I thought that seemed curious too. Also, why was this 'daring'? I'm not being a troll and I didn't read TFA, but it seems inevitable that given the tools, someone would've made a paint program.
It also weeds out the elderly and other minorities. The voter ID laws are DESIGNED to weed out Obama's constituents. They laws are all in republican controlled states! Also, despite republicans' best efforts, they were unable to find a single case of an illegal immigrant trying to vote.
The boredom and tedium you feel during sitting meditation is exactly the problem that sitting meditation is meant to solve-- that is, stopping the mental unrest that makes you constantly want to do things. So you probably *should* be doing sitting meditation. That said, yes it's incredibly frustrating, but supposedly after some time your concentration is developed and it becomes a pleasurable activity. Also I don't know the first thing about Tai Chi (except that you look silly when you do it) so you might be totally correct.
Yes, programming can mean the capability to write a program that does something, but it can also refer to the craft, by which I mean that the programmer has applied lessons learned from the past so that the program is supportable, maintainable, other developers can read it, errors are handled well, significant knowledge of things like databases so you can interact with them, the business knowledge of the company you work for, etc. I think you can excel in the first, but be terrible in the second, and vice-versa. But i'm assuming the article is talking about the former. As for the OP, I'm not sure where he works, but 'lowest of the low' is a bit of a harsh assessment when you consider the second meaning of 'programmer.'
Killing Americans that have clearly called for the destruction of the US and have means to carry it out are fair-game
It's much worse than you think. He's actually killing americans who *might* have called for the destruction of the U.S and may not necessarily have the means of carrying it out. And not only these, but those who happen to be standing nearby at the time. More specifically, a signature drone strike is determined by 'patterns of behavior', where military-aged males are behaving in a way that might be deemed suspicious as viewed from a drone's camera. They don't even know their names. In one case, they killed a 16 year old muslim kid from Colorado.
... the answers to the dumbest questions are sometimes the most interesting:) I understand that the Higgs is responsible for giving mass to all the other particles, then it must be *everywhere*. Why is it so difficult to detect? Why does it take such a staggeringly powerful supercollider to find what ought to be as common as the electron or proton?
Also, I can't help but to visualize particles as something like billiard balls while I'm aware they're only mathematical abstractions from our point of view and that experiments like the double-slit experiment refute the billiard-ball model... is there a way to visualize the Higgs to make the answer to my previous question easier to understand?
You can choose not to drive, but for a very large number of people, it's not really a choice. If you live in New York, you don't need a car, but if you live in Des Moines, Iowa, where I grew up, then you're not going to get very far in life without one. So I don't think this is disingenuous at all.
And what you call a government-mandated fee, others call spreading risk. It's the cost of living in a society where people can feel secure against illness, just as our military gives us security against invasions .
Thanks, I understand what you mean and it makes sense. This was a different sort of book than I usually review here, so I wasn't sure how to approach it, especially since it's hard to easily summarize what exactly the author's intentions are. Thanks again for the constructive criticism.
Reviewer here.. you say 'It's supposed to tell me whether I want to read the book, not provide the Coles notes version.' So, how should I know whether you want to read the book? I'd prefer to tell you what it's about and you're free to decide whether it's something you'd be interested in. I did find it interesting, but I really don't know the scope of the potential audience for such a book.
As for your critique of design patterns in general, you're spot-on, but nothing new. The same critiques have been made repeatedly for at least 10 years and yet people continue to find a few patterns catalogues useful. I mean, they're basically just common ways of structuring code, so how could that not be useful? Though, as you say, just don't use them as goals to be achieved in order to have cooler-looking class diagrams.
When he says 'interfere', he means 'stop it from happening.' Please stop thinking in absolutes. Funding science as a security to our country's future has often been a good thing. Problem is, it doesn't pay off right away.
Your un-nuanced reading of the 10th amendment is interesting, but note that this money was given to them BY WASHINGTON as part of the stimulus package. That said, the feds can't complain if they didn't attach conditions to the money in the first place. And they won't, because they don't care and they don't have a reason to care.
There are elements of the defense industry in every state and they donate to nearly everyone in congress. For a few thousand in campaign donations to the right congressmen, they can get billions in contracts like this. That's why unless there's a significant public outcry, this kind of stuff passes all the time. OpenSecrets.org is an excellent resource for finding out what industries are contributing to your senators and congressmen. Internet sources like ThinkProgress and The Young Turks report on these sorts of things regularly.
You must have lost the TCP packet from the review that contained the following text:
The author, Ross Jackson, identifies who and what is responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and many other problems in society. Most prominent are a seriously-flawed "neo-liberal economic philosophy" and the political-elite class which sponsors that philosophy for self-interested reasons at the expense of the rest of us.
By 'political-elite class', I'm guessing he's referring to politicians/officials in the Obama/Bush administrations and congress that allowed what happened to happen. I don't think there's any mistake on the part of the left or the occupy movement about the gov't's complicity in all this, and the author is certainly aware.
Regardless of the question you're asking, more gatekeepers and middlemen are not the answer. That applies to governments as well as corporations.
This book might help you think more deeply about this statement.
They had their 'points' clearly outlined in their 'Declaration of the Occupation of NYC', which they submitted to the city of NY at the start of the protests. Aside from ignorance, the reason these points went unreported was because they challenge power (i.e. money), and for many people in the MSM, it is not convenient or even permissible in many cases to challenge power. The Tea Party, on the other hand, was in direct support of power (the answer to debt is austerity, the result of austerity is the rich get richer) and so their idiotic points were repeated far and wide.
That said, as with all movements, when it became popular you had anarchists, communists and just about every left-wing (and some other) special interest group under the sun involved confusing matters. The same thing happened to the tea party when racists, gun fanatics, birthers, tenthers and morans with misspelled signs used the tea party as their platform, because that's where they could get on TV.
Beyond that, revolutions are dangerous things.
Occupy was not a 'revolution.' The 'core' occupiers and the movement in large never suggested taking down the gov't. But what they did was enormously successful in that they brought unprecedented attention to the corruptive influence of Wall Street on gov't. In a democracy the best you can do is get people talking about facts, and hope the raised level of consciousness will ultlimately give politicians the courage to do the right things.
As for the Atlantic, they're as good a magazine as you're capable of finding nowadays, which isn't saying a whole lot, but they frequently have interesting features with an attempt at being two-sided.
As for Stratfor, an executive at Goldman Sachs gave them $4mil in 2011. They've also received an unknown (to me) amount of money from Dow Chemical. No one's giving them this much money simply because they enjoy the newsletters. I'm not sure you can call a 'joke' a company that receives this kind of support from industry.
I think it's more nuanced than 'capitalism is good or bad'. It's done tremendous good for poor parts of the world, generally speaking, but as we've seen in recent investigations of Foxconn, for example, it needs some regulation so people aren't getting crippled by the chemicals they're told to use on the job, or trapped in mines underground, etc.
I think all the GP is saying is that the 'machine' of capitalism can't be trusted to operate on its own. When we give the machine more freedom, people tend to suffer on a mass scale, all for the benefit of short-term gains to relatively few people. I don't believe there's a simple solution, but society needs to respect where capitalism fails people in the system and regulate it as needed.
The best examples are when the profit motive is combined with health care, education or prisons, so when human welfare is supposed to be the 'product,' things often get systematically contorted so that the desired effects are not realized. Look at the private vs. public effectiveness in any of these industries and you'll see what I mean.
It wouldn't shock me to find out that a person using anonymous proxies, VPNs, encryption, blah blah, is up to no good, but that's not the real issue here. Why are they jumping to the conclusion that these nerds are terrorists?
A terrorist is someone who performs indiscriminate mass violence to make populations afraid, for political reasons. A hacker is NOT a terrorist. Why do they call them terrorists? So they can treat them as enemy combatants, hold them indefinitely in custody (or kill them) without a trial. Same thing with that dotcom/megaupload guy. They destroyed his business without even going through the courts. This is literally part of a suprisingly successful movement to bypass due process when dealing with anyone that threatens big money. We should really be concerned by the gov'ts use of this word.
I agree. It also says a lot that liberal economists like Paul Krugman support the 'sweatshops.' It brings millions of dollars to impoverished local economies and will slowly improve the standard of living for everyone there. On the other hand, the turnover at Foxconn is ridiculous. I can't find a precise number, but it's somewhere between 5% and 40% monthly. With something like 400,000 workers, that's at least 20,000 a month! This tells me two things: 1) it's not necessarily slave labor if they can leave at will. 2) Foxconn might eventually find it more profitable to improve standards to retain their labor.
That's one of the major criticisms I've heard, that it's too episodic. I've also noticed he uses 'ex deus machina' too often: there's the big battle in Two Towers (Minas Tirith?) that goes on forever, but when everything looks hopeless, the Ents storm in and save the day. That happened again in the third book with the spirits that Aragorn (if I remember correctly) summons. You can probably find more examples.
That said, I think they're great books and probably the best feat of world-building in the history of fantasy writing, afaik. They're incredibly rich and detailed in this regard, and that, in my mind, is what makes them fun to read.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that seemed curious too. Also, why was this 'daring'? I'm not being a troll and I didn't read TFA, but it seems inevitable that given the tools, someone would've made a paint program.
It also weeds out the elderly and other minorities. The voter ID laws are DESIGNED to weed out Obama's constituents. They laws are all in republican controlled states! Also, despite republicans' best efforts, they were unable to find a single case of an illegal immigrant trying to vote.
The boredom and tedium you feel during sitting meditation is exactly the problem that sitting meditation is meant to solve-- that is, stopping the mental unrest that makes you constantly want to do things. So you probably *should* be doing sitting meditation. That said, yes it's incredibly frustrating, but supposedly after some time your concentration is developed and it becomes a pleasurable activity. Also I don't know the first thing about Tai Chi (except that you look silly when you do it) so you might be totally correct.
Yes, programming can mean the capability to write a program that does something, but it can also refer to the craft, by which I mean that the programmer has applied lessons learned from the past so that the program is supportable, maintainable, other developers can read it, errors are handled well, significant knowledge of things like databases so you can interact with them, the business knowledge of the company you work for, etc. I think you can excel in the first, but be terrible in the second, and vice-versa. But i'm assuming the article is talking about the former. As for the OP, I'm not sure where he works, but 'lowest of the low' is a bit of a harsh assessment when you consider the second meaning of 'programmer.'
It's much worse than you think. He's actually killing americans who *might* have called for the destruction of the U.S and may not necessarily have the means of carrying it out. And not only these, but those who happen to be standing nearby at the time. More specifically, a signature drone strike is determined by 'patterns of behavior', where military-aged males are behaving in a way that might be deemed suspicious as viewed from a drone's camera. They don't even know their names. In one case, they killed a 16 year old muslim kid from Colorado.
... the answers to the dumbest questions are sometimes the most interesting :) I understand that the Higgs is responsible for giving mass to all the other particles, then it must be *everywhere*. Why is it so difficult to detect? Why does it take such a staggeringly powerful supercollider to find what ought to be as common as the electron or proton?
Also, I can't help but to visualize particles as something like billiard balls while I'm aware they're only mathematical abstractions from our point of view and that experiments like the double-slit experiment refute the billiard-ball model... is there a way to visualize the Higgs to make the answer to my previous question easier to understand?
I agree Roberts must have some ulterior motive, but this seems dubious. Link to better explanation?
You can choose not to drive, but for a very large number of people, it's not really a choice. If you live in New York, you don't need a car, but if you live in Des Moines, Iowa, where I grew up, then you're not going to get very far in life without one. So I don't think this is disingenuous at all.
And what you call a government-mandated fee, others call spreading risk. It's the cost of living in a society where people can feel secure against illness, just as our military gives us security against invasions .
what part of 'pretty much' don't you understand?
Except for the ones with preexisting conditions who now have the opportunity to live long and fruitful lives?
You'll be subsidized if you can't afford it. Otherwise, it's pretty much like car insurance, so was the game already over decades ago?
Thanks, I understand what you mean and it makes sense. This was a different sort of book than I usually review here, so I wasn't sure how to approach it, especially since it's hard to easily summarize what exactly the author's intentions are. Thanks again for the constructive criticism.
Reviewer here.. you say 'It's supposed to tell me whether I want to read the book, not provide the Coles notes version.' So, how should I know whether you want to read the book? I'd prefer to tell you what it's about and you're free to decide whether it's something you'd be interested in. I did find it interesting, but I really don't know the scope of the potential audience for such a book.
As for your critique of design patterns in general, you're spot-on, but nothing new. The same critiques have been made repeatedly for at least 10 years and yet people continue to find a few patterns catalogues useful. I mean, they're basically just common ways of structuring code, so how could that not be useful? Though, as you say, just don't use them as goals to be achieved in order to have cooler-looking class diagrams.
When he says 'interfere', he means 'stop it from happening.' Please stop thinking in absolutes. Funding science as a security to our country's future has often been a good thing. Problem is, it doesn't pay off right away.
I think that's the FEC's responsibility, and they tend not to be touchy at all.
He's the mayor of a "small New Jersey hamlet" whose closest advisor seems to be his 22 year old son. I doubt party affiliation means much of anything.
Your un-nuanced reading of the 10th amendment is interesting, but note that this money was given to them BY WASHINGTON as part of the stimulus package. That said, the feds can't complain if they didn't attach conditions to the money in the first place. And they won't, because they don't care and they don't have a reason to care.
There are elements of the defense industry in every state and they donate to nearly everyone in congress. For a few thousand in campaign donations to the right congressmen, they can get billions in contracts like this. That's why unless there's a significant public outcry, this kind of stuff passes all the time. OpenSecrets.org is an excellent resource for finding out what industries are contributing to your senators and congressmen. Internet sources like ThinkProgress and The Young Turks report on these sorts of things regularly.
You must have lost the TCP packet from the review that contained the following text:
The author, Ross Jackson, identifies who and what is responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and many other problems in society. Most prominent are a seriously-flawed "neo-liberal economic philosophy" and the political-elite class which sponsors that philosophy for self-interested reasons at the expense of the rest of us.
By 'political-elite class', I'm guessing he's referring to politicians/officials in the Obama/Bush administrations and congress that allowed what happened to happen. I don't think there's any mistake on the part of the left or the occupy movement about the gov't's complicity in all this, and the author is certainly aware.
Regardless of the question you're asking, more gatekeepers and middlemen are not the answer. That applies to governments as well as corporations.
This book might help you think more deeply about this statement.
They had their 'points' clearly outlined in their 'Declaration of the Occupation of NYC', which they submitted to the city of NY at the start of the protests. Aside from ignorance, the reason these points went unreported was because they challenge power (i.e. money), and for many people in the MSM, it is not convenient or even permissible in many cases to challenge power. The Tea Party, on the other hand, was in direct support of power (the answer to debt is austerity, the result of austerity is the rich get richer) and so their idiotic points were repeated far and wide.
That said, as with all movements, when it became popular you had anarchists, communists and just about every left-wing (and some other) special interest group under the sun involved confusing matters. The same thing happened to the tea party when racists, gun fanatics, birthers, tenthers and morans with misspelled signs used the tea party as their platform, because that's where they could get on TV.
Beyond that, revolutions are dangerous things.
Occupy was not a 'revolution.' The 'core' occupiers and the movement in large never suggested taking down the gov't. But what they did was enormously successful in that they brought unprecedented attention to the corruptive influence of Wall Street on gov't. In a democracy the best you can do is get people talking about facts, and hope the raised level of consciousness will ultlimately give politicians the courage to do the right things.
As for the Atlantic, they're as good a magazine as you're capable of finding nowadays, which isn't saying a whole lot, but they frequently have interesting features with an attempt at being two-sided.
As for Stratfor, an executive at Goldman Sachs gave them $4mil in 2011. They've also received an unknown (to me) amount of money from Dow Chemical. No one's giving them this much money simply because they enjoy the newsletters. I'm not sure you can call a 'joke' a company that receives this kind of support from industry.
I think it's more nuanced than 'capitalism is good or bad'. It's done tremendous good for poor parts of the world, generally speaking, but as we've seen in recent investigations of Foxconn, for example, it needs some regulation so people aren't getting crippled by the chemicals they're told to use on the job, or trapped in mines underground, etc.
I think all the GP is saying is that the 'machine' of capitalism can't be trusted to operate on its own. When we give the machine more freedom, people tend to suffer on a mass scale, all for the benefit of short-term gains to relatively few people. I don't believe there's a simple solution, but society needs to respect where capitalism fails people in the system and regulate it as needed.
The best examples are when the profit motive is combined with health care, education or prisons, so when human welfare is supposed to be the 'product,' things often get systematically contorted so that the desired effects are not realized. Look at the private vs. public effectiveness in any of these industries and you'll see what I mean.
It wouldn't shock me to find out that a person using anonymous proxies, VPNs, encryption, blah blah, is up to no good, but that's not the real issue here. Why are they jumping to the conclusion that these nerds are terrorists?
A terrorist is someone who performs indiscriminate mass violence to make populations afraid, for political reasons. A hacker is NOT a terrorist. Why do they call them terrorists? So they can treat them as enemy combatants, hold them indefinitely in custody (or kill them) without a trial. Same thing with that dotcom/megaupload guy. They destroyed his business without even going through the courts. This is literally part of a suprisingly successful movement to bypass due process when dealing with anyone that threatens big money. We should really be concerned by the gov'ts use of this word.
I agree. It also says a lot that liberal economists like Paul Krugman support the 'sweatshops.' It brings millions of dollars to impoverished local economies and will slowly improve the standard of living for everyone there. On the other hand, the turnover at Foxconn is ridiculous. I can't find a precise number, but it's somewhere between 5% and 40% monthly. With something like 400,000 workers, that's at least 20,000 a month! This tells me two things: 1) it's not necessarily slave labor if they can leave at will. 2) Foxconn might eventually find it more profitable to improve standards to retain their labor.
That's one of the major criticisms I've heard, that it's too episodic. I've also noticed he uses 'ex deus machina' too often: there's the big battle in Two Towers (Minas Tirith?) that goes on forever, but when everything looks hopeless, the Ents storm in and save the day. That happened again in the third book with the spirits that Aragorn (if I remember correctly) summons. You can probably find more examples.
That said, I think they're great books and probably the best feat of world-building in the history of fantasy writing, afaik. They're incredibly rich and detailed in this regard, and that, in my mind, is what makes them fun to read.