Ok, as an American New Yorker (we've had our share of cops slaughtering innocent people too), this article has astonished me. It occurs to me that:
1. He was shot SEVEN TIMES IN THE HEAD -- not even the most pissed off New York City cop would dump that much ammo into a guy. I mean, that's just unbelievable. Seven times! Did they think he was going to leap to his feet and attack? Somebody's been reading too much Clive Barker...
2....And once in the shoulder. So, was that the "warning shot"? Or just a cop who can't shoot straight?
3. And, for what? HE HAD A TAN. So, apparently, in Britain, if you're ethnic, you're as good as dead and the cops will "shoot to kill" suddenly (and hit you seven times in the head). Amazingly, this has made me appreciate the U.S. and especially, the N.Y. government. OUR cops just chew you out, maybe rough you up a little (unless you're Amadou Diallo, but more on that in a minute).
4. About Amadou Diallo: Four (I think) N.Y. detectives fired dozens of rounds in his general direction, shooting him a number of times (but not all in the head). Most of the shots missed wildly. In contrast, in Britain, "missing wildly" means "hit him in the shoulder". So, not only are British cops much bigger homicidal maniacs, but THEY'RE BETTER SHOTS, TOO.
Sigh...
When I finally get around to visiting Europe, I think I'll skip Britain. God forbid they see my tan and light me up.
Ok, I take it back. Thank you for taking the time to sort this out with me, this has been the most interesting and informative conversation I've had on Slashdot in a long, long time.
Again, I didn't say that ARPANET was designed to survive a nuclear attack. I said it was designed to practice, test, and develop technologies that in and of themselves would be useful in developing a network that would survive a nuclear attack. Research in networking technology in what looks like an innocuous place can be applied elsewhere.
And, anyway, why is everyone so bashful about this issue? Am I really to believe that during the cold war, and during REAGAN'S presidency (Mr. Cold War himself), a project like ARPANET had nothing to do with surviving a nuclear war? Give me a break. The whole idea of decentralized, packet-switched networks arose out of a desire to have functioning communications after a nuclear exchange. The whole reason RAND worked on this was that the phone system wasn't up to the task.
It doesn't matter what someone working on the actual project thought his goals were. It doesn't matter what the official story was. And it doesn't matter what a bunch of scientists, decades after the fact, spin their motivations as. It's all just SPIN. You're repeating the "official" version (which, like everything the military says to the public, is cleaned up for consumption).
The guys who signed the checks almost certainly were thinking of military applications. I'll believe their goals were all sweetness and light when I see pigs fly.
Well, I think it's a little more complicated than that. The original RAND think-tanks who dreamed this stuff up WERE trying to figure out how to keep communications up during a nuclear attack. And the original internet, DARPANET (or ARPANET, depending on the time as you've mentioned) was a research network designed to explore these ideas. And the scientists who worked on ARPANET probably weren't thinking mostly about survivability, but rather how neat the ideas they were working with were. But the guys in charge were DEFINITELY thinking about survivability. That's why they kept renewing the funding.
So, the public knows about arpanet, and the public internet, which are NOT designed to survive nukes, but the government almost certainly has its own network (probably part of milnet) that WILL survive any nuclear attack. And the ideas used to build this network came from the ARPANET project, because that was the purpose of ARPANET -- to work out all the details.
It's all surrounded by a dense fog of bullshit at this point, and we'll never know the whole, unvarnished truth. That's my take on it, anyway.
Well, since we're talking about objective reality, there's never been ANY evidence that there's ANYTHING supernatural going on, ANYWHERE. In every single case where a scientist went in to test some weird thing going on, a rational explanation was found and the supernatural was debunked.
So, if we're talking about pure objective reality, belief in the supernatural (this includes religious belief) is irrational and unsupported by observable fact.
If I had to venture a guess as to what form a god might take, IF such a god existed, I'd suggest that perhaps our universe is actually composed of more than four dimensions (x,y,z,time) and we are the four-dimensional cross-section of some larger form. Spiritual things might be higher-dimensional forms that have no intersection with the four dimensions, and are perceived by us outside of the four dimensions, with the experience somehow percolating down to us subconsciously. As far as God goes, then, perhaps he's something that pervades all higher dimensions as a sort of group life form like coral, so that we're all actually a part of him. If we live on after death, perhaps it's as a component that has lost it's four-dimensional cross section.
That makes a lot more sense to me than "a big bearded guy in the sky".
Well, the truth is, I don't believe in Christianity, the bible, hell, or any of that stuff. I think it's all a little silly. I just like the contradiction I mentioned. I think it's rather funny, and shows how many competing hands were involved in the writing, and rewriting, and editing of the bible over the course of the past two thousand years.
I'd convert to buddhism, but I think they're kind of silly too. Who wants detachment? I like being alive. I hope I'm born again an infinite number of times. I think that would be a swell fate.
But I definitely don't believe in Hell, or a God who would threaten me with it to get me to love him. It reminds me of one of Aesop's fables:
The sun and the wind saw a man walking along in a coat and made a bet to see who could make the man take it off.
So the wind blew and blew, and did everything it could to force the man to remove his coat. But the harder the wind blew, the tighter he wrapped his coat around himself. Finally the wind gave up.
Then the sun let his warm rays soothe the man, and as the fellow warmed up and became comfortable, he took off his coat and smiled.
I didn't say I believed any of this hooey; I just said I found the contradictions in the Christian bible amusing.
I do not believe in Hell, period.
Consider it from my point of view for a moment. Imagine you're a college-educated, secular, agnostic New Yorker who's only been in church a couple of times in his whole life (outside of boot camp, where they made everyone go). Pretend you've studied physics, chemistry and engineering at the university level and absolutely believe that the universe is fifteen billion years old, the earth is four billion years old, and that all forms of life evolved from lower forms of life, tracing a history back billions of years to complex proteins in a chemical stew.
Ok, ready? PRETEND YOU'RE ME.
Now pretend some religious person is trying to explain God, Hell, eternal damnation, and Jesus to you. You're a logical person, so you create a list of the things he's saying, to see whether they fit together logically:
God, who supposedly created everybody, and loves us all, is supposedly going to send three quarters of the world's population to a horrible, firey doom JUST BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T JOIN ONE SPECIFIC CHURCH.
Among people who DO join that church, anyone who does anything the church "fathers" disapprove of is going to hell too. Jerking off, getting laid, drinking, playing video games, saying things like "Motherfucker" and "Fuck, Shit, Piss!", and so on, all send you straight to the Big Barbecue at the End of the Universe.
The only way God is going to accept you into heaven is if you turn yourself into a dried up, joyless excuse for a person and then, once you're IN heaven, you have to spend all your time ADORING HIM, even though VANITY IS SUPPOSED TO BE A MORTAL SIN.
Oh, and GOD LOVES YOU.
At this point, if you're me, your brain trips the circuit breaker and you say, aloud (without meaning to) "But that's completely ridiculous! None of that shit makes any sense whatsoever!"
Well, there ya go. That's how arguments break out, and why I try not to spend any time in the deep south.
Re:Insightful no. Swallowing the kool aid - yes.
on
The Science Of Happiness
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You know what I find ironic? There's an actual story in the gospels that contradicts this guy's whole script about original sin and redemption. Here we go (I'm paraphrasing):
A rich kid goes up to Jesus and asks, "How does one win entry into the kingdom of heaven?"
Jesus replies "Follow the commandments."
The kid says "Is that all there is to it?"
Jesus says, "Well, if you want to be perfect, give your money to the poor and follow me as a disciple."
The kid went away, saddened at this. Apparently he didn't want to give up his money.
Jesus said as the kid walked away, "It is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle."
So, there you have it. If you want to get into heaven, obey the commandments. Nothing about swearing allegiance to Jesus, nothing about original sin, nothing about anything but "be nice to each other". If you want to be "perfect", follow Jesus and preach the Word, but he never said you HAD to.
I think Christians tend to forget that JESUS WAS A JEW, so he believed in Jewish rules. He even said, "I am not the end of the law but the fulfillment of it".
What happened was, over the past couple of thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church rearranged Jesus' principles in their dogma to solidify their power. It's pretty hard to threaten people if all they have to do to get into heaven is be nice to others. If a priest has to utter some magic words over your deathbed, though... Well, there ya go! Instant power.
(Mr. Spock): There's a disaster forming on Earth, sir. The bullshit quotient in futurism is approaching singularity.
(Kirk): Singularity? The point at which all further discourse is reduced to technobabble and nobody says anything meaningful ever again??? Oh! My! God! We! Must! Take! Action! (visualize hand movements)
(Mr. Spock): Oh, NO! It's too late! Singularity in 3... 2... 1...
(Kirk): Quick! Scotty! I need you to prioritize the development of a SOA and utilize the new paradigm to implement a proactive solution to this third-party challenge! OH, GOD, ALL IS LOST! ALL IS LOST!
The dark ages (and other amusements) are PROOF of the staying power and innate vitality of Western Civilization. Our culture has survived the burning of the library at Alexandria, the sacking of Rome, the dark ages, plague, a thousand years' worth of brutal conflict, the church and its anti-intellectual mania, the church's inquisition, and countless other ridiculous stumbling blocks -- all to produce in the end the most powerful, world-encompassing civilization that has ever existed, a civilization whose science, mathematics, technology and culture every other culture has adopted, a civilization over EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OLD.
And after all this, India, who had it relatively easy compared to us, DIDN'T SPLIT THE ATOM OR PRODUCE A MODERN SCIENCE. And, even though a certain sort of Indian likes to imperiously claim that Indians are the smartest people on the planet, their country boasts an enormous poverty-stricken underclass, less than a 50% literacy rate, huge problems with their infrastructure... All while we "dumb Americans" have a literacy rate far up in the 90's and have all our trains running on time.
My point is not that "India Sucks". My point is that India doesn't have a fraction of the bragging rights snooty indians often try to claim. I think they should try and develop a little humility, concentrate on DEVELOPING that "developing country", and quit bragging about how great they are. If the rest of you had a lick of common sense, you'd feel the same way.
And you think I'm a fucktard? Who cares? I'm correct.
Fuck you, dipshit. Bounced back, didn't it? AND managed to give India (and it's four-thousand year whatever):
1. A big kick in the teeth while the British took the whole place over and ran it for hundreds of years,
2. Its freedom when Britain got tired of pissing around with it, and
3. It's current success (THEY didn't invent high tech, WE did -- and we gave it to them).
I studied history too, FUCKTARD. And they haven't had a single culture for four thousand years; it's been one group after another running the place (not counting the British). Kinda like the rest of the world, huh!
Indians (and everyone else who likes to brag about how great they are) are full of shit. Kinda like you! Fucktard.
An A/C said: "When you Americans have managed to hold together a multi-racial, multi-lingual society for four thousand years in the face of wars, floods, famines and invasion then maybe your current prosperity will look like more than beginner's luck."
When you consider America as part of a greater Western Civilization which has held together over the course of more than 8,000 years (from the earliest democracies in ancient Greece to the present) in the face of wars, floods, famines and invasion then maybe you'll realize why we think your braggadocio is, at best, quaint.
Well... I just checked out the Wikipedia page on root servers, and it seems most of the root servers aren't even in the U.S. anymore -- just the "nominal" ones. These international root servers apparently cache their data periodically.
So, let's say Europe is sick of letting the U.S. control the root servers. Let's say Europe doesn't like some policy change the U.S. makes about a domain. Whatever.
Why not just stop caching data from the "nominal" root servers and maintain your own root servers as standalone? All the ISPs in your country could base themselves off of your root servers. It's not like the data changes all that often, anyway. And you could always make treaties with interesting countries to keep each other's root servers up to date.
Why does anyone need the U.S. government's permission to take over root server duty? I'm not getting it. What's stopping the rest of the world from just doing their own thing spontaneously?
All the root servers do is keep track of the servers for the various domains, right? Go standalone, and hire a nerd to spend all day verifying the various country domains and keep them updated.
Yeah, when you Indians have more than a 50% literacy rate (meaning people that can actually READ), and you've supplied indoor plumbing, electrical power, refrigeration and clean water to virtually your whole population (as we in the U.S. have for most of the last century) THEN you can talk trash.
In the meantime, you don't have any bragging rights. Sorry about that.
...And it's not even a big deal. As I understand it, after reading Mr. Stallman's comments to an interviewer, all he's saying is:
(paraphrased) If you take some GPL code, like for instance, a blogging system for the web, and you modify it, you must distribute your modified version.
This doesn't mean you have to give away web services or PhP pages you write, it doesn't mean you have to give away your company's content that you're running on apache, it just means that if you alter a GPL'ed system, you have to share the source code to your changes.
Telephone: You talk, and the vibrations from the sound waves vibrate a membrane in the phone. The membrane in turn vibrates an electrical element in a coil, which through induction produces a small electrical current. This current is sent through the wires, amplified along the way, until it reaches the earpiece of the other phone, where the exact reverse process uses a membrane to produce sound.
I think the laptops are a fantastic idea; the instant they're available on the market, I'm buying five of the buggers and setting them up as a sort of "arsenal" of computing gear, from which I can grab one on my way to the office. My purchase will subsidize one laptop for someone poor, and I'll get the benefit of a very cool laptop -- winners all around!
Seriously -- this thing is so cool, it's only a matter of time before SOMEBODY decides to market it. I bet it would totally wipe out the PDA market, and put a dent in the commercial laptop market too. One market dies, another is born. Kinda like evolution, eh?
Certain corporations might be annoyed about that, but OTHER corporations will make a killing on it. My money is on the guys who run with the idea.
I've done something like this in the past. Here's an approach you could use:
1. Look at how you've organized your paper documents. If they're in boxes, or file cabinet drawers, they must be named or coded, right? And within a coded box or drawer, you must have folders that are themselves named or coded (or notebooks?).
2. Name your top-level directories after your boxes or file cabinet drawers (or whole file cabinets if we're talking about a LOT of papers). Then, move down through the hierarchy to more specific groups of documents. Drawer, folder set, folder. Do all this with your directory structure.
3. As you scan each article page in, name each one by taking its title, replacing spaces with dashes, and appending a page number, like this: "Some-Article-I-Wrote_1.png". Collect groups of input scans into PDF documents using your favorite PDF editor. Then, name the aggregate article using article name, with date and time appended (to help with duplicate titles): "Some-Article-I-Wrote_9-14-2005_1207PM.pdf"
4. You can search your archive using your favorite operating system's built in search, searching on title, directory names, etc. It works.
Yeah, but programming is as much a craft or trade as it is a science. And when you need it to support the higher mathematical sciences you're thinking of, it makes sense to spend some time actually learning the stuff (instead of puttering around in your dorm room with a book from Border's). Let me give you my Physics analogy:
A hundred years ago, when Physics was still a growing field, people used to have to make their own laboratory apparatus. Now, you could argue that people who are properly motivated would have been able to make their OWN apparatus. But I would counter that most physicists learned at the hand of their teachers, and took courses in fabrication while they were in school.
Clearly, the old timers thought that it was better for a student to learn to fabricate apparatus in a formal way, guided by a master who has been doing it for many years. And this is exactly how they did it. I used to have a reprint of one of the old handbooks physicists used to use. It had chapters on lost wax moulding, metal casting, glass blowing, and all of the other various things a physicist was expected to be able to do.
Compare this to computer science.
One cannot do computer science without doing programming, so programming is very much like (for instance) glass blowing. It is a means to an end that is necessary for a computer scientist.
One cannot be very good at programming (or glass blowing) without at least SOME instruction and practice. And, just as an old-time physicist wouldn't have been able to do much without good glass-blowing and metal-casting skills, a modern computer scientist is crap without good programming skills.
Here's an example: I used to know a guy who got a Ph.D at Harvard in Computer Science.
Harvard.
And he didn't know how to do anything, even something as simple as a k-way merge sort in code, because he'd never spent any time actually programming.
It doesn't make any sense. It sounds like their developers were all arguing back and forth and the lead developer got fed up:
LD: "OK, nobody wants to get along, all you creeps want to do is bicker back and forth, 'I want fancy UI', 'I want games', 'I want this', 'I want that'!"
Developers: "MINE MINE MINE!"
LD: "Fine! Fine! Since you don't want to get along, you're just going to have to do it the hard way. I want a makefile with a flag, and we'll make one version for each of you. NOBODY wins."
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, as an American New Yorker (we've had our share of cops slaughtering innocent people too), this article has astonished me. It occurs to me that:
...And once in the shoulder. So, was that the "warning shot"? Or just a cop who can't shoot straight?
1. He was shot SEVEN TIMES IN THE HEAD -- not even the most pissed off New York City cop would dump that much ammo into a guy. I mean, that's just unbelievable. Seven times! Did they think he was going to leap to his feet and attack? Somebody's been reading too much Clive Barker...
2.
3. And, for what? HE HAD A TAN. So, apparently, in Britain, if you're ethnic, you're as good as dead and the cops will "shoot to kill" suddenly (and hit you seven times in the head). Amazingly, this has made me appreciate the U.S. and especially, the N.Y. government. OUR cops just chew you out, maybe rough you up a little (unless you're Amadou Diallo, but more on that in a minute).
4. About Amadou Diallo: Four (I think) N.Y. detectives fired dozens of rounds in his general direction, shooting him a number of times (but not all in the head). Most of the shots missed wildly. In contrast, in Britain, "missing wildly" means "hit him in the shoulder". So, not only are British cops much bigger homicidal maniacs, but THEY'RE BETTER SHOTS, TOO.
Sigh...
When I finally get around to visiting Europe, I think I'll skip Britain. God forbid they see my tan and light me up.
Huh. Well, you've convinced me. I'll be damned.
Ok, I take it back. Thank you for taking the time to sort this out with me, this has been the most interesting and informative conversation I've had on Slashdot in a long, long time.
You're alright; an interesting guy.
Again, I didn't say that ARPANET was designed to survive a nuclear attack. I said it was designed to practice, test, and develop technologies that in and of themselves would be useful in developing a network that would survive a nuclear attack. Research in networking technology in what looks like an innocuous place can be applied elsewhere.
And, anyway, why is everyone so bashful about this issue? Am I really to believe that during the cold war, and during REAGAN'S presidency (Mr. Cold War himself), a project like ARPANET had nothing to do with surviving a nuclear war? Give me a break. The whole idea of decentralized, packet-switched networks arose out of a desire to have functioning communications after a nuclear exchange. The whole reason RAND worked on this was that the phone system wasn't up to the task.
It doesn't matter what someone working on the actual project thought his goals were. It doesn't matter what the official story was. And it doesn't matter what a bunch of scientists, decades after the fact, spin their motivations as. It's all just SPIN. You're repeating the "official" version (which, like everything the military says to the public, is cleaned up for consumption).
The guys who signed the checks almost certainly were thinking of military applications. I'll believe their goals were all sweetness and light when I see pigs fly.
Well, I think it's a little more complicated than that. The original RAND think-tanks who dreamed this stuff up WERE trying to figure out how to keep communications up during a nuclear attack. And the original internet, DARPANET (or ARPANET, depending on the time as you've mentioned) was a research network designed to explore these ideas. And the scientists who worked on ARPANET probably weren't thinking mostly about survivability, but rather how neat the ideas they were working with were. But the guys in charge were DEFINITELY thinking about survivability. That's why they kept renewing the funding.
So, the public knows about arpanet, and the public internet, which are NOT designed to survive nukes, but the government almost certainly has its own network (probably part of milnet) that WILL survive any nuclear attack. And the ideas used to build this network came from the ARPANET project, because that was the purpose of ARPANET -- to work out all the details.
It's all surrounded by a dense fog of bullshit at this point, and we'll never know the whole, unvarnished truth. That's my take on it, anyway.
Well, since we're talking about objective reality, there's never been ANY evidence that there's ANYTHING supernatural going on, ANYWHERE. In every single case where a scientist went in to test some weird thing going on, a rational explanation was found and the supernatural was debunked.
So, if we're talking about pure objective reality, belief in the supernatural (this includes religious belief) is irrational and unsupported by observable fact.
If I had to venture a guess as to what form a god might take, IF such a god existed, I'd suggest that perhaps our universe is actually composed of more than four dimensions (x,y,z,time) and we are the four-dimensional cross-section of some larger form. Spiritual things might be higher-dimensional forms that have no intersection with the four dimensions, and are perceived by us outside of the four dimensions, with the experience somehow percolating down to us subconsciously. As far as God goes, then, perhaps he's something that pervades all higher dimensions as a sort of group life form like coral, so that we're all actually a part of him. If we live on after death, perhaps it's as a component that has lost it's four-dimensional cross section.
That makes a lot more sense to me than "a big bearded guy in the sky".
I always shop in used CD stores. I can get a very nice CD at "Mr. Bill's CDs" for four bucks. That's a whole lot cheaper than 20!
Well, the truth is, I don't believe in Christianity, the bible, hell, or any of that stuff. I think it's all a little silly. I just like the contradiction I mentioned. I think it's rather funny, and shows how many competing hands were involved in the writing, and rewriting, and editing of the bible over the course of the past two thousand years.
I'd convert to buddhism, but I think they're kind of silly too. Who wants detachment? I like being alive. I hope I'm born again an infinite number of times. I think that would be a swell fate.
But I definitely don't believe in Hell, or a God who would threaten me with it to get me to love him. It reminds me of one of Aesop's fables:
The sun and the wind saw a man walking along in a coat and made a bet to see who could make the man take it off.
So the wind blew and blew, and did everything it could to force the man to remove his coat. But the harder the wind blew, the tighter he wrapped his coat around himself. Finally the wind gave up.
Then the sun let his warm rays soothe the man, and as the fellow warmed up and became comfortable, he took off his coat and smiled.
I didn't say I believed any of this hooey; I just said I found the contradictions in the Christian bible amusing.
I do not believe in Hell, period.
Consider it from my point of view for a moment. Imagine you're a college-educated, secular, agnostic New Yorker who's only been in church a couple of times in his whole life (outside of boot camp, where they made everyone go). Pretend you've studied physics, chemistry and engineering at the university level and absolutely believe that the universe is fifteen billion years old, the earth is four billion years old, and that all forms of life evolved from lower forms of life, tracing a history back billions of years to complex proteins in a chemical stew.
Ok, ready? PRETEND YOU'RE ME.
Now pretend some religious person is trying to explain God, Hell, eternal damnation, and Jesus to you. You're a logical person, so you create a list of the things he's saying, to see whether they fit together logically:
God, who supposedly created everybody, and loves us all, is supposedly going to send three quarters of the world's population to a horrible, firey doom JUST BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T JOIN ONE SPECIFIC CHURCH.
Among people who DO join that church, anyone who does anything the church "fathers" disapprove of is going to hell too. Jerking off, getting laid, drinking, playing video games, saying things like "Motherfucker" and "Fuck, Shit, Piss!", and so on, all send you straight to the Big Barbecue at the End of the Universe.
The only way God is going to accept you into heaven is if you turn yourself into a dried up, joyless excuse for a person and then, once you're IN heaven, you have to spend all your time ADORING HIM, even though VANITY IS SUPPOSED TO BE A MORTAL SIN.
Oh, and GOD LOVES YOU.
At this point, if you're me, your brain trips the circuit breaker and you say, aloud (without meaning to) "But that's completely ridiculous! None of that shit makes any sense whatsoever!"
Well, there ya go. That's how arguments break out, and why I try not to spend any time in the deep south.
You know what I find ironic? There's an actual story in the gospels that contradicts this guy's whole script about original sin and redemption. Here we go (I'm paraphrasing):
.02...
A rich kid goes up to Jesus and asks, "How does one win entry into the kingdom of heaven?"
Jesus replies "Follow the commandments."
The kid says "Is that all there is to it?"
Jesus says, "Well, if you want to be perfect, give your money to the poor and follow me as a disciple."
The kid went away, saddened at this. Apparently he didn't want to give up his money.
Jesus said as the kid walked away, "It is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle."
So, there you have it. If you want to get into heaven, obey the commandments. Nothing about swearing allegiance to Jesus, nothing about original sin, nothing about anything but "be nice to each other". If you want to be "perfect", follow Jesus and preach the Word, but he never said you HAD to.
I think Christians tend to forget that JESUS WAS A JEW, so he believed in Jewish rules. He even said, "I am not the end of the law but the fulfillment of it".
What happened was, over the past couple of thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church rearranged Jesus' principles in their dogma to solidify their power. It's pretty hard to threaten people if all they have to do to get into heaven is be nice to others. If a priest has to utter some magic words over your deathbed, though... Well, there ya go! Instant power.
My
He called me a fucktard first. I was just being polite and coordinating with his strange customs. "When in rome"...
I wonder what a "fucktard" is? Is it people who are late to one night stands, I wonder?
Bridge to captain! Bridge to captain! We have an emergency!
(Kirk, rushing onto bridge): VREET! Ok, what's up?
(Mr. Spock): There's a disaster forming on Earth, sir. The bullshit quotient in futurism is approaching singularity.
(Kirk): Singularity? The point at which all further discourse is reduced to technobabble and nobody says anything meaningful ever again??? Oh! My! God! We! Must! Take! Action! (visualize hand movements)
(Mr. Spock): Oh, NO! It's too late! Singularity in 3... 2... 1...
(Kirk): Quick! Scotty! I need you to prioritize the development of a SOA and utilize the new paradigm to implement a proactive solution to this third-party challenge! OH, GOD, ALL IS LOST! ALL IS LOST!
The dark ages (and other amusements) are PROOF of the staying power and innate vitality of Western Civilization. Our culture has survived the burning of the library at Alexandria, the sacking of Rome, the dark ages, plague, a thousand years' worth of brutal conflict, the church and its anti-intellectual mania, the church's inquisition, and countless other ridiculous stumbling blocks -- all to produce in the end the most powerful, world-encompassing civilization that has ever existed, a civilization whose science, mathematics, technology and culture every other culture has adopted, a civilization over EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OLD.
And after all this, India, who had it relatively easy compared to us, DIDN'T SPLIT THE ATOM OR PRODUCE A MODERN SCIENCE. And, even though a certain sort of Indian likes to imperiously claim that Indians are the smartest people on the planet, their country boasts an enormous poverty-stricken underclass, less than a 50% literacy rate, huge problems with their infrastructure... All while we "dumb Americans" have a literacy rate far up in the 90's and have all our trains running on time.
My point is not that "India Sucks". My point is that India doesn't have a fraction of the bragging rights snooty indians often try to claim. I think they should try and develop a little humility, concentrate on DEVELOPING that "developing country", and quit bragging about how great they are. If the rest of you had a lick of common sense, you'd feel the same way.
And you think I'm a fucktard? Who cares? I'm correct.
Fuck you, dipshit. Bounced back, didn't it? AND managed to give India (and it's four-thousand year whatever):
1. A big kick in the teeth while the British took the whole place over and ran it for hundreds of years,
2. Its freedom when Britain got tired of pissing around with it, and
3. It's current success (THEY didn't invent high tech, WE did -- and we gave it to them).
I studied history too, FUCKTARD. And they haven't had a single culture for four thousand years; it's been one group after another running the place (not counting the British). Kinda like the rest of the world, huh!
Indians (and everyone else who likes to brag about how great they are) are full of shit. Kinda like you! Fucktard.
An A/C said: "When you Americans have managed to hold together a multi-racial, multi-lingual society for four thousand years in the face of wars, floods, famines and invasion then maybe your current prosperity will look like more than beginner's luck."
When you consider America as part of a greater Western Civilization which has held together over the course of more than 8,000 years (from the earliest democracies in ancient Greece to the present) in the face of wars, floods, famines and invasion then maybe you'll realize why we think your braggadocio is, at best, quaint.
Silly Indian.
Well... I just checked out the Wikipedia page on root servers, and it seems most of the root servers aren't even in the U.S. anymore -- just the "nominal" ones. These international root servers apparently cache their data periodically.
So, let's say Europe is sick of letting the U.S. control the root servers. Let's say Europe doesn't like some policy change the U.S. makes about a domain. Whatever.
Why not just stop caching data from the "nominal" root servers and maintain your own root servers as standalone? All the ISPs in your country could base themselves off of your root servers. It's not like the data changes all that often, anyway. And you could always make treaties with interesting countries to keep each other's root servers up to date.
Why does anyone need the U.S. government's permission to take over root server duty? I'm not getting it. What's stopping the rest of the world from just doing their own thing spontaneously?
All the root servers do is keep track of the servers for the various domains, right? Go standalone, and hire a nerd to spend all day verifying the various country domains and keep them updated.
Or am I missing the problem?
Yeah, when you Indians have more than a 50% literacy rate (meaning people that can actually READ), and you've supplied indoor plumbing, electrical power, refrigeration and clean water to virtually your whole population (as we in the U.S. have for most of the last century) THEN you can talk trash.
In the meantime, you don't have any bragging rights. Sorry about that.
...And it's not even a big deal. As I understand it, after reading Mr. Stallman's comments to an interviewer, all he's saying is:
(paraphrased) If you take some GPL code, like for instance, a blogging system for the web, and you modify it, you must distribute your modified version.
This doesn't mean you have to give away web services or PhP pages you write, it doesn't mean you have to give away your company's content that you're running on apache, it just means that if you alter a GPL'ed system, you have to share the source code to your changes.
What's everyone getting so excited about?
Oh... What a weird analogy! Einstein may have been brilliant, but I think he was simultaneously a very, very strange man.
Telephone: You talk, and the vibrations from the sound waves vibrate a membrane in the phone. The membrane in turn vibrates an electrical element in a coil, which through induction produces a small electrical current. This current is sent through the wires, amplified along the way, until it reaches the earpiece of the other phone, where the exact reverse process uses a membrane to produce sound.
What was all that about cats???
You forgot another group of westerners who would love this -- people who like to go backpacking, travelling, etc. The hand crank is brilliant!
I think the laptops are a fantastic idea; the instant they're available on the market, I'm buying five of the buggers and setting them up as a sort of "arsenal" of computing gear, from which I can grab one on my way to the office. My purchase will subsidize one laptop for someone poor, and I'll get the benefit of a very cool laptop -- winners all around!
Seriously -- this thing is so cool, it's only a matter of time before SOMEBODY decides to market it. I bet it would totally wipe out the PDA market, and put a dent in the commercial laptop market too. One market dies, another is born. Kinda like evolution, eh?
Certain corporations might be annoyed about that, but OTHER corporations will make a killing on it. My money is on the guys who run with the idea.
I've done something like this in the past. Here's an approach you could use:
;)
1. Look at how you've organized your paper documents. If they're in boxes, or file cabinet drawers, they must be named or coded, right? And within a coded box or drawer, you must have folders that are themselves named or coded (or notebooks?).
2. Name your top-level directories after your boxes or file cabinet drawers (or whole file cabinets if we're talking about a LOT of papers). Then, move down through the hierarchy to more specific groups of documents. Drawer, folder set, folder. Do all this with your directory structure.
3. As you scan each article page in, name each one by taking its title, replacing spaces with dashes, and appending a page number, like this: "Some-Article-I-Wrote_1.png". Collect groups of input scans into PDF documents using your favorite PDF editor. Then, name the aggregate article using article name, with date and time appended (to help with duplicate titles): "Some-Article-I-Wrote_9-14-2005_1207PM.pdf"
4. You can search your archive using your favorite operating system's built in search, searching on title, directory names, etc. It works.
It worked for me, anyway.
Yeah, but programming is as much a craft or trade as it is a science. And when you need it to support the higher mathematical sciences you're thinking of, it makes sense to spend some time actually learning the stuff (instead of puttering around in your dorm room with a book from Border's). Let me give you my Physics analogy:
A hundred years ago, when Physics was still a growing field, people used to have to make their own laboratory apparatus. Now, you could argue that people who are properly motivated would have been able to make their OWN apparatus. But I would counter that most physicists learned at the hand of their teachers, and took courses in fabrication while they were in school.
Clearly, the old timers thought that it was better for a student to learn to fabricate apparatus in a formal way, guided by a master who has been doing it for many years. And this is exactly how they did it. I used to have a reprint of one of the old handbooks physicists used to use. It had chapters on lost wax moulding, metal casting, glass blowing, and all of the other various things a physicist was expected to be able to do.
Compare this to computer science.
One cannot do computer science without doing programming, so programming is very much like (for instance) glass blowing. It is a means to an end that is necessary for a computer scientist.
One cannot be very good at programming (or glass blowing) without at least SOME instruction and practice. And, just as an old-time physicist wouldn't have been able to do much without good glass-blowing and metal-casting skills, a modern computer scientist is crap without good programming skills.
Here's an example: I used to know a guy who got a Ph.D at Harvard in Computer Science.
Harvard.
And he didn't know how to do anything, even something as simple as a k-way merge sort in code, because he'd never spent any time actually programming.
Do you think he's any use at all, to anybody?
Why did HE bother with his degree?
Money?
No, no, he means the ones made of rice. They're crunchy.
Hell, I'm already confused. SEVEN VERSIONS???
It doesn't make any sense. It sounds like their developers were all arguing back and forth and the lead developer got fed up:
LD: "OK, nobody wants to get along, all you creeps want to do is bicker back and forth, 'I want fancy UI', 'I want games', 'I want this', 'I want that'!"
Developers: "MINE MINE MINE!"
LD: "Fine! Fine! Since you don't want to get along, you're just going to have to do it the hard way. I want a makefile with a flag, and we'll make one version for each of you. NOBODY wins."
Developers: "WAAAAAAHHHH!"
LD: "Don't make me come over there!"
Yeah... Gotta love Microsoft...