How many of you swore that each checkerbox was different and got thoroughly pissed off when you checked the hex value with the dropper and they were the same?
How many of you physically cut and moved one box next to its partner and back again over and over, screaming in mental anguish as one moment they're obviously the same and the next they're two different colors?
"...European armies are mostly... cold-war style, prepared to fight a large scale land war against the Russian invasion. USA did not have to pay this 'Russian tax', being separated by an ocean."
Actually the main thrust of our R&D during the cold war was towards defeating the Russians on open ground in large scale battles in Europe. The Apache attack helicopter is a good example; it was intended to fly around and mask behind trees and destroy large numbers of Russian tanks on the open grounds of Eastern Europe. A number of our other vehicles were the same way.
Recall that the US has a handful of military bases in Europe and had great interest in stopping any Russian advance. The US army structure was very much devoted to fighting a cold-war type war.
No beef with your post, just wanted to point that out.:)
The US is planning for the long term. Going crazy with these things is silly, but every time we've scaled back on military in the past, it's bit us in the ass -- both world wars are perfect examples of this where we scaled back on both technological and training developments.
Military funding and support should very with the times, but one thing the US military leaders have learned through being good students of military history is that there will *always* be some nutjob with a gun who wants your cookies. Eventually, maybe sooner than later, someone with a beef against the US is going to finish developing the technology to challenge the US in space.
The free market IS the best thing in the world to these guys. He'll sell it to the conservationists for the simple reason that the government owns it and can sell it to anyone it damn well chooses for any price it damn well chooses. The market isn't all about getting the most for your money but about having the freedom to sell to whom you want to for whatever price the two of you see fit.
Kerry would get up and dance a Ballmer with a guy in a penguin suit if he were interviewing with Slashdot. He's a politician, they play the colors that you want to see.
My personal opinion is that politicians are *all* snakes, the only reliable option is to keep them in the wild and out of my house. Hence, I will be voting Libertarian this year.
If you want to give more power to a large minority and take away from a small majority, then alter the requirements for the vote, but at least let the vote take place. Seems a rather hackish way of solving the problem to me.
My understanding is that democratic senators are preventing a vote from being called to confirm Bush's nominations via filibuster. Unless someone wants to add more, I think this is a pretty clear cut-and-dry case of the democrats getting tired of democracy.
Both sides suck. Vote third party. Like companies, politicians won't change until you take your support elsewhere.
I recall watching something on TV with Mr. Doohan talking about a woman that he had met at a Star Trek convention. She apparently was having lots of problems in life, going through depression, had recently been through a divorce (IIRC), etc., and had fixated on Star Trek as a release (not sure in what sense, I saw this a while ago). I believe she had fixated on Mr. Doohan specifically.
Anyway, she met with Mr. Doohan and from what I recall was very emphatic about getting to know him -- I'm unsure if she was trying to treat him as Scotty or as the actor, but regardless the feeling I got from his description was that she was hanging onto the image of him from the show as she didn't have much else to hang on to. Pretty sad.
Mr. Doohan said that he talked with her for a long time and after they parted they kept in touch, seeing each other over a period of time (2 years?). He tried to support her, talk through her problems, tried to help steer her back on the right track, etc.
Then, he says, one day she just disappeared. He didn't hear anything from her for a few years and then suddenly she called him. She had landed a stable job, was working out of her problems and had a better grip on life. She thanked him for what he had done.
Nobody is perfect, I am sure Mr. Doohan has his bad side, but from watching this I got the overall impression that he is a very caring man. How many Hollywood stars would put up with an obsessed fan in the condition she was in?
Seeing him smiling in his wheelchair just pulls on my heart and makes me smile. I sincerely hope the rest of his years are peaceful and rewarding.
Like companies, political parties are never going to change unless you take your business elsewhere.
Want to put a little more bite in your bark? Put all your political activism into threatening (and backing it up) to vote for someone else until politicians start representing you instead of playing the game. They know they can get away with it these days because most of the country is so polarized to one side or the other that they can't see straight -- fighting over which politician sucks the least instead over which politician is the best.
This argument is easily found on both sides throughout the spectrum. One of the more visible examples of this are those who are voting Kerry not to put him into office but because they hate Bush -- these folks are putting a lot of money into advertising to: "Anyone but Bush" is a common phrase.
Just food for thought. Maybe we'll start getting a little better representation in 20 or 30 years.
In the end, the benefit of the Internet is the ease of putting up webpages. If you're starting a news station, it's hard to get national syndication without a large amount of money. On the Internet, you publish a webpage and get a little interest.
There is a lot of censorship and hardship gaining access to the TV medium. The Internet, as a medium, is open to everyone.
I think the "moral of the story" might be to work for smaller companies. Many people seem to think that big business is the *only* business and that's just not true.
When companies get that big, managers are often hired soley on their management experience and not on anything else. If you have a manager who doesn't understand the finer points of what you do, I think you have a company with too much fat.
People need to be trusted enough to do a good job on their own without being micromanaged. And if they're not, they need to be delt with or canned.
In my book, a manager should be a well paid person who not only can (and sometimes does) do the job of those under him (to a degree anyway), but has management skills as well. I think lots of people are going to disagree with me on this one and I may very well be wrong. However, I've found stark contrast to my quality of work at the small company I'm working for under both flexible management (more self-management) and management from someone coming straight from a Forbes top 50.
These high standards are why small businesses are leaner and more efficient than the corporate giants; they're also often why people are more loyal to a small company. If only consumer pressure would go up and government regulation (read: Barriers To Entry; laws giving big corporations teeth), maybe more small companies would be on top.
I often listen to talk radio during the day. It's ritalin for the other half of my consciousness that likes to meander about while I'm doing stuff that doesn't require total concentration.
I generally only listen to WSB out of Atlanta for Neal Boortz (a libertarian) in the morning (through 12 PM CST) and Sean Hannity in the afternoon (3-5 CST).
Linux users:
gxine mms://66.250.188.14/WSB_AM &
After 5:00 I generally listen to our local NPR station to keep things balanced and interesting.:)
If it's news you're into, these few links are more than I can possibly read during the day: http://news.google.com/ http://slashdot.org http://fark.com http://linuxgames.com/ http:// boortz.com/nuze/index.html
You make a very good point and illustration, though I'm not sure my entire question has been answered. I'm referring to this part:
"Is math a highly important part of excelling in greater understanding?"
And this is my dillema. Through programming and understanding object relationships, learning how to break down code into bits in my mind, etc., I have a greater understanding of life in general. I'm able to use the analytical, logical and abstract skills from programming and apply them to life in general. In politics or logic or science or anything I can apply the same skills to break down problems and observations into bits and play with them in my head. I completely understand what you're describing because I do it myself every day.
However, I hate math.;) Maybe we're not talking about the same thing when we say "math", but I have never had much skill in holding numbers in my head and transforming equations into other forms for proofs, etc. When I look at an equation I'm not throwing around transformations in my head that may get me to my goal; answers don't come to me like they do when I'm programming. I couldn't even begin to put it into words, I can't put my finger on the problem myself. I just know that even through calculus (though I did well enough) the concepts never just came to me like they do while programming.
So, when my friend advises me to learn more math, I wonder if math is the only way to it or if many math fanatics are mistaken and it's not math that I need to explore, but the mere concepts of logical, abstract and relational thinking.
Depending on your environment, often it helps to only use vi for administration.
Let me throw this at you folks: the reason most people use tools like webmin is to get to the heart of configuration and skip the cruft and confusing parts of configs, correct? To pull all the important parts together in one organized place.
I think that for many ground-up distros, vi *is* the best tool. I hope I don't read like a zealot here; this is my honest observation.
To explain what I'm getting at, compare Gentoo to Red Hat. In my experience with Red Hat, I always felt like I didn't know *exactly* what was going on. Any time I made a change without a GUI I felt like I missed a script or config file somewhere along the way. When I was running Red Hat, I used Webmin for just this reason.
However, with Gentoo, the system is a little cleaner and you're also forced to get nitty-gritty and learn things in the process. There is more to learn, but the boundaries are more clearly defined. When you want to configure something, there isn't any hesitation about whether webmin is up to date or problems when webmin doesn't support a directive you want to tweak. You already know where the directive is and you go right to it. This also makes troubleshooting easier.
This whole thing also brings up the debate between GUI and CLI. GUIs have to be programmed (in addition to the underlying application) and maintained, meaning they're generally not all-encompassing (lacking support for some directives) and occasionally not up to date. With a CLI editor, you have access to the full power of a configuration file. It's easy for a project to add a key=value configuration directive to a new version and you have immediate access.
I think it will work differently for different people. Some people today prefer a more abstract but complex environment (Windows) and some people prefer a more clean-cut and hands-on environment (Linux). As Linux matures, what some would call needless complexity and abstraction will be added and the Windows-type administrators who move to Linux will just use the abstracted GUIs.
I think the whole Linux/Windows debate is quite applicable to the CLI/GUI debate.
You seem to have a grasp on the benefits of math in life; maybe I could pick your brain some? The particular discussion over lunch arose out of my curiosity at the "true geeks." Maybe I can explain.
A 'true' geek to me is someone who takes an interest in something just to know about it. Most of the true geeks I know also happen to be very intelligent and generally have more than one specialty, for instance computer science and some areas of physics (acoustics, electronics). I regard many of these people as geniuses.
However, I don't see myself as a geek in the genius sense. I love to know for the sake of knowing, but I see myself as more of a "jack of all trades, master of none" rather than any remote kind of genius.
I expressed this over lunch in idle conversation and my friend suggested that I expand my knowledge of math. He had noted that the "genius" geeks he is familiar with are all skilled in math. Furthermore, he related that for him personally, math has expanded his perception of, for lack of a better term, existance. The image that I got was that math can better your mental understanding and improve your grasp of the entire game of life, altering your intelligence in a way only possible with math (or at least he failed to give another take).
Any feedback on this would be greatly beneficial, I'm at a loss to connect dots from math to higher understanding and knowledge.
I had lunch with a gentleman this afternoon who is of the opinion that math is the gateway to higher understanding of things throughout one's entire life. I am curious to what other people think in this aspect.
This is a good example, I think, of where math can help real world problems. However, the idea of isolating core issues and pitting the two against one another does not require an understanding of mathematical principles. From my point of view, many mathematical concepts and relationships work well in the abstract world as well as that on paper.
Is the whole "Math is Life" concept a bunch of fluff that serves itself or can it really be applied in a *real* sense often? Is math a highly important part of excelling in greater understanding?
Regardless you make a very good point and that is that we won't have hardware support and photoshop and good games, etc., until we get the other crap that comes with it. That said, we're not only going to get good software we want (signal), but a lot of bad software we don't (noise) as well as ads and other junk (noise).
But I didn't say that I'd prefer to stay the way we were, I said I'm all for Linux's growth. I'm just dreading the day that I have to start dealing with this stuff in the Linux environment. A good comparison, I think, is going from the early days of the Internet to now. Sure, we have lots more content and the ability to order plane tickets, but then we have spam, pop-ups, etc.
Hopefully the existing Linux communities (like Gentoo, which I use) will keep things together.
"The linux landscape is changing, its going mainstream, and there are a lot linux users who don't like that. I must humbly suggest to such people that you cannot do anything about it, and you should therefore either accept the reality or start moving to another system where you can feel more "l33t"."
You call others narrowminded but I don't think you yourself understand the reasons people are afraid of the side-effects of Linux growth. Maybe you're just hearing a vocal minority.
I personally cannot stand to use Windows these days, for many reasons... but one of the biggest is the environment. Under Linux searching for help, files or other content is particularly easy: the signal to noise ratio is quite good. Under Windows, it's "Sign up to download, we sell your email, now you can wait in a queue to get your file, but here are some ads to keep you busy". Pop-ups, spam, misdirection, just junk in general.
The bottom line for this reasoning is that Linux it's just easier to find what you want (or at least a definitive 'It doesn't exit') in a shorter time. When the community starts growing, we'll see lots of wannabe applications attempting to sell themselves to you, registration keys and website registrations, hassles downloading files or getting help, etc. This is a Bad Thing.
That all said, I'm in favor of Linux's growth and I think most people are. There aren't many true Linux users who do it just to be "leet" and I think its pretty silly to suggest that. Most Linux hobbiests do it because they are in control, in one way or another -- application choices, configurations, power, etc.
Slapping a dogma on someone and calling them an idiot isn't helping anyone. I think the Linux community is ready to expand and wants to expand, it's just afraid of how severe the consequences might be when the 'unwashed masses' start using this stuff.
Someone on the right will say the exact same thing.
"Left is not based in fact" "Fox news is only slightly right" Etc.
You will not notice the negatives about your own side unless you're on the other side of the fence or you're really good at introspection. The vast majority of people aren't and often people who think they are are victims of elitism.
There are many, many people on the right who are very intelligent and think things through quite well. The problem, in the end, is the assumptions made on both sides and the common experience where you only hear the idiots from an idealogy.
I seriously suggest you rethink your political outlook if you ever want to have a valid debate.
You make sense, but I think your comparison fails:
"the fact that corporations can trounce your liberties as much as the government can." 1) Corporations don't back up their threats with guns, as the government does. They can attempt to stomp on your 'rights' on the scale that the government can, but they are not able to force you to do anything.
"Government concentrations of power were pretty closely monitored (until 9/11" 2) Not really. Look back to McCarthy, et. al. and the big name court cases. It takes longer than just a few years for the courts to come into play. I would also add to this that you are focused on only a portion of government -> individual regulation, however there is much more that is often monitored much less than the example you gave.
3) You are absolutely right about corporations being a threat to capitalism. Competition is perfect in theory, but corporations exploit the apathy of the consumer to get around this theory. Competition comes from insistance on quality. And the majority of consumers aren't in the fighting mindset yet. Until the majority care about quality, we'll have to deal with this. I think it's a mistake for the loud minority to run consumer protection through the government -- most of it ends up blunt and poorly worded and costs more to enforce. But, I digress....
If nothing else, votes moving to another party will finally force the two major parties to begin taking sides again. It's pretty silly to watch elections boil down to mud-slinging because the only other option is making vague statements on policy -- it seems like some politicians just don't want to take up the issues and instead appear "smarter" or "friendlier" and smear mud on the other guy. This isn't a popularity contest, this is a contest of policy, if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think it pretty much exemplifies how hard Linux gaming is to set up, when you have an entire Wiki engine set up for one FAQ."
Anyone remember spending hours upon hours hacking at DOS configs to get your old games to load just right?
Give things time. Once some of the APIs and components stabilize and mature I think we'll start to see a lot more games for Linux.
Cheers
How many people actually opened this up in Gimp?
:)
How many of you swore that each checkerbox was different and got thoroughly pissed off when you checked the hex value with the dropper and they were the same?
How many of you physically cut and moved one box next to its partner and back again over and over, screaming in mental anguish as one moment they're obviously the same and the next they're two different colors?
Count me in. This illusion pisses me off.
"...European armies are mostly ... cold-war style, prepared to fight a large scale land war against the Russian invasion. USA did not have to pay this 'Russian tax', being separated by an ocean."
:)
Actually the main thrust of our R&D during the cold war was towards defeating the Russians on open ground in large scale battles in Europe. The Apache attack helicopter is a good example; it was intended to fly around and mask behind trees and destroy large numbers of Russian tanks on the open grounds of Eastern Europe. A number of our other vehicles were the same way.
Recall that the US has a handful of military bases in Europe and had great interest in stopping any Russian advance. The US army structure was very much devoted to fighting a cold-war type war.
No beef with your post, just wanted to point that out.
Cheers
The US is planning for the long term. Going crazy with these things is silly, but every time we've scaled back on military in the past, it's bit us in the ass -- both world wars are perfect examples of this where we scaled back on both technological and training developments.
Military funding and support should very with the times, but one thing the US military leaders have learned through being good students of military history is that there will *always* be some nutjob with a gun who wants your cookies. Eventually, maybe sooner than later, someone with a beef against the US is going to finish developing the technology to challenge the US in space.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Cheers
The free market IS the best thing in the world to these guys. He'll sell it to the conservationists for the simple reason that the government owns it and can sell it to anyone it damn well chooses for any price it damn well chooses. The market isn't all about getting the most for your money but about having the freedom to sell to whom you want to for whatever price the two of you see fit.
Cheers
Kerry would get up and dance a Ballmer with a guy in a penguin suit if he were interviewing with Slashdot. He's a politician, they play the colors that you want to see.
My personal opinion is that politicians are *all* snakes, the only reliable option is to keep them in the wild and out of my house. Hence, I will be voting Libertarian this year.
Cheers
If you want to give more power to a large minority and take away from a small majority, then alter the requirements for the vote, but at least let the vote take place. Seems a rather hackish way of solving the problem to me.
Thanks for the reply.
Cheers
My understanding is that democratic senators are preventing a vote from being called to confirm Bush's nominations via filibuster. Unless someone wants to add more, I think this is a pretty clear cut-and-dry case of the democrats getting tired of democracy.
Both sides suck. Vote third party. Like companies, politicians won't change until you take your support elsewhere.
Cheers
This happens to me (under Galeon on Linux - gecko based) when the banner ads come up on the right side of /.
Cheers
Mod parent up, I believe he is correct. If you folks want to look into what I'm talking about, that would probably be the best place to look.
Cheers
I recall watching something on TV with Mr. Doohan talking about a woman that he had met at a Star Trek convention. She apparently was having lots of problems in life, going through depression, had recently been through a divorce (IIRC), etc., and had fixated on Star Trek as a release (not sure in what sense, I saw this a while ago). I believe she had fixated on Mr. Doohan specifically.
Anyway, she met with Mr. Doohan and from what I recall was very emphatic about getting to know him -- I'm unsure if she was trying to treat him as Scotty or as the actor, but regardless the feeling I got from his description was that she was hanging onto the image of him from the show as she didn't have much else to hang on to. Pretty sad.
Mr. Doohan said that he talked with her for a long time and after they parted they kept in touch, seeing each other over a period of time (2 years?). He tried to support her, talk through her problems, tried to help steer her back on the right track, etc.
Then, he says, one day she just disappeared. He didn't hear anything from her for a few years and then suddenly she called him. She had landed a stable job, was working out of her problems and had a better grip on life. She thanked him for what he had done.
Nobody is perfect, I am sure Mr. Doohan has his bad side, but from watching this I got the overall impression that he is a very caring man. How many Hollywood stars would put up with an obsessed fan in the condition she was in?
Seeing him smiling in his wheelchair just pulls on my heart and makes me smile. I sincerely hope the rest of his years are peaceful and rewarding.
Like companies, political parties are never going to change unless you take your business elsewhere.
Want to put a little more bite in your bark? Put all your political activism into threatening (and backing it up) to vote for someone else until politicians start representing you instead of playing the game. They know they can get away with it these days because most of the country is so polarized to one side or the other that they can't see straight -- fighting over which politician sucks the least instead over which politician is the best.
This argument is easily found on both sides throughout the spectrum. One of the more visible examples of this are those who are voting Kerry not to put him into office but because they hate Bush -- these folks are putting a lot of money into advertising to: "Anyone but Bush" is a common phrase.
Just food for thought. Maybe we'll start getting a little better representation in 20 or 30 years.
Cheers
The problem I see with the "Microsoft should support Linux" strategy is that Microsoft is fighting to keep ground instead of gain it.
Adding support to Linux while keeping away from the GPl and from contibuting to Linux as a whole will be tricky as well.
In the end, the benefit of the Internet is the ease of putting up webpages. If you're starting a news station, it's hard to get national syndication without a large amount of money. On the Internet, you publish a webpage and get a little interest.
There is a lot of censorship and hardship gaining access to the TV medium. The Internet, as a medium, is open to everyone.
I think the "moral of the story" might be to work for smaller companies. Many people seem to think that big business is the *only* business and that's just not true.
When companies get that big, managers are often hired soley on their management experience and not on anything else. If you have a manager who doesn't understand the finer points of what you do, I think you have a company with too much fat.
People need to be trusted enough to do a good job on their own without being micromanaged. And if they're not, they need to be delt with or canned.
In my book, a manager should be a well paid person who not only can (and sometimes does) do the job of those under him (to a degree anyway), but has management skills as well. I think lots of people are going to disagree with me on this one and I may very well be wrong. However, I've found stark contrast to my quality of work at the small company I'm working for under both flexible management (more self-management) and management from someone coming straight from a Forbes top 50.
These high standards are why small businesses are leaner and more efficient than the corporate giants; they're also often why people are more loyal to a small company. If only consumer pressure would go up and government regulation (read: Barriers To Entry; laws giving big corporations teeth), maybe more small companies would be on top.
Cheers
I generally only listen to WSB out of Atlanta for Neal Boortz (a libertarian) in the morning (through 12 PM CST) and Sean Hannity in the afternoon (3-5 CST).
Linux users: After 5:00 I generally listen to our local NPR station to keep things balanced and interesting.
If it's news you're into, these few links are more than I can possibly read during the day:
http://news.google.com/
http://slashdot.or
http://fark.com
http://linuxgames.com/
http:/
Other links...
Comics:
http://userfriendly.org/
http://gpf-c
http://reallifecomics.com/
http://pvp
http://ubersoft.net/
IRC quotes:
http://bash.org/?latest
http://qdb.us/?
Cheers
You make a very good point and illustration, though I'm not sure my entire question has been answered. I'm referring to this part:
;) Maybe we're not talking about the same thing when we say "math", but I have never had much skill in holding numbers in my head and transforming equations into other forms for proofs, etc. When I look at an equation I'm not throwing around transformations in my head that may get me to my goal; answers don't come to me like they do when I'm programming. I couldn't even begin to put it into words, I can't put my finger on the problem myself. I just know that even through calculus (though I did well enough) the concepts never just came to me like they do while programming.
"Is math a highly important part of excelling in greater understanding?"
And this is my dillema. Through programming and understanding object relationships, learning how to break down code into bits in my mind, etc., I have a greater understanding of life in general. I'm able to use the analytical, logical and abstract skills from programming and apply them to life in general. In politics or logic or science or anything I can apply the same skills to break down problems and observations into bits and play with them in my head. I completely understand what you're describing because I do it myself every day.
However, I hate math.
So, when my friend advises me to learn more math, I wonder if math is the only way to it or if many math fanatics are mistaken and it's not math that I need to explore, but the mere concepts of logical, abstract and relational thinking.
Any feedback?
Depending on your environment, often it helps to only use vi for administration.
Let me throw this at you folks: the reason most people use tools like webmin is to get to the heart of configuration and skip the cruft and confusing parts of configs, correct? To pull all the important parts together in one organized place.
I think that for many ground-up distros, vi *is* the best tool. I hope I don't read like a zealot here; this is my honest observation.
To explain what I'm getting at, compare Gentoo to Red Hat. In my experience with Red Hat, I always felt like I didn't know *exactly* what was going on. Any time I made a change without a GUI I felt like I missed a script or config file somewhere along the way. When I was running Red Hat, I used Webmin for just this reason.
However, with Gentoo, the system is a little cleaner and you're also forced to get nitty-gritty and learn things in the process. There is more to learn, but the boundaries are more clearly defined. When you want to configure something, there isn't any hesitation about whether webmin is up to date or problems when webmin doesn't support a directive you want to tweak. You already know where the directive is and you go right to it. This also makes troubleshooting easier.
This whole thing also brings up the debate between GUI and CLI. GUIs have to be programmed (in addition to the underlying application) and maintained, meaning they're generally not all-encompassing (lacking support for some directives) and occasionally not up to date. With a CLI editor, you have access to the full power of a configuration file. It's easy for a project to add a key=value configuration directive to a new version and you have immediate access.
I think it will work differently for different people. Some people today prefer a more abstract but complex environment (Windows) and some people prefer a more clean-cut and hands-on environment (Linux). As Linux matures, what some would call needless complexity and abstraction will be added and the Windows-type administrators who move to Linux will just use the abstracted GUIs.
I think the whole Linux/Windows debate is quite applicable to the CLI/GUI debate.
Cheers
You seem to have a grasp on the benefits of math in life; maybe I could pick your brain some? The particular discussion over lunch arose out of my curiosity at the "true geeks." Maybe I can explain.
A 'true' geek to me is someone who takes an interest in something just to know about it. Most of the true geeks I know also happen to be very intelligent and generally have more than one specialty, for instance computer science and some areas of physics (acoustics, electronics). I regard many of these people as geniuses.
However, I don't see myself as a geek in the genius sense. I love to know for the sake of knowing, but I see myself as more of a "jack of all trades, master of none" rather than any remote kind of genius.
I expressed this over lunch in idle conversation and my friend suggested that I expand my knowledge of math. He had noted that the "genius" geeks he is familiar with are all skilled in math. Furthermore, he related that for him personally, math has expanded his perception of, for lack of a better term, existance. The image that I got was that math can better your mental understanding and improve your grasp of the entire game of life, altering your intelligence in a way only possible with math (or at least he failed to give another take).
Any feedback on this would be greatly beneficial, I'm at a loss to connect dots from math to higher understanding and knowledge.
Thanks!
I had lunch with a gentleman this afternoon who is of the opinion that math is the gateway to higher understanding of things throughout one's entire life. I am curious to what other people think in this aspect.
This is a good example, I think, of where math can help real world problems. However, the idea of isolating core issues and pitting the two against one another does not require an understanding of mathematical principles. From my point of view, many mathematical concepts and relationships work well in the abstract world as well as that on paper.
Is the whole "Math is Life" concept a bunch of fluff that serves itself or can it really be applied in a *real* sense often? Is math a highly important part of excelling in greater understanding?
Cheers
Regardless you make a very good point and that is that we won't have hardware support and photoshop and good games, etc., until we get the other crap that comes with it. That said, we're not only going to get good software we want (signal), but a lot of bad software we don't (noise) as well as ads and other junk (noise).
But I didn't say that I'd prefer to stay the way we were, I said I'm all for Linux's growth. I'm just dreading the day that I have to start dealing with this stuff in the Linux environment. A good comparison, I think, is going from the early days of the Internet to now. Sure, we have lots more content and the ability to order plane tickets, but then we have spam, pop-ups, etc.
Hopefully the existing Linux communities (like Gentoo, which I use) will keep things together.
Cheers
"The linux landscape is changing, its going mainstream, and there are a lot linux users who don't like that. I must humbly suggest to such people that you cannot do anything about it, and you should therefore either accept the reality or start moving to another system where you can feel more "l33t"."
You call others narrowminded but I don't think you yourself understand the reasons people are afraid of the side-effects of Linux growth. Maybe you're just hearing a vocal minority.
I personally cannot stand to use Windows these days, for many reasons... but one of the biggest is the environment. Under Linux searching for help, files or other content is particularly easy: the signal to noise ratio is quite good. Under Windows, it's "Sign up to download, we sell your email, now you can wait in a queue to get your file, but here are some ads to keep you busy". Pop-ups, spam, misdirection, just junk in general.
The bottom line for this reasoning is that Linux it's just easier to find what you want (or at least a definitive 'It doesn't exit') in a shorter time. When the community starts growing, we'll see lots of wannabe applications attempting to sell themselves to you, registration keys and website registrations, hassles downloading files or getting help, etc. This is a Bad Thing.
That all said, I'm in favor of Linux's growth and I think most people are. There aren't many true Linux users who do it just to be "leet" and I think its pretty silly to suggest that. Most Linux hobbiests do it because they are in control, in one way or another -- application choices, configurations, power, etc.
Slapping a dogma on someone and calling them an idiot isn't helping anyone. I think the Linux community is ready to expand and wants to expand, it's just afraid of how severe the consequences might be when the 'unwashed masses' start using this stuff.
Cheers
Someone on the right will say the exact same thing.
"Left is not based in fact"
"Fox news is only slightly right"
Etc.
You will not notice the negatives about your own side unless you're on the other side of the fence or you're really good at introspection. The vast majority of people aren't and often people who think they are are victims of elitism.
There are many, many people on the right who are very intelligent and think things through quite well. The problem, in the end, is the assumptions made on both sides and the common experience where you only hear the idiots from an idealogy.
I seriously suggest you rethink your political outlook if you ever want to have a valid debate.
Cheers
You make sense, but I think your comparison fails:
"the fact that corporations can trounce your liberties as much as the government can."
1) Corporations don't back up their threats with guns, as the government does. They can attempt to stomp on your 'rights' on the scale that the government can, but they are not able to force you to do anything.
"Government concentrations of power were pretty closely monitored (until 9/11"
2) Not really. Look back to McCarthy, et. al. and the big name court cases. It takes longer than just a few years for the courts to come into play. I would also add to this that you are focused on only a portion of government -> individual regulation, however there is much more that is often monitored much less than the example you gave.
3) You are absolutely right about corporations being a threat to capitalism. Competition is perfect in theory, but corporations exploit the apathy of the consumer to get around this theory. Competition comes from insistance on quality. And the majority of consumers aren't in the fighting mindset yet. Until the majority care about quality, we'll have to deal with this. I think it's a mistake for the loud minority to run consumer protection through the government -- most of it ends up blunt and poorly worded and costs more to enforce. But, I digress....
Cheers
If nothing else, votes moving to another party will finally force the two major parties to begin taking sides again. It's pretty silly to watch elections boil down to mud-slinging because the only other option is making vague statements on policy -- it seems like some politicians just don't want to take up the issues and instead appear "smarter" or "friendlier" and smear mud on the other guy. This isn't a popularity contest, this is a contest of policy, if you ask me.
Cheers