"In my experience (from somebody who was a Liberal Arts major before I studied programming); it is far easier for a Liberal Arts major to learn computer programming than it is for a computer programmer to acquire critical thinking skills."
LOL!:o)
Ah , I do like trolls. LIberal arts doesn't involve thinking - ie problem solving - its just memory. A parrot could do it.
"If you want to be challanged, get a job doing something weird that hasn't benefited years of people doing the same thing and improving the process."
Its not about me being challenged - I can do that with my own homebrew projects. What worries me is amateurs getting into coding positions and writing appalling code that probably ends up costing a lot more in the long run that if they'd hired people who had a clue. When Boeing or Airbus wants to build a new plane they don't hire some kid who's good folding paper aircraft, they hire proper engineers. I don't understand why IT should be treated so differently. Just because almost anyone can write a hello world program doesn't mean almost anyone should be allowed to work in programming.
Frankly if you hadn't thought up half of them yourself without being told about them then you don't have much talent as a coder but aside from that, all that bringing out a load of books about them did was give no talent coders a method of lego brick programming that usually gives rise to some half arsed semi working inefficient POS that someone who has a clue ends up having to spend months debugging and sorting out other issues. I know I'm coming across as an arrogant snob but since when did programming stop being a profession and start being a free for all for all liberal arts failures who can type a line of C# and suddenly think they're Turing?
Yes we should unless you want destritue pensioners. It might not matter to a kid like you but it does matter to the people who spent their whole lives paying into them.
"Go troll elsewhere, you laughable failure."
Hmm , ok son, whatever you say. Arguing with a kid is like trying to arge with a monkey - all noise and posturing and hot air but no substance.
When you eventually leave the gilded cage of school/uni and go out into the real world, get a job and sort out a pension scheme and have to take responsibility for your own life rather than have mum and dad as a fallback option, then perhaps you might look back on some of your comments and laugh. But I won't hold my breath.
"So the people who voluntarily accept employment somewhere and then (usually) voluntarily accept the company pension scheme have NO CHOICE about where (a small part!) of their income is invested."
Oh right , so its their fault is it because they took a job to earn money and need a pension when they retire?
"But every citizen of Greece was apparently aware of "
A majority of the citizens of greeks didn't pay all or any of their taxes so spare me the sob story.
"You're an idiot."
Sorry, I think you must be looking in the mirror.
"Or perhaps what you don't want to say is"
I think what you need to say is you're a silly little kid without a clue of how the world really works. Plus you obviously don't have a job or you wouldn't be so dismissive of pension schemes.
"Also, Viol8 is a troll. I recall a funny extended fight with it one afternoon a few years ago, until eventually it came out and admitted it.)"
Care to post a link?
I was not trolling - I have no sympathy for the greeks. They caused their own downfall - no one forced them to join the euro after cooking the books and no one forced them to tax dodge on an epic scale.
The greeks didn't protest when all the money was loaned to them in the first place so they could go on a massive public sector spending binge and buy the fast cars and beachfront villas. Now its somehow the fault of the organisations who loaned it that the greedy tax dodging greeks are in this mess because they didn't understand Economics 101?? On yer bike pal.
"But currently the problems in the other countries devalue the euro, meaning Germany gets to export at great prices."
Which means that greece could also export at great prices if they actually bothered to produce anything that anyone wanted.
"Basically, Germany gets a huge boost for free and pretends it's all due to working hard"
Rubbish - it is due to working hard. Meanwhile the greeks don't bother to pay their taxes then whine abd bitch like little children when finally it all goes t1ts up.
No sympathy. The greeks made their bed , well its time to lie down.
.... when they can even create a web page that formats properly on Firefox?
Anyway , people have been predicting this since credit cards came along. Hasn't happened yet - its just a wet dream of various financial organisations so they can get that small fee everytime we use their device to pay and so they can track us. They don't like cash because in normal day to day life its untraceable.
"By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates."
If you ran your own silicate mine you wouldn't buy in silicates from elsewhere. His point is if you already have the staff and infrastructure and perhaps are even in the IT business its cheaper to do it yourself.
"Take email, look at the costs of using Google mail vs. running a complete, resilient mail system."
By resilient I assume you mean MS Exchange that doesn't fall over every 5 minutes? Simple - use a unix box running sendmail + pop3/imap and point something like Thunderbird at it.
Unfortunately a lot of linux distro coders don't seem to know where the dividing line between wryly amusing and lame is when it comes to naming releases. The novelty of Ubuntus silly release names wore off for me personally around 5 years ago. All I want a OS so please just stick with the release numbers and don't treat me like a 7 year ago girl looking for a new cuddly toy.
"Science rules the universe, not science fiction."
Anyone who thinks that the current view we have of physics is more or less complete with just a couple of things left to fill in here or there is deluded. I would wager a large amount of money that in 1000 years technology based on physics we know nothing about yet will as Arthur C Clarke said - be indistinguishable from magic. And that may well include some method of faster than light travel. And if that physics is possible then its also possible that an intelligent alien race as already developed it.
So no, the possibilities of those scenarious happening are not essentially zero. If there's a highly advanced alien race out there then they're highly probable.
No sane person/coporation who didn't have their own agenda (hello banks) would value a social chit chat and picture website at 100 billion. And only an idiot would believe it and the shares were worth it
.. but the frequency range of birds hearing is even worse than that of humans. You can hear higher frequencies than your average parrot. It was probably just coincidence - the birds whistling happened to be on an audible frequency that also triggered the primitive badly filtered electronics in the TV.
"This is a Sci-Fi writer we are talking about here."
And this is the real world we're discussing.
"in which case the idea of chipping everyone is a brilliant idea"
Is it? Thats your opinion , not one I happen to share.
"well if you can't accept the ways that technology can automate lives then please go back to your slide rule and abacus. After all the first computers were so painfully slow that there's no point in having a computer either is there?"
And computer speeds up maths calculation by a factor of millions allowing you do get more done. How much does getting one to pull your curtains and switch on some music speed things up by and what exactly are you going to do on the sofa in that time saved?
"mean google searching "hospital wrong bloody type" only produces 2.8million hits so it's never likely to happen is it."
Straw man. Nice try, no cigar. Any hospital that didn't check your records first before giving you a transfusion is unlikely to take much notice of an embedded chip. Plus I don't want my privacy completely swept away just on the off chance something unpleasent may happen.
Oh a related matter - do you have curtains or blinds where you live? Yes? Why - do you have something to hide? Get rid of them and let the whole world watch you taking a dump or have sex with your gf. Whats the problem , privacy is overrated , right?
"Halt it and do what? The aging shuttle fleet was ridiculously expensive to maintain"
Any space system is highly expensive to maintain. With that price came flexibility. Name me any other system that could have brought a satellite DOWN from orbit not to mention allowing on the spot repairs.
"Where is the money supposed to come from?"
Oh I dunno, how about some of the billions still being spent in afghanistan. When is the US going to pull out again?
"I don't think people here are that gullible to believe that's Obama's fault given that the plan to kill the shuttle program pre-dated Obama"
So you're saying he didn't have the executive authority to halt that plan? No, sorry, doesn't wash. As far as I'm concerned he's just continued the backwards looking short sighted policies of Bush in this regard.
"If you wan't to blame Obama for something legitimate blame him for pushing NASA to become more dependent on the private space industry"
How many people have the russians put in space since the 1970s compared to NASA? Not many! The shuttle had something like 140 launches and each one could carry up to 7 people. There have been 26 soyuz launches and each capsule takes up to 3.
... error prone and the country as a whole doesn't have the money. This is just posturing more likely to China rather than the West given that the USA no longer has the ability to launch astronauts ( in LEO never mind to the moon. (Nice one Obama).
"The difference between distopian and utopian is only in the application of technology."
Your idea of utopia might not be mine.
"Imagine the benefits of such a technology if there was no crime,"
Does crime include violent uprising against oppressive governments?
"Never again would a wrong blood transfusion be given, if you have an accident the ambulance would know your allergies instantly, not that there'd be as many accidents as disqualified drivers may actually stay disqualified. No need to worry about losing a credit card since the payment could be made based on the chip in you person. "
Thanks, but i'll put up with that in exchange for not being some 24/7 monitored zombie.
"Or how about the Bill Gates system of a house that is smart enough to adjust tastes depending on who is in the room, with art, music, mood lighting, etc."
And what if there are 2 people in the room? Also for those of us who haven't yet degenerated into a lipid filled spheroid who can't move from a sofa its quite possible to do that manually in , oh , 10 seconds?
"The difference between a distopia and a utopia is the existence of bad guys in the story, nothing more."
And the difference between life and death is simply a beating heart, nothing more. Short of genetically engineering the entire human race to weed out "bad" genes (how do you define bad?), there will always be "bad guys".
I suggest you take a break from star trek re-runs and wake up to the real human condition.
Slashdot Mirror
"In my experience (from somebody who was a Liberal Arts major before I studied programming); it is far easier for a Liberal Arts major to learn computer programming than it is for a computer programmer to acquire critical thinking skills."
LOL! :o)
Ah , I do like trolls. LIberal arts doesn't involve thinking - ie problem solving - its just memory. A parrot could do it.
"If you want to be challanged, get a job doing something weird that hasn't benefited years of people doing the same thing and improving the process."
Its not about me being challenged - I can do that with my own homebrew projects. What worries me is amateurs getting into coding positions and writing appalling code that probably ends up costing a lot more in the long run that if they'd hired people who had a clue. When Boeing or Airbus wants to build a new plane they don't hire some kid who's good folding paper aircraft, they hire proper engineers. I don't understand why IT should be treated so differently. Just because almost anyone can write a hello world program doesn't mean almost anyone should be allowed to work in programming.
Frankly if you hadn't thought up half of them yourself without being told about them then you don't have much talent as a coder but aside from that, all that bringing out a load of books about them did was give no talent coders a method of lego brick programming that usually gives rise to some half arsed semi working inefficient POS that someone who has a clue ends up having to spend months debugging and sorting out other issues. I know I'm coming across as an arrogant snob but since when did programming stop being a profession and start being a free for all for all liberal arts failures who can type a line of C# and suddenly think they're Turing?
"we should protect these schemes;"
Yes we should unless you want destritue pensioners. It might not matter to a kid like you but it does matter to the people who spent their whole lives paying into them.
"Go troll elsewhere, you laughable failure."
Hmm , ok son, whatever you say. Arguing with a kid is like trying to arge with a monkey - all noise and posturing and hot air but no substance.
When you eventually leave the gilded cage of school/uni and go out into the real world, get a job and sort out a pension scheme and have to take responsibility for your own life rather than have mum and dad as a fallback option, then perhaps you might look back on some of your comments and laugh. But I won't hold my breath.
"So the people who voluntarily accept employment somewhere and then (usually) voluntarily accept the company pension scheme have NO CHOICE about where (a small part!) of their income is invested."
Oh right , so its their fault is it because they took a job to earn money and need a pension when they retire?
"But every citizen of Greece was apparently aware of "
A majority of the citizens of greeks didn't pay all or any of their taxes so spare me the sob story.
"You're an idiot."
Sorry, I think you must be looking in the mirror.
"Or perhaps what you don't want to say is"
I think what you need to say is you're a silly little kid without a clue of how the world really works. Plus you obviously don't have a job or you wouldn't be so dismissive of pension schemes.
I think your playtimes over sonny.
"Loans are a risk to the lender as much as the borrower."
Are you in a company pension scheme? Do you realise that the in most cases the people in it have NO CHOICE about where their money is invested?
So yourself a favour and dump the left wing student vitriol and grow up.
"Also, Viol8 is a troll. I recall a funny extended fight with it one afternoon a few years ago, until eventually it came out and admitted it.)"
Care to post a link?
I was not trolling - I have no sympathy for the greeks. They caused their own downfall - no one forced them to join the euro after cooking the books and no one forced them to tax dodge on an epic scale.
The greeks didn't protest when all the money was loaned to them in the first place so they could go on a massive public sector spending binge and buy the fast cars and beachfront villas. Now its somehow the fault of the organisations who loaned it that the greedy tax dodging greeks are in this mess because they didn't understand Economics 101?? On yer bike pal.
"But currently the problems in the other countries devalue the euro, meaning Germany gets to export at great prices."
Which means that greece could also export at great prices if they actually bothered to produce anything that anyone wanted.
"Basically, Germany gets a huge boost for free and pretends it's all due to working hard"
Rubbish - it is due to working hard. Meanwhile the greeks don't bother to pay their taxes then whine abd bitch like little children when finally it all goes t1ts up.
No sympathy. The greeks made their bed , well its time to lie down.
.... when they can even create a web page that formats properly on Firefox?
Anyway , people have been predicting this since credit cards came along. Hasn't happened yet - its just a wet dream of various financial organisations so they can get that small fee everytime we use their device to pay and so they can track us. They don't like cash because in normal day to day life its untraceable.
Its a pig to set up but works well when it is. At any rate, any port 25 server program will do.
"By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates."
If you ran your own silicate mine you wouldn't buy in silicates from elsewhere. His point is if you already have the staff and infrastructure and perhaps are even in the IT business its cheaper to do it yourself.
"Take email, look at the costs of using Google mail vs. running a complete, resilient mail system."
By resilient I assume you mean MS Exchange that doesn't fall over every 5 minutes? Simple - use a unix box running sendmail + pop3/imap and point something like Thunderbird at it.
Unfortunately a lot of linux distro coders don't seem to know where the dividing line between wryly amusing and lame is when it comes to naming releases. The novelty of Ubuntus silly release names wore off for me personally around 5 years ago. All I want a OS so please just stick with the release numbers and don't treat me like a 7 year ago girl looking for a new cuddly toy.
"Science rules the universe, not science fiction."
Anyone who thinks that the current view we have of physics is more or less complete with just a couple of things left to fill in here or there is deluded. I would wager a large amount of money that in 1000 years technology based on physics we know nothing about yet will as Arthur C Clarke said - be indistinguishable from magic. And that may well include some method of faster than light travel. And if that physics is possible then its also possible that an intelligent alien race as already developed it.
So no, the possibilities of those scenarious happening are not essentially zero. If there's a highly advanced alien race out there then they're highly probable.
As one commentator said - "muppet bait".
No sane person/coporation who didn't have their own agenda (hello banks) would value a social chit chat and picture website at 100 billion. And only an idiot would believe it and the shares were worth it
.. but the frequency range of birds hearing is even worse than that of humans. You can hear higher frequencies than your average parrot. It was probably just coincidence - the birds whistling happened to be on an audible frequency that also triggered the primitive badly filtered electronics in the TV.
... that those tribesmen 2000 years ago would have been jewish , right? So where does the christian bashing come into it?
"If you want to know why readership has declined significantly, here is an example."
Yeah right, because most of /. 's readership are churchgoing evangelists.
Not.
Get over yourself.
"This is a Sci-Fi writer we are talking about here."
And this is the real world we're discussing.
"in which case the idea of chipping everyone is a brilliant idea"
Is it? Thats your opinion , not one I happen to share.
"well if you can't accept the ways that technology can automate lives then please go back to your slide rule and abacus. After all the first computers were so painfully slow that there's no point in having a computer either is there?"
And computer speeds up maths calculation by a factor of millions allowing you do get more done. How much does getting one to pull your curtains and switch on some music speed things up by and what exactly are you going to do on the sofa in that time saved?
"mean google searching "hospital wrong bloody type" only produces 2.8million hits so it's never likely to happen is it."
Straw man. Nice try, no cigar. Any hospital that didn't check your records first before giving you a transfusion is unlikely to take much notice of an embedded chip. Plus I don't want my privacy completely swept away just on the off chance something unpleasent may happen.
Oh a related matter - do you have curtains or blinds where you live? Yes? Why - do you have something to hide? Get rid of them and let the whole world watch you taking a dump or have sex with your gf. Whats the problem , privacy is overrated , right?
"Halt it and do what? The aging shuttle fleet was ridiculously expensive to maintain"
Any space system is highly expensive to maintain. With that price came flexibility. Name me any other system that could have brought a satellite DOWN from orbit not to mention allowing on the spot repairs.
"Where is the money supposed to come from?"
Oh I dunno, how about some of the billions still being spent in afghanistan. When is the US going to pull out again?
"I don't think people here are that gullible to believe that's Obama's fault given that the plan to kill the shuttle program pre-dated Obama"
So you're saying he didn't have the executive authority to halt that plan? No, sorry, doesn't wash. As far as I'm concerned he's just continued the backwards looking short sighted policies of Bush in this regard.
"If you wan't to blame Obama for something legitimate blame him for pushing NASA to become more dependent on the private space industry"
That too.
How many people have the russians put in space since the 1970s compared to NASA? Not many! The shuttle had something like 140 launches and each one could carry up to 7 people. There have been 26 soyuz launches and each capsule takes up to 3.
"Obama? What's he got to do with it?"
He's in charge - not Bush. It was his call.
"Oh, you're trolling. Never mind. Go crawl back under your bridge."
Ah yes, the standand slashdot "if I don't agree with you you must be a troll" approach to discussion.
Sorry , I'd love to go back under the bridge but it looks like you're already there.
... error prone and the country as a whole doesn't have the money. This is just posturing more likely to China rather than the West given that the USA no longer has the ability to launch astronauts ( in LEO never mind to the moon. (Nice one Obama).
"The difference between distopian and utopian is only in the application of technology."
Your idea of utopia might not be mine.
"Imagine the benefits of such a technology if there was no crime,"
Does crime include violent uprising against oppressive governments?
"Never again would a wrong blood transfusion be given, if you have an accident the ambulance would know your allergies instantly, not that there'd be as many accidents as disqualified drivers may actually stay disqualified. No need to worry about losing a credit card since the payment could be made based on the chip in you person. "
Thanks, but i'll put up with that in exchange for not being some 24/7 monitored zombie.
"Or how about the Bill Gates system of a house that is smart enough to adjust tastes depending on who is in the room, with art, music, mood lighting, etc."
And what if there are 2 people in the room? Also for those of us who haven't yet degenerated into a lipid filled spheroid who can't move from a sofa its quite possible to do that manually in , oh , 10 seconds?
"The difference between a distopia and a utopia is the existence of bad guys in the story, nothing more."
And the difference between life and death is simply a beating heart, nothing more. Short of genetically engineering the entire human race to weed out "bad" genes (how do you define bad?), there will always be "bad guys".
I suggest you take a break from star trek re-runs and wake up to the real human condition.