place, Al Qaeda is fighting for the "peace" and prosperity of a select few at the expense of many. The number of people that Al Qaeda wish to deprive of basic human rights as part of their belief system far outnumbers the people who benefit.
When I said I did not want to understand them, I meant that I never want to be the kind of person who believes in such ideals. Not all ideals are equal in merit.
Lastly, I misspoke. I meant to say Al Qaeda's type of extremism was keeping Afghanistan in its current state. Again, the type of values that the Taliban kept in good company with their "honored guests" Al Qaeda are not the kinds that I am willing to promote as equal to anything that's in the UN human rights charter.
To say that Al Qaeda is interested in "freedom" or "peace" is a semantic flaw. Their definition of these terms are incompatible with the western world's at all.
With countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq, I think a case can be made that people in these countries want to be left alone, but hardly in "peace". The "terrorists" coming from these countries have no interest in peace or justice; I duspute your characterization that they do.
The kind of extremism that made Afghanistan the most primitive and backwards nation on earth is the same thing Al Qaeda is is fighting for. Please do not assume these people are altruistic!
I do not want to "Understand" that kind of fucked -up thinking. As you say, I am interested in changing US foreign policy to avoid pissing them off, but who knows what pisses off crazy people, when you get down to it. Tomorrow it can change.
I can't help thinking...If Al Qaeda is attacking us for our support of the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia, why haven't they been focusing on replacing the house of Saud? They are more interested in getting the USA out of the middle east, which basically makes them just racist.
I see this argument, but its by the less sophisticated creationists. Their main beef is not so much with legs to wings (or fins to arms), but things like scales to feathers. We see animals with scales, we see animals with feathers, we see animals with scales AND feathers. the argument is, where are the animals that are covered with something that's BETWEEN a scale and a feather?
I think it's a valid question, but I wonder if the problem is with classification, not that these intermediate animals exist or not. These things exist, but based on what we have now, would they be classified as "freaks"? So basically, I'd assume there are fossils all over the place that are intermediate forms, but they don't get as much attention because they are not strictly classifiable? But then, the creationist argument is that we aren't finding fossils of these intermediate forms at all, so who knows.
I'm not a scientist or a creationist, so I don't know how to validate their claims in the context of this discovery. I don't think smarter creationists would be bothered by a fish with underdeveloped arms, but I could be wrong.
You made your point, but there's a disconnect between your point and why its relevant to the original statement. If someone said to me "isn't it time we ditched floppy disks for something better?" I'd probably say "yeah", not jump all over their ass because someone somewhere uses floppy disks.
April Fool's day has only been around for about 400 years, it's time to start coping with the fact that it's not going away. You people sound like a senior citizen mad about loud fireworks on the fourth of july, or someone pissed that a Christmas walk has main street closed off.
lol, apparently no one downloaded the "floppies" before you got your "informative" mod. Even if you guys don't have an Apple IIc, check out the disk images.
This is one of the few "holidays" that hasn't been absurdly sanitized, probably because it's pretty low-impact as far as ritual is concerned. I want to see April Fool's jokes everywhere the entire day of April 1. Tradition and festivity are some of the things that make life rich.
For some reason, I find this topic fascinating.
I guess OJ was found liable for "wrongful death" which could mean anything, so long as he was somehow involved in their deaths. Of course any rational human being would derive that nearly any involvement he would have had in the murders would imply criminal guilt, save for finding their writhing bodies and doing nothing about it.
I wonder if a context was established in the wrongful death ruling. I'd like to hear how he was supposedly liable for their deaths if he didn't do it. I'd hope that it wasn't sufficient to not qualify "wrongful death" with how he was actually liable.
You are referring to RATING according to performance. I (and the original article) am referring to RANKING according to performance.
if there is a company that ranks on a 5 point scale and the company has (for the sake of simplicity) 5 employees, they will be ranked 1 through 5 according to their performance relative to the other workers. This is bullshit because it gives you no useful information. If everyone at the company sucks, someone is still going to get ranked higher than everyone else. If everyone is great, then half of your staff are still going to get "below average" ratings. Obviously it makes no sense to fire all the "5"s. Next evaluation period, a bunch of people are pissed off they dropped a grade.
This system has a huge advantage for management though, because the only way for an employee to "not lose" is to work his ass off. Even if everyone at a small company got together and tried to all slack off (since a low-productivity office gold star rating employee is equivalent to a high productivity office gold-star employee), everyone would feel at huge risk that they will slack too far and lose their place to someone who put in just a little more effort. So then it turns right around into the other extreme again, each person trying to outdo the other, fighting madly to avoid a below-average slot.
My reasoning against this system is:
1) it tells you nothing about actual job performance, neither in terms of task requirement fulfillment nor how your employees perform against professionals in their field.
2) it can be used as a management crutch to keep productivity high in spite of bad morale.
3) it relies on fear rather than reward or personal achievement as a motivator. This is neither healthy for the employee nor the company in the long run.
4) it discourages teamwork because all coworkers are viewed as competitors. Relationships between coworkers and superiors are seen as combative rather than cooperative.
5) rating half of your highly skilled professional staff as "below average" is a great motivator all right. It's great for motivating them to quit and get a job where they are appreciated.
The sane alternative is really simple: it's the exact rating system you yourself are talking about. Rate how good someone has accomplished the tasks given to her! Appropriate adjustments made for professional and perhaps local standards of quality (programmers in IA may not be as educated or productive as silicon valley programmers.) I am not against working hard or doing a good job. I am against policies that are harmful to employees. Hard work should be rewarded.
hearing about technical people writing "social networking" software.
How do you tell if an engineer is an extrovert?
He looks at YOUR shoes when he's talking.
We'd all be filling out our own evaluations if this were true.
I'm not bitter or anything, I get very good evaluations. The fact that you can do things to improve your rating is not the point.
The competitive rating system is how management compensates for lack of productivity due to a terrible work environment and the corresponding low morale. It's not sufficient to do your job to the best of your abilities, you have to kill yourself to work your way above the next guy so you don't get fired. So basically you are working overtime to get ahead, so the next guy has to work more overtime to beat you out. Maybe I worry that I screwed up on that last project, so I start taking work home so maybe I can bump myself up past the next guy on the chain.
If people are put in a low-morale environment, they will do less and less until they are only doing the bare minimum they need to do to not get fired. This system is how management gets around that without actually fixing the problem.
I have no evidence of this, but I suspect this system is more popular when jobs are scarce and your chance of saying "fuck it" and quitting are low.
Holy crap you are right. The ONLY reason I go back into Windows these days is to burn those weird-ass CD images.
For everything else I do, Linux varies between great to tolerable.
They requested it, and some agencies ignored this request. That's not censorship.
The U.S. government made the absurd claim that Bin Laden was "sending secret messages to his supporters" through his speeches, when it was blatantly obvious that the U.S. was simply interested in suppressing him.
It is the policy of every sane government to disincentivize the publishing of terrorist demands/manifestos, as publicity is one of the goals of terrorism. Absurd claim? I doubt you are a terrorism expert, so stop characterizing as "absurd" the professional opinion of people who are.
Understandably in fact. Bin Laden was making a whole lot of sense and sounded extremely reasonable when compared to Bush.
How do you evaluate the reasonableness of an argument by a person who rams commuter airplanes full of people into skyscrapers?
The U.S. does not have the moral standing to criticise other nations. To do so is the height of hypocrisy.
If I believed it was better to avoid hypocricsy than to address injustice, I'd agree with that. I guess we'd better just dissolve the United Nations then, because I don't see any members with clean hands.
You can't reach a lesser charge of civil liability for wrongful death as the result of murder without finding him guilty of the greater charge of murder first, right? By issuing a not-guilty verdict, the government was stating there was not enough evidence to prove he commited murder, so enlighten me how a civil court could sanely find him liable for an act he couldn't legally be found to have actually done?
The civil court made an assumption of guilt for the crime of murder using only enough evidence to find legal liability if the act ACTUALLY OCCURED. The act was never legally proven to have accured (otherwise he would have been guilty!) so I don't see where the civil court gets off deciding unilaterally if someone is guilty or innocent of a criminal charge in making their decisions, let alone deciding the OPPOSITE of the outcome of the actual criminal case in question.
A significant chunk of those 50,000 VARs who might have been considering OO.o before have just received orders from Microsoft to engage the enemy. Never underestimate the number of people who are completely uncritical of anything microsoft says.
I believe it's only going to get harder once MS takes OO.o seriously. That's when they start strongarming their OEMs and breaking document compatibility.
I don't understand how a civil court can base liability on a criminal act that the defendant was found not guilty of. This of course could be done if he was found guilty, but it would seem to me that if you are not GUILTY of murder, you are by default not LIABLE for murder.
I understand if you use the same evidence you could reach different conclusions by applying a different threshold. However the civil court basically reevaluated evidence from a criminal proceeding while ignoring the conclusion, and de facto found someone guilty of murder by finding liability. (I realize a wrongful death suit doesn't imply murder, but in this case it does.)
My question is, does the civil court have the authority to evaluate guilt in a criminal act on the way to proving liability? Is this common?
When GIMP people who have never even used Photoshop stop talking about how this version is going to be the Photoshop killer, Photoshop users will stop pointing out why that's wrong.
Every "GIMP is gonna take over graphic design like a storm!" comment is the equivalent of Microsoft astroturfing to us. It's platform evangelism, with no basis in fact.
is STILL copyrighted. That's why every restaurant has their own goofy birthday song instead of the universally recognized happy birthday song.
If your kid has a birthday party and you hire a clown to come in and he sings Happy Birthday, the law was broken. What kind of bullshit is that?
What are they ignoring? California has some of the strictest gun laws in the union!
"Conspirator" in US Law doesn't imply more than one person, interestingly. For example, Counterfeiting is automatically conspiracy even if you were the only one involved.
Maybe not. It's hard to trace email, so its hard to catch spammers. The death penalty in the USA doesn't tend to be a real effective deterrent to crime because people don't think they are going to be caught.
Minor quibble, you probably don't even need to be convicted before you're dispatched in China.
You know, I can't actually disagree with you there. Most code I see/maintain probably couldn't even be described as "procedural" let alone OO. It's hard enough to get some people even to put stuff in methods.
My only issue is that its quite easy to pass off bad C++ skills as bad OO skills, when in fact if the same code was programmed in java would be perfectly OO simply because its more straighforward.
Unfortunately you are right, and most java programmers can't do OO in either language, because they don't even have the concepts down.
No. Many Java programmers understand Object Orientation quite well. It's C++'s mangled OO-with-crutches syntax that trips them up. You could write an entire book on OO examples in C++ that look plausible and compile, but don't work at all like you'd expect at first glance. This is because C++ has to accommodate more programming styles than just OO. C++ doesn't assume that just because you are using objects that you want to use every OO feature.
Method overriding and hiding, assigning derived objects to a base class instead of using pointers, using derived methods when on a base class when the base method isn't virtual, not declaring your namespace in your class to call base methods. OO is not hard to understand. OO in C++ is hard to understand. There's a difference.