They used to do this a lot in California and Texas, until people figured out you can operate a motor vehicle and a firearm at the same time. Now, both states are full of polite drivers. Not necessarily competent drivers, but at least they are polite.
Wherever you are just needs to go through the 'armed populace has had ENOUGH' phase, start shooting and killing tailgaters and rude drivers - only takes about 3 months and the interstate will be a peaceful, relaxing drive for years.
That's Darwin at work. Any motorcyclist worth keeping alive knows better than to ride in any car's blind spot. They spend about 1/8th of a second in the blind spot going around, and if you start to come over they will be past you before you can get there (see also : no substitute for cubic inches.)
Smart bikers learn not to ride in a car's blind spot, and if they find themselves in a blind spot to get the hell out of it. Ditto for 'next to 18 wheeler rigs.' Ditto for tailgating, or being tailgated. Ditto for 'boxed in and nowhere to go.'
Every once in a while I get some hot-shot kid on a motorcycle in a hurry decide to tailgate me - demonstrating that he hasn't yet had the one accident that turns a dumb biker into a smart biker. I generally tap the brake pedal just enough to flash the brake lights at him, and most of them catch a clue. The rest of the time (very, very rarely) it becomes a contest : ABS in my car vs. his reaction time and ability to control his shiny Ninja in an emergency stop.
That said, and as a biker, I find that people that ride motorcycles are about the safest drivers even when they are in a car. Something about the penalty for getting it wrong being pretty severe on a bike.
And no, I have never actually crunched a tailgater (I considered it a few times though.)
-The idea behind "digital cash" though, as opposed to a debit or credit card, is that it's anonymous and therefore as untraceable as cash.
Are we still talking about the United States Government? The same crew that sees the RFID as the second coming? Somehow I don't think they are working very hard on making THAT version of "digital cash" a reality.
Bah! Kids today and their new fangled color laser printers and 9600dpi scanners. Back when I was a kid we started with two blocks of solid steel, a sharp pokey scrapey tool, and a magnifying glass. Then we painstakingly had to carve away at the steel until we had a matched set of plates, loaded up a super pressure stomper and fed it special linen based paper and uberGreen ink. Took months, maybe a year to get a good rig running.
And we were THANKFUL!
Ever want to see some good old school counterfeiting, watch 'To Live and Die in LA'. Those guys would cut up Carly and use her for fish food.
Adding a gigabit NIC to the Wintel box would be trivial, but I am not sure about availability of gigabit networking on your specific instance of Mac hardware - but if it works you can get a crossover cable to run between the two cards (no intermediate hub/switch necessary) and just hardcode the ip addresses for those cards. It becomes your own little private sub-net, and I believe that once you have done that it is also trivial to share the Wintel box's connection to the outside world.
Doing this would move the bottleneck from the network to the hard drive, back where it belongs - gigabit theoretical wire speed is roughly... 90MB/s and even my fastest hard drives peak sustained read throughput is only half of that.
According to Kevin Mitnick roughly (insert large number here)% of all 'computer hacking' is done via social engineering. Why spend weeks or months on a distributed network hacking 4096-bit encryption when you can hire a 36DD-24-36 from the local stripper shack to get one of the guys to just tell her his password simply by pretending she likes him?
Old story - a sys/admin at company I was doing consulting for was bragging on his security at lunch with me one day, I told him I could hack my way onto his network in about 5 minutes. We get back, he takes that bet. With him standing there watching (I was dressed in a suit, everybody there knew I was the consultant - that helps) I called the department manager on the phone, said 'I need your username and password.' He told it to me, I walked to an empty machine, logged in as that user with that password. Took me 2 minutes.
I used the word Engineer as a way of differentiating between the people that studied 'computer stuff' towards a degree granted by the college of engineering (BS/Computer Science under the Department of Engineering, often referred to as a degree in Software Engineering), and those that studied 'computer stuff' towards the degree granted by the department of business (BA/Computer Information Systems under the Department of Business).
The CS students in the Engineering department often take more hardcore math and engineering classes than math majors and have distain for anybody that uses Excel, and the CIS students in the Business department take accounting classes, business management classes and take pride in their ability to use Excel.
By using 'Computer Scientist' as a catch-all, you lose the ability to determine which camp the person belongs to...
-I'm studying it with no intention of becoming a "programmer."
Well no worries, because if things don't change you are going to graduate with a degree in Computer Science (aka Software Engineering) and right out of school your career options are going to be: Burger Flipper Gas Pumper Food Server Grocery Sacker
Incredibly sad, too - because if this is your 4th year in college it means that you went in your first day during the last few months of the tech boom.
Even more sad - I could fix this entire 'outsourcing to India' thing permanently for a little less than a million dollars. Take me a month or two and every tech company in America would be BEGGING for programmers and computer techs. Sun Tzu was old, but he was right.
Please share - what is the WinZip exploit? Did the file come across as a.zip file or a.exe? Did you simply double click on a.zip file and in addition to displaying the file list in the WinZip dialog box, it ran one of the programs? Some sort of 'auto-run' in a.zip file or in the.zip environment?
The reason I ask is... I am as blissfully ignorant on WinZip + exploit = virus code runs as you were until Tuesday.
Insurance for an employees family can run $1,000 a month. This isn't the entire story, however, behind 'fully burdened salary'.
Take all the office expenses related to people except actual salary : Building expenses, insurance, 401(k) matching, the $4.3M bonus paid to each corporate officer, the stretch limo and corporate jet expenses, etc... Get a dollar figure $burden. Take just base salary of the company. Get a dollar figure $baseSalary.
Lets pretend that the entire company spends $100M a year on $baseSalary and another $40M a year in $burden ($28M of which was executive perks and bonuses.) The total outlay was $140M so the % to come up with the 'fully burdened salary' is +40%.
Take your $50k a year salary, run it through that magic math, and your 'fully burdened salary' is $50k x 1.4 = $70k a year.
I am guessing that the Windows machine is connected to the network via Ethernet, and there is a single Ethernet port in your work area that a little Ethernet cable plugs into on one side, the other side going into the Ethernet jack on your Windows machine.
Go to Best Buy, or Circuit City, or Frys and buy a small Linksys 4 port 10/100 switch for about $40. Buy an extra Ethernet cable or two. Get a crossover Ethernet cable just in case, save yourself a trip in you need it - buy a red one so you don't have to figure out why it doesn't work in places that regular Ethernet cables go.
Unplug the Ethernet cable from the Windows machine. Plug it into the switch in the one socket that is set apart from the other four (this is the uplink.) Plug the two new cables (not the crossover) into any two holes in the switch they will fit. Plug the other end of one into your Windows machine, and the other end of the other into the Apple.
Turn everything on. Voila! Everything pretty much works and you didn't need an extra drop. You can even hide the little Linksys switch under your desk so the IT department doesn't know that you have tampered with the network.
Last suggestion, network admins can peruse the names of all the machines on their network. I suggest you name the Apple laptop something that looks like it fits in with all the other corporate network machines. I do not know how to do this on an Apple, or even if it applys, but it is worth noting. - As for making computers communicate over firewire or USB as a way to emulate or replace regular network components... why, when doing it the straightforward way is so much simpler?
Yup - I checked and I was wrong, what I described was a supercritical fluid and not plasma.
Damn, there goes my marketing budget on next year's super gotta-have national defense weapon. 'Plasma weapon' is something the common people can relate to and congressmen will spend money on... 'Supercritical fluid weapon' just sounds a little too phallic and borderline gay.
Damn. I may stick with my original definition of Plasma just for marketing purposes. Back me up guys, if anybody questions it - you know the truth, I know the truth, but they don't need to know the truth.
I would suggest aerodynamic pods, individual sized, with small winglets to keep it oriented, shaped like a small cruise missle, with that carbon tile stuff as an exterior. Perhaps with a water lining that as it heated could be used as reactionary mass to shoot out the back end as a means to absorb some of the heat as it converted the water to steam, or perhaps some ablative material that was designed to melt away in layers to dissipate the heat. Parachute in there somewhere like a little model rocket. It could be foam lined inside a clamshell design, put the breather tube from the O2 bottle in your mouth and have it encase you like a camera case full of foam with a cutout for your shape (insulate you from the heat, protect you from the impact and physical shock of re-entry. It wouldn't need to be comfortable or even let you move around, just keep you alive for 15 minutes on the way down.
See also : Mechwarrior Dropship Battlemech drop pods. Shape of the Patriot missle. Pelican camera shipping case. Pershing II cruise missle.
Actually this sounds very similar to, and yet entirely different from the plasma I learned about in college 20 or so years ago.
As I recall, this is how matter arrives at the plasma state: 1. Start with some matter. 2. Suck out all the other gasses surrounding that original matter. 3. Seal the container. 4. Heat it up beyond the boiling point, maintain a constant volume. 5. Some of the liquid will become a gas as it boils off. The partial pressure mixture of gas and liquid will equalize and as more heat enters the system more of it will boil out of the liquid phase as gas, and the density of the gas will increase. 6. The pressure inside the container increases. 7. Keep adding heat. Eventually the density of the superheated gas will be the same as the density of the frothy liquid and the state of the entire volume will be roughly the same - this is called Plasma.
I don't recall it having anything to do with electrically charged particles, or electrons being stripped away.
I suggest that you consider foam (mental vision : put ice cream in a tall glass, pour root beer over it - the foam is the fluffy stuff on top... ) for a second - it isn't a liquid but if you touch it you get wet. It isn't a gas but its density approaches that of heavy gasses. It has properties of both a liquid and a gas - because it is sort of a half-step between the two.
Consider the conditions of the re-entrant space shuttle : hauling ass through upper atmosphere. Friction of the atmosphere on the wing leading edges causing both friction induced heat and pressure. The metal that comprises the shuttle providing the 'matter' in step #1 above, is super-heated and pushed under intense pressure through cracks in the superstructure. Depending on the pressure and temperature, it could have possibly been 'plasma' as I understand it, or it could have been really hot molten metal (which when sprayed on you, feels a lot like plasma, I envision.)
Funny, in a Karma sort of way. My grandfather has this, has entire fields of vision that he actually can't see, particularly directly in front of him. Doesn't stop him from driving, but luckily he lives in rural Alabama so he just sits at the light until someone behind him honks, which means that the light has turned green.
I can't change it, I can't fix him, and I can't make it better for him. But I can try to understand how the world looks through his eyes and appreciate how things are really more difficult when the body stops working with you and starts working against you. After reading this thread I think I am going to cut him some slack.
I would like to propose a nice piece of optic quality clear plastic in the shape of a lens, large enough to be useful but small enough to be handy. This piece of plastic could be molded into a convex shape such that light rays passing through it would appear larger to someone looking at someone through it. We could also mold a plastic handle on it, and maybe even throw in a protective case to keep it from getting scratched.
Magnifying lenses - they're not just for scorching bugs anymore!
Naw, that would never work. Carry on with the cybernetic implants for old people.
Quite honestly nobody, not even your geek friends, are going to be impressed by a digital watch. Invest in a nice Swiss made Superlative Chronograph - Officially Certified - Rolex Submariner.
Cost you about $2,500 used, or somewhere in the $3,800 range new. Doesn't use batteries, it is self winding as long as you wear it. Sapphire crystal. Pretty much scratch proof while you are wearing it - anything that can scratch that lens would blow off your arm in the process. Stainless steel one case. Waterproof down to 1000 feet (330m). Odds are you will never need to buy another watch in your lifetime, and it will be a good one to pass down to the next generation.
It is one accessory that is instantly recognized by anybody that is looking, and anybody that is going to be impressed by a watch will be impressed by this one.
Does one thing, tell time, and it does that fairly well. Doesn't surf the web, track contacts, tell you where you are, keep a list of phone numbers, take pictures, or play music... but you already have toys that do that - get yourself a Rolex, a stainless steel Submariner if you are looking entry level, or a two tone Daytona if you are a mid- to high- end professional.
You will love it, and you will continue to love it forever.
I am open to suggestions, recommendations, and revisions. By all means, share the development methodology that you use here - don't just detract, contribute.
Real programmers don't program GUIs - they program the faceless back end data manipulations and calculations, real-time missle guidance systems and the code that keeps fusion plants running along at 96% capacity. Real programmers write recursive self modifying code, but only when necessary. Real programmers first try to understand the task at hand and then pick a language that best suits the business needs, even if it means programming in Visual Basic, or in a language they don't know yet and have to learn during the course of the project.
Once they get it working, they hand it off to a newbie so the newbie can code the front end, usually in VB.
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They used to do this a lot in California and Texas, until people figured out you can operate a motor vehicle and a firearm at the same time. Now, both states are full of polite drivers. Not necessarily competent drivers, but at least they are polite.
Wherever you are just needs to go through the 'armed populace has had ENOUGH' phase, start shooting and killing tailgaters and rude drivers - only takes about 3 months and the interstate will be a peaceful, relaxing drive for years.
That's Darwin at work. Any motorcyclist worth keeping alive knows better than to ride in any car's blind spot. They spend about 1/8th of a second in the blind spot going around, and if you start to come over they will be past you before you can get there (see also : no substitute for cubic inches.)
Hah - try a 1977 Corvette. You can park a BUS in my blindspots.
Smart bikers learn not to ride in a car's blind spot, and if they find themselves in a blind spot to get the hell out of it. Ditto for 'next to 18 wheeler rigs.' Ditto for tailgating, or being tailgated. Ditto for 'boxed in and nowhere to go.'
Every once in a while I get some hot-shot kid on a motorcycle in a hurry decide to tailgate me - demonstrating that he hasn't yet had the one accident that turns a dumb biker into a smart biker. I generally tap the brake pedal just enough to flash the brake lights at him, and most of them catch a clue. The rest of the time (very, very rarely) it becomes a contest : ABS in my car vs. his reaction time and ability to control his shiny Ninja in an emergency stop.
That said, and as a biker, I find that people that ride motorcycles are about the safest drivers even when they are in a car. Something about the penalty for getting it wrong being pretty severe on a bike.
And no, I have never actually crunched a tailgater (I considered it a few times though.)
-The idea behind "digital cash" though, as opposed to a debit or credit card, is that it's anonymous and therefore as untraceable as cash.
Are we still talking about the United States Government? The same crew that sees the RFID as the second coming? Somehow I don't think they are working very hard on making THAT version of "digital cash" a reality.
Bah!
Kids today and their new fangled color laser printers and 9600dpi scanners.
Back when I was a kid we started with two blocks of solid steel, a sharp pokey scrapey tool, and a magnifying glass. Then we painstakingly had to carve away at the steel until we had a matched set of plates, loaded up a super pressure stomper and fed it special linen based paper and uberGreen ink. Took months, maybe a year to get a good rig running.
And we were THANKFUL!
Ever want to see some good old school counterfeiting, watch 'To Live and Die in LA'. Those guys would cut up Carly and use her for fish food.
All you carnivors need to back off, cut hal9000 some slack.
If God had wanted us to eat animals, he would have made them out of meat.
Gigabit networking?
... 90MB/s and even my fastest hard drives peak sustained read throughput is only half of that.
Adding a gigabit NIC to the Wintel box would be trivial, but I am not sure about availability of gigabit networking on your specific instance of Mac hardware - but if it works you can get a crossover cable to run between the two cards (no intermediate hub/switch necessary) and just hardcode the ip addresses for those cards. It becomes your own little private sub-net, and I believe that once you have done that it is also trivial to share the Wintel box's connection to the outside world.
Doing this would move the bottleneck from the network to the hard drive, back where it belongs - gigabit theoretical wire speed is roughly
According to Kevin Mitnick roughly (insert large number here)% of all 'computer hacking' is done via social engineering. Why spend weeks or months on a distributed network hacking 4096-bit encryption when you can hire a 36DD-24-36 from the local stripper shack to get one of the guys to just tell her his password simply by pretending she likes him?
Old story - a sys/admin at company I was doing consulting for was bragging on his security at lunch with me one day, I told him I could hack my way onto his network in about 5 minutes. We get back, he takes that bet. With him standing there watching (I was dressed in a suit, everybody there knew I was the consultant - that helps) I called the department manager on the phone, said 'I need your username and password.' He told it to me, I walked to an empty machine, logged in as that user with that password. Took me 2 minutes.
I used the word Engineer as a way of differentiating between the people that studied 'computer stuff' towards a degree granted by the college of engineering (BS/Computer Science under the Department of Engineering, often referred to as a degree in Software Engineering), and those that studied 'computer stuff' towards the degree granted by the department of business (BA/Computer Information Systems under the Department of Business).
...
The CS students in the Engineering department often take more hardcore math and engineering classes than math majors and have distain for anybody that uses Excel, and the CIS students in the Business department take accounting classes, business management classes and take pride in their ability to use Excel.
By using 'Computer Scientist' as a catch-all, you lose the ability to determine which camp the person belongs to
I was a lifeguard in college. There are two people on this Earth still alive because I jumped in and stood between them and death.
There is no greater feeling.
-I'm studying it with no intention of becoming a "programmer."
:
Well no worries, because if things don't change you are going to graduate with a degree in Computer Science (aka Software Engineering) and right out of school your career options are going to be
Burger Flipper
Gas Pumper
Food Server
Grocery Sacker
Incredibly sad, too - because if this is your 4th year in college it means that you went in your first day during the last few months of the tech boom.
Even more sad - I could fix this entire 'outsourcing to India' thing permanently for a little less than a million dollars. Take me a month or two and every tech company in America would be BEGGING for programmers and computer techs. Sun Tzu was old, but he was right.
Please share - what is the WinZip exploit? .zip file or a .exe? .zip file and in addition to displaying the file list in the WinZip dialog box, it ran one of the programs? .zip file or in the .zip environment?
... I am as blissfully ignorant on WinZip + exploit = virus code runs as you were until Tuesday.
Did the file come across as a
Did you simply double click on a
Some sort of 'auto-run' in a
The reason I ask is
Please share.
Insurance for an employees family can run $1,000 a month. This isn't the entire story, however, behind 'fully burdened salary'.
Take all the office expenses related to people except actual salary : Building expenses, insurance, 401(k) matching, the $4.3M bonus paid to each corporate officer, the stretch limo and corporate jet expenses, etc... Get a dollar figure $burden.
Take just base salary of the company. Get a dollar figure $baseSalary.
Lets pretend that the entire company spends $100M a year on $baseSalary and another $40M a year in $burden ($28M of which was executive perks and bonuses.) The total outlay was $140M so the % to come up with the 'fully burdened salary' is +40%.
Take your $50k a year salary, run it through that magic math, and your 'fully burdened salary' is $50k x 1.4 = $70k a year.
I am guessing that the Windows machine is connected to the network via Ethernet, and there is a single Ethernet port in your work area that a little Ethernet cable plugs into on one side, the other side going into the Ethernet jack on your Windows machine.
... why, when doing it the straightforward way is so much simpler?
Go to Best Buy, or Circuit City, or Frys and buy a small Linksys 4 port 10/100 switch for about $40. Buy an extra Ethernet cable or two. Get a crossover Ethernet cable just in case, save yourself a trip in you need it - buy a red one so you don't have to figure out why it doesn't work in places that regular Ethernet cables go.
Unplug the Ethernet cable from the Windows machine. Plug it into the switch in the one socket that is set apart from the other four (this is the uplink.) Plug the two new cables (not the crossover) into any two holes in the switch they will fit. Plug the other end of one into your Windows machine, and the other end of the other into the Apple.
Turn everything on. Voila! Everything pretty much works and you didn't need an extra drop. You can even hide the little Linksys switch under your desk so the IT department doesn't know that you have tampered with the network.
Last suggestion, network admins can peruse the names of all the machines on their network. I suggest you name the Apple laptop something that looks like it fits in with all the other corporate network machines. I do not know how to do this on an Apple, or even if it applys, but it is worth noting.
-
As for making computers communicate over firewire or USB as a way to emulate or replace regular network components
Yup - I checked and I was wrong, what I described was a supercritical fluid and not plasma.
...
Damn, there goes my marketing budget on next year's super gotta-have national defense weapon.
'Plasma weapon' is something the common people can relate to and congressmen will spend money on
'Supercritical fluid weapon' just sounds a little too phallic and borderline gay.
Damn. I may stick with my original definition of Plasma just for marketing purposes.
Back me up guys, if anybody questions it - you know the truth, I know the truth, but they don't need to know the truth.
I would suggest aerodynamic pods, individual sized, with small winglets to keep it oriented, shaped like a small cruise missle, with that carbon tile stuff as an exterior. Perhaps with a water lining that as it heated could be used as reactionary mass to shoot out the back end as a means to absorb some of the heat as it converted the water to steam, or perhaps some ablative material that was designed to melt away in layers to dissipate the heat. Parachute in there somewhere like a little model rocket. It could be foam lined inside a clamshell design, put the breather tube from the O2 bottle in your mouth and have it encase you like a camera case full of foam with a cutout for your shape (insulate you from the heat, protect you from the impact and physical shock of re-entry. It wouldn't need to be comfortable or even let you move around, just keep you alive for 15 minutes on the way down.
See also : Mechwarrior Dropship Battlemech drop pods. Shape of the Patriot missle. Pelican camera shipping case. Pershing II cruise missle.
Actually this sounds very similar to, and yet entirely different from the plasma I learned about in college 20 or so years ago.
:
... ) for a second - it isn't a liquid but if you touch it you get wet. It isn't a gas but its density approaches that of heavy gasses. It has properties of both a liquid and a gas - because it is sort of a half-step between the two.
As I recall, this is how matter arrives at the plasma state
1. Start with some matter.
2. Suck out all the other gasses surrounding that original matter.
3. Seal the container.
4. Heat it up beyond the boiling point, maintain a constant volume.
5. Some of the liquid will become a gas as it boils off. The partial pressure mixture of gas and liquid will equalize and as more heat enters the system more of it will boil out of the liquid phase as gas, and the density of the gas will increase.
6. The pressure inside the container increases.
7. Keep adding heat. Eventually the density of the superheated gas will be the same as the density of the frothy liquid and the state of the entire volume will be roughly the same - this is called Plasma.
I don't recall it having anything to do with electrically charged particles, or electrons being stripped away.
I suggest that you consider foam (mental vision : put ice cream in a tall glass, pour root beer over it - the foam is the fluffy stuff on top
Consider the conditions of the re-entrant space shuttle : hauling ass through upper atmosphere. Friction of the atmosphere on the wing leading edges causing both friction induced heat and pressure. The metal that comprises the shuttle providing the 'matter' in step #1 above, is super-heated and pushed under intense pressure through cracks in the superstructure. Depending on the pressure and temperature, it could have possibly been 'plasma' as I understand it, or it could have been really hot molten metal (which when sprayed on you, feels a lot like plasma, I envision.)
Actually with the exception of some subtle differences in DOS version 4.01, IBM-DOS was MS-DOS.
-I predate the American availability of Lego.
Holy cow. I had just assumed that Legos were part of the childhood toybox forever, like Crayons, toy guns, and fire. Thanks for the dose of reality.
Funny, in a Karma sort of way. My grandfather has this, has entire fields of vision that he actually can't see, particularly directly in front of him. Doesn't stop him from driving, but luckily he lives in rural Alabama so he just sits at the light until someone behind him honks, which means that the light has turned green.
I can't change it, I can't fix him, and I can't make it better for him. But I can try to understand how the world looks through his eyes and appreciate how things are really more difficult when the body stops working with you and starts working against you. After reading this thread I think I am going to cut him some slack.
I would like to propose a nice piece of optic quality clear plastic in the shape of a lens, large enough to be useful but small enough to be handy. This piece of plastic could be molded into a convex shape such that light rays passing through it would appear larger to someone looking at someone through it. We could also mold a plastic handle on it, and maybe even throw in a protective case to keep it from getting scratched.
Magnifying lenses - they're not just for scorching bugs anymore!
Naw, that would never work. Carry on with the cybernetic implants for old people.
Quite honestly nobody, not even your geek friends, are going to be impressed by a digital watch.
... but you already have toys that do that - get yourself a Rolex, a stainless steel Submariner if you are looking entry level, or a two tone Daytona if you are a mid- to high- end professional.
Invest in a nice Swiss made Superlative Chronograph - Officially Certified - Rolex Submariner.
Cost you about $2,500 used, or somewhere in the $3,800 range new.
Doesn't use batteries, it is self winding as long as you wear it.
Sapphire crystal. Pretty much scratch proof while you are wearing it - anything that can scratch that lens would blow off your arm in the process.
Stainless steel one case. Waterproof down to 1000 feet (330m).
Odds are you will never need to buy another watch in your lifetime, and it will be a good one to pass down to the next generation.
It is one accessory that is instantly recognized by anybody that is looking, and anybody that is going to be impressed by a watch will be impressed by this one.
Does one thing, tell time, and it does that fairly well. Doesn't surf the web, track contacts, tell you where you are, keep a list of phone numbers, take pictures, or play music
You will love it, and you will continue to love it forever.
I am open to suggestions, recommendations, and revisions.
By all means, share the development methodology that you use here - don't just detract, contribute.
Real programmers don't program GUIs - they program the faceless back end data manipulations and calculations, real-time missle guidance systems and the code that keeps fusion plants running along at 96% capacity. Real programmers write recursive self modifying code, but only when necessary. Real programmers first try to understand the task at hand and then pick a language that best suits the business needs, even if it means programming in Visual Basic, or in a language they don't know yet and have to learn during the course of the project.
Once they get it working, they hand it off to a newbie so the newbie can code the front end, usually in VB.