To my defense, that Marines/Navy thing in the US has always confused a bit I guess.
Heh... if you ever want to live dangerously, here are some arguments, pro and con, as to Marines being part of the Navy.
The USMC is part of the Department of the Navy, and the framers were certainly thinking of them (then called the Continental Marines) when they wrote "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States...". So all their paperwork is Dept of Navy, and they get paid by the Dept of Navy. And it's not like they couldn't have their own department, the Air Force gets its own. (It used to be a branch of the Army.) And they wear the same cool Navy hats, which are way better than the Army hats.
Why you'll lose the argument: in the Pentagon, the Marine Corps Commandant is coequal to the Chief of Naval Operations in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By the big test of "can I tell this guy what to do," the Marines are not part of the Navy. And, obviously, they don't do the same training, have the same mission, etc, etc.
How do people manage to cope with all those endless lists?
You ignore the lists and do the actual training hands on. Unfortunately, a lot of guys who never went to college assume that "book learning" is all about rote memorization.
My experience is mostly company level / lower enlisted stuff, especially the "death by powerpoint" training slides.
TRADOC (training and doctrine command) consistently assumes that people have no interest in learning how things work and tries to break everything into endless lists of steps.
For example, in Airborne school, they explained preparing to land like so:
If you are moving forward, pull the rear set of risers to your chest. If you are moving to the left, pull the right set of risers to your chest. If you are moving to the right, pull the left set of risers to your chest. If you are moving backwards, pull the front set of risers to your chest.
What's going on is you pull the risers in the direction you want to go, and your goal is to slow down so you don't get dragged all over the DZ, but they won't simply *say* that even when it's far, far simpler.
Everything is itemized as task, conditions, standards. Everything is a list of steps to memorize, even if there are ten lists with just one thing different between the lists. (If you're curious what they look like, google Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks.)
There are, in fairness, a large number of very well written field manuals. However, most of my experience with training has been from these damned lists of tasks or, worst of all, powerpoint slides generated from lists of tasks; field manuals seem to be something you read on your own time.
What's happened, I think, is that TRADOC is a huge bureaucracy, and they are more concerned with getting everything into a standard format than with the material being useful. They just can't figure out how to produce a large body of coherent thought, and have fallen back on endless checklists and outlines.
Lion-tamers use the same Rule of 3 by using a 4 legged chair to hold back lions ( their minds can manage 3 things threatening 'em, not 4 ).
It's not fair to judge your post and the book you're talking about entirely by this one remark, but experience is telling me: fuck fairness, this guy's an idiot.
That definition doesn't distinguish irony from incongruity. Maybe all irony is a kind of incongruity, but irony as a literary device has to have some symbolic element to it.
By your definition, not going to pee when you need to pee would be ironic. A situation that is the opposite of what you expect is simply unexpected.
Irony is when there is some symbolic element of a situation, often something's name, that is the opposite of that situation. For instance, I was involuntarily recalled and am now stationed at Camp Liberty, *that* is irony.
When I get 5 mod points, I try to spend 3 or 4 upmodding stuff, and usually the last one or two I'll downmod someone who seems to be trying to either drive a wedge between people or something that is way overrated and thus suppressing some of the more interesting lower rated comments. Since I try to browse at 0 or -1, a lot of it depends where the scrollbar takes me.
I can't see how anyone could be a tyrant with 5 mod points. I've certainly seen political threads where liberals and conservatives both upmod their POV, but even then you're trying to find your most reasonable, convincing arguments rather than just upmodding talking points. Most of the time, I can influence a political conversation far more by commenting than by moderating.
Generally, people don't understand that the mod system is a system: it happens to have a human component, and like many similar structures (committees, democracies, etc) it is a structure designed to remove a certain amount of human capriciousness by spreading the task over many elements.
The design goal of the system is that you can browse at 4 or 5 and see relatively interesting comments, and at 2 or 3 and see a fairly in depth discussion. You're looking for justice and trying to banish hypocrisy, but all the designers were looking for was decent conversation and trying to filter out garbage.
OS X does do all that stuff and has been resolution independent under the hood since at least 10.5. If you have Developer Tools installed, Quartz Debug can alter the UI resolution.
Most apps have issues, even some Apple apps are still glitchy. Interestingly, in 10.6, I noticed that iTunes will actually zoom the whole window, indicating that they have an upgrade path for non-resolution independent apps. So we'll probably see it working smoothly by 10.7.
Why do we believe that aliens will be preoccupied with themselves and ignore the cosmic plot, just like we humans do? perhaps aliens evolved from a kind of ants, for example, where the 'we' is above the 'I'.
Instead of "I'm going to play Half Life" the ants would be saying "let's play Half Life." Same end state.
"First off, the Army gets to be pretty picky about who it lets in."
WHAT!? They are letting in convicted felons, non U.S. citizens, gang bangers, all kinds of malcontents these days just to get BODIES to go fight in Afganistan and Iraq. I know - I have friends and family SERVING in the Army right now (no none of them are in the above list - they know people who are though). We have PYCHOS's in the Army killing kids FOR FUN, killing dogs FOR FUN, killing reporters and kids FOR FUN! Read the news watch the videos WIkileaks released!
I'm currently in Baghdad, and I've done five years active prior to that. I've heard my share of stories. I also know that a lot of guys are totally full of shit; if some guy claims he had 200 confirmed kills, I assume it's more like 20. If someone claims he killed a civilian and the guy hasn't just got out of prison, he's probably lying.
There were a lot of dogs killed. This was often requested by locals; Muslims generally consider dogs to be pests like rats, and they are a major problem in this region. The biggest problem was never dogs being killed, it was camels; they threatened us with having to pay the $25k if we killed a camel.
Also, most vets I've talked do dislike the children, but no one goes around randomly killing them or any other civilians. All these fantastic stories have to be squared with the fact that there is a justice system in place and soldiers do go to prison when they break the law.
There are gangs that are actively trying to infiltrate the Army, I guess to get the training on weapons and tactics. If felons are getting in, it's because background checks failed, which is liable to happen when you're recruiting for an organization that has hundreds of thousands of people.
Paying bad teachers more doesn't make them teach better. There are good teachers out there who deserve more for what they put into their jobs, and plenty more people who would make great teachers but won't take that big a pay cut from their current jobs in science, engineering, etc.
Similarly, elementary schools don't need two "counselors" each making $70k+. High schools don't need "career counselors" making $90k. And the school board doesn't need six figures (hell, no elected official does). Stop wasting money on administration and get some better teachers.
I'll be up front and admit that I have no idea how much teachers and administrators should be paid. However, I know that if someone wrote the same thing about IT people, we'd be pointing out that if you don't offer a decent salary, you're guaranteed to get crap people.
Hire some former drill instructors to fix discipline problems. Yes, your little deviant brat who "would never do anything bad" might get his feelings hurt a little bit, but maybe he'll finally get his shit straight and go on to be a decent member of society.
Understanding how the recruiting process works might dispel the notion that some guy screaming at people can turn "deviants" into good citizens.
First off, the Army gets to be pretty picky about who it lets in. They can screen out a lot of physical and mental disorders that few employers are allowed to screen. And felonies are right out, whereas schools pretty much have to teach kids even if they've been expelled from other schools.
Now, my experience was combat arms, so this may not be as universal in the Army as it should be. But even if only at an abstract level, we understood that the stuff we were doing could get us or our buddies killed, which becomes pretty concrete when you're dealing with heavy weapons. Further, there was a real sense of camaraderie, and the feeling that we were doing something truly worthwhile. I was older than others, but I thought that even for teenagers they were pretty damned good about paying attention, even when no one was looking over their shoulders.
Finally, our drill sergeants (drill instructor is the Marine term) had gone through everything we were going through. Just in case they hadn't, in drill sergeant school they got to be treated like brand new privates. So the younger guys especially looked up to them and tried to emulate them.
None of those three factors are in play in a school. The bottom line is that parents aren't going to listen to any erudite arguments as to why some guy is yelling at their precious baby, they're just going hire a lawyer and sue the school into submission.
People have been trying to block the spread of ideas since before the invention of the printing press. They've always failed.
Really? In the States and other countries, there have been fairly extensive "campaign finance" laws. These basically restrict the flow of cash, and thus the ability to spread ideas, for non-incumbent parties. They have been extremely successful at shutting up difficult opposition.
Not true. Most car accidents occur within 5 miles of one's home.... I'm not sure based on the 5 miles rule that your statement "the more time you spend in a car the more likely you are to die in a car accident" holds water.
The reason that factoid was invented was to encourage people not to be complacent when making short trips. I can't really say it's wrong because "most" could be as little as 50%.
The only reason most accidents happen close to home is that people tend to make lots of short trips, and short trips tend to be close to home. Also, if you drive 10 miles out and back, you half that trip was within 5 miles of home.
Their friends are doing it because their friends are doing it; that's really what a movement is. The whole notion of social justice encapsulates it neatly: it's a circular reasoning that what you're doing is right because it's justice, which is simply another way of saying it's what's right. (As opposed to legal justice, which derives from the consent of the governed.) It's a bit like your typical corporate drone explaining that they do something because it's policy, in other words, they do that because that's what they do.
First of all, I never claimed that folks who are in their late teens/early 20s are going to be pillars of the community or moral paragons...
I thought you were subscribing to a romantic stereotype of college students. The fact is that on a very simple ethical question, "should I cheat on this test," an overwhelming majority of college kids can't bring themselves to do the right thing. In fairness, though, colleges give them terrible feedback by reducing their entirety of their accomplishments to a BS number; credit scores are another example of that.
Yeah... Seems to me that the late teens/early 20's are when most people get all activist and start trying to save the world.
At that age, the save-the-world types do it because their friends are doing it. Early to late teens are the age when people cheat in school, bully each other, shoplift, vandalize; generally people are at an ethical low point at that age.
Right, so a post about evolution is modded offtopic on a discussion about evolution, and when I (who isn't Christian or creationist, check my other posts on this discussion) complain about a blatant abuse of the mod system, that's just some persecution complex?
"A bunch of WATB's who need to STFU."
Fortunately, I doubt they're going to respect the wishes of snot-nosed little bitch like you.
We have a pretty, consistent tree of evolution extracted from fossyls. How difficult is it to look at the big picture and say that evolution s the most probable explanation?
I've never looked at the fossil record. I think evolution happens because the math makes it work that way. But, yeah, from what I've heard the fossil record is pretty overwhelming.
But Creationism is mostly an exercise in denying evidence. You can't very well carry the fossil record in your pocket, and if you're simply debating they have enough false claims that refuting the all means you can only draw even in the minds of the audience.
Scratch that, theres one fact thats even better to make you think a bit about life: a human body is composed of TEN non-animal (bacteria, "protozoa", fungi...) cells for every one "truly living" human cell. So, were just made up of 1 part living stuff and the other 10 parts are non-living crap?
A bacterial cell is on the order of 1pg, whereas human cells are around 1ng. So they're on the order of 1% of your mass.
You've probably got more non-living mass in your gut and colon if you haven't taken a good dump lately.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was just tweaking you.
To my defense, that Marines/Navy thing in the US has always confused a bit I guess.
Heh... if you ever want to live dangerously, here are some arguments, pro and con, as to Marines being part of the Navy.
The USMC is part of the Department of the Navy, and the framers were certainly thinking of them (then called the Continental Marines) when they wrote "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States...". So all their paperwork is Dept of Navy, and they get paid by the Dept of Navy. And it's not like they couldn't have their own department, the Air Force gets its own. (It used to be a branch of the Army.) And they wear the same cool Navy hats, which are way better than the Army hats.
Why you'll lose the argument: in the Pentagon, the Marine Corps Commandant is coequal to the Chief of Naval Operations in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By the big test of "can I tell this guy what to do," the Marines are not part of the Navy. And, obviously, they don't do the same training, have the same mission, etc, etc.
How do people manage to cope with all those endless lists?
You ignore the lists and do the actual training hands on. Unfortunately, a lot of guys who never went to college assume that "book learning" is all about rote memorization.
My experience is mostly company level / lower enlisted stuff, especially the "death by powerpoint" training slides.
TRADOC (training and doctrine command) consistently assumes that people have no interest in learning how things work and tries to break everything into endless lists of steps.
For example, in Airborne school, they explained preparing to land like so:
If you are moving forward, pull the rear set of risers to your chest. If you are moving to the left, pull the right set of risers to your chest. If you are moving to the right, pull the left set of risers to your chest. If you are moving backwards, pull the front set of risers to your chest.
What's going on is you pull the risers in the direction you want to go, and your goal is to slow down so you don't get dragged all over the DZ, but they won't simply *say* that even when it's far, far simpler.
Everything is itemized as task, conditions, standards. Everything is a list of steps to memorize, even if there are ten lists with just one thing different between the lists. (If you're curious what they look like, google Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks.)
There are, in fairness, a large number of very well written field manuals. However, most of my experience with training has been from these damned lists of tasks or, worst of all, powerpoint slides generated from lists of tasks; field manuals seem to be something you read on your own time.
What's happened, I think, is that TRADOC is a huge bureaucracy, and they are more concerned with getting everything into a standard format than with the material being useful. They just can't figure out how to produce a large body of coherent thought, and have fallen back on endless checklists and outlines.
Lion-tamers use the same Rule of 3 by using a 4 legged chair to hold back lions
( their minds can manage 3 things threatening 'em, not 4 ).
It's not fair to judge your post and the book you're talking about entirely by this one remark, but experience is telling me: fuck fairness, this guy's an idiot.
Ok but; were you a General when in the Navy ?
The Navy has Admirals, not Generals.
Yes, last night a guy from the company was reading /. and his boss got angry and drew up plans to put cruise missiles in conexs.
That definition doesn't distinguish irony from incongruity. Maybe all irony is a kind of incongruity, but irony as a literary device has to have some symbolic element to it.
By your definition, not going to pee when you need to pee would be ironic. A situation that is the opposite of what you expect is simply unexpected.
Irony is when there is some symbolic element of a situation, often something's name, that is the opposite of that situation. For instance, I was involuntarily recalled and am now stationed at Camp Liberty, *that* is irony.
When I get 5 mod points, I try to spend 3 or 4 upmodding stuff, and usually the last one or two I'll downmod someone who seems to be trying to either drive a wedge between people or something that is way overrated and thus suppressing some of the more interesting lower rated comments. Since I try to browse at 0 or -1, a lot of it depends where the scrollbar takes me.
I can't see how anyone could be a tyrant with 5 mod points. I've certainly seen political threads where liberals and conservatives both upmod their POV, but even then you're trying to find your most reasonable, convincing arguments rather than just upmodding talking points. Most of the time, I can influence a political conversation far more by commenting than by moderating.
Generally, people don't understand that the mod system is a system: it happens to have a human component, and like many similar structures (committees, democracies, etc) it is a structure designed to remove a certain amount of human capriciousness by spreading the task over many elements.
The design goal of the system is that you can browse at 4 or 5 and see relatively interesting comments, and at 2 or 3 and see a fairly in depth discussion. You're looking for justice and trying to banish hypocrisy, but all the designers were looking for was decent conversation and trying to filter out garbage.
OS X does do all that stuff and has been resolution independent under the hood since at least 10.5. If you have Developer Tools installed, Quartz Debug can alter the UI resolution.
Most apps have issues, even some Apple apps are still glitchy. Interestingly, in 10.6, I noticed that iTunes will actually zoom the whole window, indicating that they have an upgrade path for non-resolution independent apps. So we'll probably see it working smoothly by 10.7.
Google had a cloud printing service set up ages ago, so how's this new?
Why do we believe that aliens will be preoccupied with themselves and ignore the cosmic plot, just like we humans do? perhaps aliens evolved from a kind of ants, for example, where the 'we' is above the 'I'.
Instead of "I'm going to play Half Life" the ants would be saying "let's play Half Life." Same end state.
Your source does prefer "bald-faced", but it explicitly says: "The phrase can either be used as bold-faced lie..."
Perhaps you should actually read the article before you link to it.
Now that's just crazy talk.
"First off, the Army gets to be pretty picky about who it lets in."
WHAT!? They are letting in convicted felons, non U.S. citizens, gang bangers, all kinds of malcontents these days just to get BODIES to go fight in Afganistan and Iraq. I know - I have friends and family SERVING in the Army right now (no none of them are in the above list - they know people who are though). We have PYCHOS's in the Army killing kids FOR FUN, killing dogs FOR FUN, killing reporters and kids FOR FUN! Read the news watch the videos WIkileaks released!
I'm currently in Baghdad, and I've done five years active prior to that. I've heard my share of stories. I also know that a lot of guys are totally full of shit; if some guy claims he had 200 confirmed kills, I assume it's more like 20. If someone claims he killed a civilian and the guy hasn't just got out of prison, he's probably lying.
There were a lot of dogs killed. This was often requested by locals; Muslims generally consider dogs to be pests like rats, and they are a major problem in this region. The biggest problem was never dogs being killed, it was camels; they threatened us with having to pay the $25k if we killed a camel.
Also, most vets I've talked do dislike the children, but no one goes around randomly killing them or any other civilians. All these fantastic stories have to be squared with the fact that there is a justice system in place and soldiers do go to prison when they break the law.
There are gangs that are actively trying to infiltrate the Army, I guess to get the training on weapons and tactics. If felons are getting in, it's because background checks failed, which is liable to happen when you're recruiting for an organization that has hundreds of thousands of people.
Paying bad teachers more doesn't make them teach better. There are good teachers out there who deserve more for what they put into their jobs, and plenty more people who would make great teachers but won't take that big a pay cut from their current jobs in science, engineering, etc.
Similarly, elementary schools don't need two "counselors" each making $70k+. High schools don't need "career counselors" making $90k. And the school board doesn't need six figures (hell, no elected official does). Stop wasting money on administration and get some better teachers.
I'll be up front and admit that I have no idea how much teachers and administrators should be paid. However, I know that if someone wrote the same thing about IT people, we'd be pointing out that if you don't offer a decent salary, you're guaranteed to get crap people.
Hire some former drill instructors to fix discipline problems. Yes, your little deviant brat who "would never do anything bad" might get his feelings hurt a little bit, but maybe he'll finally get his shit straight and go on to be a decent member of society.
Understanding how the recruiting process works might dispel the notion that some guy screaming at people can turn "deviants" into good citizens.
First off, the Army gets to be pretty picky about who it lets in. They can screen out a lot of physical and mental disorders that few employers are allowed to screen. And felonies are right out, whereas schools pretty much have to teach kids even if they've been expelled from other schools.
Now, my experience was combat arms, so this may not be as universal in the Army as it should be. But even if only at an abstract level, we understood that the stuff we were doing could get us or our buddies killed, which becomes pretty concrete when you're dealing with heavy weapons. Further, there was a real sense of camaraderie, and the feeling that we were doing something truly worthwhile. I was older than others, but I thought that even for teenagers they were pretty damned good about paying attention, even when no one was looking over their shoulders.
Finally, our drill sergeants (drill instructor is the Marine term) had gone through everything we were going through. Just in case they hadn't, in drill sergeant school they got to be treated like brand new privates. So the younger guys especially looked up to them and tried to emulate them.
None of those three factors are in play in a school. The bottom line is that parents aren't going to listen to any erudite arguments as to why some guy is yelling at their precious baby, they're just going hire a lawyer and sue the school into submission.
People have been trying to block the spread of ideas since before the invention of the printing press.
They've always failed.
Really? In the States and other countries, there have been fairly extensive "campaign finance" laws. These basically restrict the flow of cash, and thus the ability to spread ideas, for non-incumbent parties. They have been extremely successful at shutting up difficult opposition.
RTFS: they ruled out socioeconomic factors.
Not true. Most car accidents occur within 5 miles of one's home. ... I'm not sure based on the 5 miles rule that your statement "the more time you spend in a car the more likely you are to die in a car accident" holds water.
The reason that factoid was invented was to encourage people not to be complacent when making short trips. I can't really say it's wrong because "most" could be as little as 50%.
The only reason most accidents happen close to home is that people tend to make lots of short trips, and short trips tend to be close to home. Also, if you drive 10 miles out and back, you half that trip was within 5 miles of home.
And why are their friends doing it?
Their friends are doing it because their friends are doing it; that's really what a movement is. The whole notion of social justice encapsulates it neatly: it's a circular reasoning that what you're doing is right because it's justice, which is simply another way of saying it's what's right. (As opposed to legal justice, which derives from the consent of the governed.) It's a bit like your typical corporate drone explaining that they do something because it's policy, in other words, they do that because that's what they do.
First of all, I never claimed that folks who are in their late teens/early 20s are going to be pillars of the community or moral paragons...
I thought you were subscribing to a romantic stereotype of college students. The fact is that on a very simple ethical question, "should I cheat on this test," an overwhelming majority of college kids can't bring themselves to do the right thing. In fairness, though, colleges give them terrible feedback by reducing their entirety of their accomplishments to a BS number; credit scores are another example of that.
Funny, I did think about ethics when I was 20.
Yeah... Seems to me that the late teens/early 20's are when most people get all activist and start trying to save the world.
At that age, the save-the-world types do it because their friends are doing it. Early to late teens are the age when people cheat in school, bully each other, shoplift, vandalize; generally people are at an ethical low point at that age.
Again, I think people are unclear on the whole "reboot" concept.
Pretty sure they're clear on it, you're the one who doesn't use Windows too often.
Right, so a post about evolution is modded offtopic on a discussion about evolution, and when I (who isn't Christian or creationist, check my other posts on this discussion) complain about a blatant abuse of the mod system, that's just some persecution complex?
"A bunch of WATB's who need to STFU."
Fortunately, I doubt they're going to respect the wishes of snot-nosed little bitch like you.
We have a pretty, consistent tree of evolution extracted from fossyls. How difficult is it to look at the big picture and say that evolution s the most probable explanation?
I've never looked at the fossil record. I think evolution happens because the math makes it work that way. But, yeah, from what I've heard the fossil record is pretty overwhelming.
But Creationism is mostly an exercise in denying evidence. You can't very well carry the fossil record in your pocket, and if you're simply debating they have enough false claims that refuting the all means you can only draw even in the minds of the audience.
Scratch that, theres one fact thats even better to make you think a bit about life: a human body is composed of TEN non-animal (bacteria, "protozoa", fungi...) cells for every one "truly living" human cell. So, were just made up of 1 part living stuff and the other 10 parts are non-living crap?
A bacterial cell is on the order of 1pg, whereas human cells are around 1ng. So they're on the order of 1% of your mass.
You've probably got more non-living mass in your gut and colon if you haven't taken a good dump lately.