The fossil record does no such thing, and pseudo-scientists waste a lot of time tilting at windmills.
The Genesis story is a lot of things, but scientific theory it is not. It is of no merit to try to disprove it by scientific method.
Well, that's true up to the point where some nutjob starts insisting that everything in the Bible is the literal truth, and that therefore Genesis is true, and evolution doesn't happen.
At this point the nutjob is putting his beliefs forward as a scientific theory, be it ever so lacking in foundation, and a certain amount of windmill-tilting is then unfortunately required.
And when the nutjobs of the world make a co-ordinated attempt to have their nutjobbery taught to children as being respectable science, then those windmills start taking on the characteristics of actual giants, and tilting at them becomes rather important.
I will concede that the process does indeed waste a lot of time. However, in general it isn't the scientists who kick off the fight.
who delivers cell phones, planes, and genetically engineered crops?
Well, exactly. When a team of crack theologians work out how to put a man on the moon by praying really, really hard, then I might accept that the two disciplines are to some extent equivalent and interchangeable.
In the meantime, cheap trolls like this one only serve to further discredit religion as an intellectual activity.
So you're saying that you once met someone who used the inappropriate tool for a job. Therefore that tool is inappropriate for any job.
Not quite. He's saying that he has observed through personal experience that the tool under discussion is inappropriate for a certain class of activity. He then goes on to suggest that some well known tools may be better suited to such jobs, and supports his point with an anecdote, again from personal experience.
Nothing there suggests that the tool in question is unsuitable to all classes of activity.
You might need a class in logic.
See, if it was me, I'd make real sure my own logic was beyond reproach before I took that tone with somebody.
Yes it is. Advocacy =/= astroturfing, for a start.
Personally I draw distinction between advocacy that is the result of an individual promoting an honestly held opinion, and the organised attempts of corporate bodies to present propaganda is if it were honest opionion.
Clearly you don't agree. That's all right. You're entitled to your opinion.
One day people will realise that Slashdot means fuck all to Microsoft in the war on minds
On the other hand, here we do agree to a certain extent. I don't think Microsoft are particularly interested in Slashdot. I think they're interested in any tech or business forum that gets a lot of eyeballs.
The fact that we're discussing that behavior as it manifests here doesn't mean I'm according/. any special significance.
You seem to imply that a thoughtful, well-written pro Microsoft comment should not get modded up on Slashdot because the user base disagrees with it.
I don't say anything at all about what should happen. I am saying that the it rapidly becomes apparent that the moderation does not reflect the general prevailing opionion, which you do not seem to displute.
From this, and from the timing, I think we can conclude that the moderation is the result of a concerted and organised action from a minority group attempting to skew the discussion.
This is what's commonly known as astroturfing.
Wether the comments in question have any merit in their own varies according to the comment, and I make no attempt to to judge what moderation they should receive. I think it's safe to say however that a posting is not necessarily "interesting", "insightful" or "informative", simply because it represents the current talking points coming out of Redmond.
Moderation isn't an "Agree/Disagree" vote, I don't know why you think it should be.
... and I don't know why you think I think it should be. I haven't said anything remotely to that effect, and certainly nothing in the lines you quoted support that interpretation.
To me this sounds exactly like how well reasoned minority opinions should be treated to get meaningful discussion.
No objection to anyone moderating a truly interesting dissenting viewpoint as such. I've done as much myself.
But when a corporation organises a block of posters to vote up a specific message regardless - that's astroturfing, and it does little to improve the debate.
It's pretty much establish canon that slashdot is extremely anti-Microsoft, like "The only thing Micro$oft would make that wouldn't suck is a vacuum cleaner. It would blow." category. Reality is a lot more complex
Except apparently on slashdot where we're all rabidly anti-Microsoft?
all in all what you describe sounds quite as expected.
Right, because someone who holds an opinion different from yours could only be on Microsoft's payroll.
Second time in two days that meme has surfaced. To be fair, though, there does seem to be a pattern to these things
1: News story breaks impacting on Microsoft in some way
2: Story gets posted to Slashdot.
3: A thoughtful, well-written and strongly pro-Microsoft comment gets quickly posted and rapidly modded up to +5
4: The rest of slashdot gets to read the article, and it quickly becomes apparent that the early post isn't at all representative of the majority opinion on Slashdot.
This seems to happen fairly consistently. which tends to suggest that Microsoft advocacy on this board is very well organised. So it's not unreasonable to assume that some degree of astroturfing is going on.
What's up with this obsession on/. that anyone that says anything that can remotely construed as anti-Linux or pro-MS are paid shills? Can't geeks have an argument in peace without throwing baseless accusations around?
I know what you mean. Personally I blame the Microsoft shills. It can be hard to identify honest dissent in among all the opinion-for-hire some days.:)
Slashdot did its share of shilling and spreading FUD in the case of Vista DRM etc. and was even publishing results of fake benchmarks against Windows 7.
Interesting. So are you offering this tid-bit as an example of something which is OK to do as part of our right to hold opinions in good faith? Or are you suggesting that "shutdown -p now" is indeed shilling, but defending his right to do so by suggesting that some linux advocates also represent commercial interests?
You started with a valid point, but rather undermined it by adding "anyway, you do it too, so there!!"
I completely sympathize. I've become tired of the same old excuses why faster-than-light travel isn't possible, just like you and the Apple malware thing. I mean, come on. Why don't they come up with new material?
Oh! Oh! I know that one!
This is the one that says "The reason that faster than light travel isn't possible is that users can't flap their arms fast enough, and has nothing to do with those pesky laws of physics that Microsoft would have overcome in an instant had they not decided on a more strategic approach of making the light come to you instead, (a service they intend to monetize in the near future) so it's not their fault, so there!".
The thing is, you've got two more-or-less indisputable facts there. People can't as a rule flap their arms fast enough to achieve flight, and we have excellent reason to believe that faster than light travel is impossible.
I'm just not convinced that one is a complete and adequate explanation of the other, y'know?
Notice how I got modded down for daring not to jump on the FOSSie "Boo MSFT!" groupthink wagon?
And the fact that you were willing to make your point in a grown up and adult manner and without resorting to cheap jibes was lending considerable weight to your argument.
Ex-Employee: Fire me, will you? We'll see who laughs last...
dials telephone...
Ex-Employee: Hello? SIIA? I'd like to report a case of widespread use of unlicensed software by a major company...
Ex-Employee: Uh... no, no, I'm no longer with the company. I uh, left... because I was disgusted at their wanton disregard for intellectual property...
Which isn't to say that some of those reports aren't made by highly principled people, of course. But I bet I know which category had the most hits...
That's actually true (I use Yahoo currently for my search needs) but it's not the point I was trying to make.
mmm... you were saying (I believe) that although a decision by Google might well lead to a decline in the use of their engine, Bing would probably be next on the MPAA's hit list and would have to follow suit (thus losing any advantage) or else come to some arrangement with the MPAA, probably involving censoring references to torrent and the like from their indices. Personally, I suspect they'd choose the latter approach, and still count it a good deal if it meant overthrowing Google and getting their hands on all that ad revenue. Not to mention being able to once again distort their search results for fun and profit with the reasonable expectation that people might be reading them.
What I found more interesting was the suggestion that Google might want to remove MPAA related results in order to attract more users in the form of countless MPAA haters who have been silently boycotting Google because they wish never to receive an MPAA related search result.
For one thing. I can't imagine that your particular market segment is large enough to make up for potential losses if Google decide to ignore an entire industry. For another, I'm not aware of any MPAA free search engine that people such as yourself could be using in place of Google, which means that by and large Google probably already have those users. Also, frankly, I just can't see the point of having potential access to less information rather than more. Ever. But maybe that's just me.
Granted, I can imagine how an MPAA-free Internet might have widespread appeal. But (as has been pointed out once or twice in this topic) removing the MPAA from Google is not the same thing as removing them from the Internet.
As a side note: didn't Yahoo dismantle their search engine some years ago in favour of licensing either Google's or whatever MS were calling their offering at the time? I seem to recall they keep flip-flopping between the two depending on who's offering the better deal.
Using Yahoo is not necessarily the same thing as not using Google:)
Exactly! And it seems like the best way they've figured out to accomplish that end is to copy the best.
No argument there.
Were Google to suddenly take a nosedive it wouldn't take long for someone else to step up to the plate.
None of which would help Google, however. Which brings me back to my point - handing out "internet death sentences" would be a stupid thing for Google to do...
They could do that, but it would be an amazingly stupid move, I think.
I agree entirely. The Bing team would be dancing in the streets if Google decided it was going to cut off a sizeable sector of industry. Hell, they'd probably pay Google to make it happen if they thought it could work.
Jesus. No one can read analogies. Let me break it down:
Hey, don't tell me, tell Frosty.
I just get irritated when someone thinks they can derail an analogy by pointing out that the two things under consideration are not the same thing - as if there'd be any point in an analogy if both items were the same.
To be fair, Nick, it's not at all like a test or homework. That's why "like" is incorrect.
This may be so, but I think you need to make a bit more effort to demonstrate why two cases are insufficiently alike. You can't dismiss every comparison made in an argument simply by pointing out that the two items being compared are not in fact identical.
To be fair again, I do happen to think that the term "cheating" is not particularly helpful in this case. There are more interesting questions to be asked. Still, if you're going to address the issue of cheating, at least put a little effort into it.
As the Linux system isn't due to go "live" for another fortnight, I'd expect that it is the.NET based system that has been hacked.
I agree, but we can't be sure.
That said, if the LSE had switched to Linux and immediately been hacked after (presumably) years of running securely on.NET, I expect the Redmond PR machine would have leapt into action, and we'd be seeing a lot more articles, and they'd be very specific about which O/S was running.
Instead, we have one vague and potentially misleading article. Either Microsoft PR is asleep on the job, or they're keeping quiet because the incident reflects poorly on their product.
However I cannot think of a reason why it should be bad if you can start make from the editor.
Me neither.
:!make
generally does the job for me. Also handy is
!!make
Generally from a blank line at the bottom of the file - runs make and drops the output into the vi buffer. You can put/* */ around the line before hand so you don't forget about it and get syntax errors from the compiler output.
That said, I'm a bit lazy. Usually I just type
control-z
make
fg
and I don't get the overhead of having some cumbersome great IDE using up memory and pixels on my machine.
I would say that people with any technical proficiency, being engineers or scientists or just ordinary geeks are capable of taking decisions that are actually based more on real life scenarios than ideologies
I tend to agree.
Speaking scientifically, however, we can't draw any firm conclusions without a control group. The engineers in question may have been a moderating influence, or they may have been the most repressive, reactionary extremists that could be found in China's engineering community. We can't know for sure unless we can examine a universe where non-engineers were appointed to those posts and all other factors remained the same.
Even then, we could only draw conclusions about the engineers in question. To draw any wide ranging conclusions, we'd need to evaluate thousands of alternate Chinas and plot the number of engineers in government against the progress of it's political system. Of course you'd need a definition of "progress" and a decent set of metrics too, but that's getting away from the point.
The main point I was making was that it's pretty nonsensical to point to China's political system as a reason why having engineers in positions of power would be either ineffective or a bad idea, which is how I read the GP text.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's true up to the point where some nutjob starts insisting that everything in the Bible is the literal truth, and that therefore Genesis is true, and evolution doesn't happen.
At this point the nutjob is putting his beliefs forward as a scientific theory, be it ever so lacking in foundation, and a certain amount of windmill-tilting is then unfortunately required.
And when the nutjobs of the world make a co-ordinated attempt to have their nutjobbery taught to children as being respectable science, then those windmills start taking on the characteristics of actual giants, and tilting at them becomes rather important.
I will concede that the process does indeed waste a lot of time. However, in general it isn't the scientists who kick off the fight.
Well, exactly. When a team of crack theologians work out how to put a man on the moon by praying really, really hard, then I might accept that the two disciplines are to some extent equivalent and interchangeable.
In the meantime, cheap trolls like this one only serve to further discredit religion as an intellectual activity.
Not quite. He's saying that he has observed through personal experience that the tool under discussion is inappropriate for a certain class of activity. He then goes on to suggest that some well known tools may be better suited to such jobs, and supports his point with an anecdote, again from personal experience.
Nothing there suggests that the tool in question is unsuitable to all classes of activity.
See, if it was me, I'd make real sure my own logic was beyond reproach before I took that tone with somebody.
Personally I draw distinction between advocacy that is the result of an individual promoting an honestly held opinion, and the organised attempts of corporate bodies to present propaganda is if it were honest opionion.
Clearly you don't agree. That's all right. You're entitled to your opinion.
On the other hand, here we do agree to a certain extent. I don't think Microsoft are particularly interested in Slashdot. I think they're interested in any tech or business forum that gets a lot of eyeballs.
The fact that we're discussing that behavior as it manifests here doesn't mean I'm according /. any special significance.
I don't say anything at all about what should happen. I am saying that the it rapidly becomes apparent that the moderation does not reflect the general prevailing opionion, which you do not seem to displute.
From this, and from the timing, I think we can conclude that the moderation is the result of a concerted and organised action from a minority group attempting to skew the discussion.
This is what's commonly known as astroturfing.
Wether the comments in question have any merit in their own varies according to the comment, and I make no attempt to to judge what moderation they should receive. I think it's safe to say however that a posting is not necessarily "interesting", "insightful" or "informative", simply because it represents the current talking points coming out of Redmond.
No objection to anyone moderating a truly interesting dissenting viewpoint as such. I've done as much myself.
But when a corporation organises a block of posters to vote up a specific message regardless - that's astroturfing, and it does little to improve the debate.
Except apparently on slashdot where we're all rabidly anti-Microsoft?
Expected != Desirable, however.
Second time in two days that meme has surfaced. To be fair, though, there does seem to be a pattern to these things
1: News story breaks impacting on Microsoft in some way
2: Story gets posted to Slashdot.
3: A thoughtful, well-written and strongly pro-Microsoft comment gets quickly posted and rapidly modded up to +5
4: The rest of slashdot gets to read the article, and it quickly becomes apparent that the early post isn't at all representative of the majority opinion on Slashdot.
This seems to happen fairly consistently. which tends to suggest that Microsoft advocacy on this board is very well organised. So it's not unreasonable to assume that some degree of astroturfing is going on.
I know what you mean. Personally I blame the Microsoft shills. It can be hard to identify honest dissent in among all the opinion-for-hire some days. :)
Interesting. So are you offering this tid-bit as an example of something which is OK to do as part of our right to hold opinions in good faith? Or are you suggesting that "shutdown -p now" is indeed shilling, but defending his right to do so by suggesting that some linux advocates also represent commercial interests?
You started with a valid point, but rather undermined it by adding "anyway, you do it too, so there!!"
The thing is, Microsoft say this sort of thing a lot, these days. The trouble is, it tends to work out as:
Hence the mix of suspicion and derision flavouring this discussion..
Oh! Oh! I know that one!
This is the one that says "The reason that faster than light travel isn't possible is that users can't flap their arms fast enough, and has nothing to do with those pesky laws of physics that Microsoft would have overcome in an instant had they not decided on a more strategic approach of making the light come to you instead, (a service they intend to monetize in the near future) so it's not their fault, so there!".
The thing is, you've got two more-or-less indisputable facts there. People can't as a rule flap their arms fast enough to achieve flight, and we have excellent reason to believe that faster than light travel is impossible.
I'm just not convinced that one is a complete and adequate explanation of the other, y'know?
And the fact that you were willing to make your point in a grown up and adult manner and without resorting to cheap jibes was lending considerable weight to your argument.
Pity it didn't last, really.
So your advice for jobseekers would be to find a crook and work for him, because you'll be better looked after?
Of course, there is another plausible scenario:
Which isn't to say that some of those reports aren't made by highly principled people, of course. But I bet I know which category had the most hits...
I have this sudden, strange urge to rush out and buy a copy of Daikatana...
mmm... you were saying (I believe) that although a decision by Google might well lead to a decline in the use of their engine, Bing would probably be next on the MPAA's hit list and would have to follow suit (thus losing any advantage) or else come to some arrangement with the MPAA, probably involving censoring references to torrent and the like from their indices. Personally, I suspect they'd choose the latter approach, and still count it a good deal if it meant overthrowing Google and getting their hands on all that ad revenue. Not to mention being able to once again distort their search results for fun and profit with the reasonable expectation that people might be reading them.
What I found more interesting was the suggestion that Google might want to remove MPAA related results in order to attract more users in the form of countless MPAA haters who have been silently boycotting Google because they wish never to receive an MPAA related search result.
For one thing. I can't imagine that your particular market segment is large enough to make up for potential losses if Google decide to ignore an entire industry. For another, I'm not aware of any MPAA free search engine that people such as yourself could be using in place of Google, which means that by and large Google probably already have those users. Also, frankly, I just can't see the point of having potential access to less information rather than more. Ever. But maybe that's just me.
Granted, I can imagine how an MPAA-free Internet might have widespread appeal. But (as has been pointed out once or twice in this topic) removing the MPAA from Google is not the same thing as removing them from the Internet.
As a side note: didn't Yahoo dismantle their search engine some years ago in favour of licensing either Google's or whatever MS were calling their offering at the time? I seem to recall they keep flip-flopping between the two depending on who's offering the better deal.
Using Yahoo is not necessarily the same thing as not using Google :)
No argument there.
None of which would help Google, however. Which brings me back to my point - handing out "internet death sentences" would be a stupid thing for Google to do...
So what are you saying here? That you don't use Google, but you'd start in an instant if they just got rid of those pesky MPAA search results?
It'd be a funny old world if we were all the same, I suppose...
Meh, this is Microsoft we're talking about. They don't care about offering a good service; they just want to dominate search.
I agree entirely. The Bing team would be dancing in the streets if Google decided it was going to cut off a sizeable sector of industry. Hell, they'd probably pay Google to make it happen if they thought it could work.
"Internet death sentence", indeed.
Hey, don't tell me, tell Frosty.
I just get irritated when someone thinks they can derail an analogy by pointing out that the two things under consideration are not the same thing - as if there'd be any point in an analogy if both items were the same.
This may be so, but I think you need to make a bit more effort to demonstrate why two cases are insufficiently alike. You can't dismiss every comparison made in an argument simply by pointing out that the two items being compared are not in fact identical.
To be fair again, I do happen to think that the term "cheating" is not particularly helpful in this case. There are more interesting questions to be asked. Still, if you're going to address the issue of cheating, at least put a little effort into it.
To be fair, Frosty, that would be why he said "like" and not "exactly the same as"
That said, if the LSE had switched to Linux and immediately been hacked after (presumably) years of running securely on .NET, I expect the Redmond PR machine would have leapt into action, and we'd be seeing a lot more articles, and they'd be very specific about which O/S was running.
Instead, we have one vague and potentially misleading article. Either Microsoft PR is asleep on the job, or they're keeping quiet because the incident reflects poorly on their product.
I know which way I'm betting.
Me neither.
generally does the job for me. Also handy is
Generally from a blank line at the bottom of the file - runs make and drops the output into the vi buffer. You can put /* */ around the line before hand so you don't forget about it and get syntax errors from the compiler output.
That said, I'm a bit lazy. Usually I just type
and I don't get the overhead of having some cumbersome great IDE using up memory and pixels on my machine.
I tend to agree.
Speaking scientifically, however, we can't draw any firm conclusions without a control group. The engineers in question may have been a moderating influence, or they may have been the most repressive, reactionary extremists that could be found in China's engineering community. We can't know for sure unless we can examine a universe where non-engineers were appointed to those posts and all other factors remained the same.
Even then, we could only draw conclusions about the engineers in question. To draw any wide ranging conclusions, we'd need to evaluate thousands of alternate Chinas and plot the number of engineers in government against the progress of it's political system. Of course you'd need a definition of "progress" and a decent set of metrics too, but that's getting away from the point.
The main point I was making was that it's pretty nonsensical to point to China's political system as a reason why having engineers in positions of power would be either ineffective or a bad idea, which is how I read the GP text.