I would have to say that all this anti intellectualism on slashdot is very odd. I figured that/.ers would be people who are searching for the truth.
Just like a picture is worth a thousand words, words themselves are worth more than their "text" value.
Some people read too much into things to impress others (or themselves), while other people are discounted as reading too much into things while in the pursuit of a deeper meaning (when there actually is deeper meaning). There can even be a deeper meaning than the author ever intended in putting into a text. The author can steadfastly refuse that it is even there, but it can still be there.
The reason why I get upset at this anti-intellectualism is that there is actual purpose to understanding things at a deeper level. It's not just artsy-fartsy claptrap. It's an attempt to challenge ourselves and our societies to improvement though understanding communication.
At a very simple level I can offer analogies of usefulness of decostruction. If you understand why someone is saying something, you can second guess them. If you understand that a person coming from a certain point of view says certain things then you can use "intuition" to anticipate and respond accordingly sometimes contrary to literal speach and action. This gives us such bounty as knowing when someone is lying to us, Understanding when we are going to get fired, and when a cute person is flirting with us. These are simple uncluttered things that we deconstruct instantly and silently all the time. The deconstruction that others do is a more complicated more time consuming process, but a process that yields results nonetheless.
I guess the best engineering analogy would be that deconstructing something gives us feedback and closes the loop on expression and thought. Now some deconstrution is so annoying and flamboyant that it does seem intelectually bankrupt, and it produces zero feedback value (or even worse deconstructive feedback (mind the pun)). Some deconstruction has valuable elements that are thrown out due to anti-intellectualism, eliminating a valuable feedback network.
It's as if there is this giant control system that encompases all of us, affects the way we interact with one another globally, and locally, yet we eschew a method to make our orchestrations more wieldly. Look it up, it's "meta-communication." It's subjective but damn interesting.
As a final thought to a poorly composed rant: you can either sift through the crap and get some value out of these intellectual pursuits, or you can be a linguistic/intellectual luddite.
This is very frustrating, because the original impact of the actual study done was very striking indeed. It was done in a small representative ecosystem where the X number of species were going to be extinct, not by 2050, but the wheels were going to be set in motion and irreversable by 2050. It went something along the lines of a certain species has 1.4 offspring. After the effects of manmade climate change, their offspring rate would slip slowly to something like 1.1. Once they go below a certain threshold, a famine or catastrophy could bring a species below a critical mass.
Then some bozo took that data from the actual study and then in a press release extrapolated the data and marred the information to be 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals all dead and gone by 2050. The actual people who did the study were very upset that their data was manipulated like that, because it winds up coming off as being a very unlikely and unreasonable result.
Beta Max is not crappy proprietary hardware. They still use it in television stations. You have probably watched more television being played off a betamax tape than you have ever watched anything on a VHS.
I can think of another piece of hardware that Sony makes, what is it called? The Playstation?
But you're right on this MD being part of Voltron. Most likely the green lion.
I would mostly agree with you. Although I make a pretty clip right out of school, I'm pretty much trapped working somewhere in I.T.
I have mixed feelings about the whole sense of "indentured servitude."
On one hand I should feel lucky as hell I grew up when I did, and that I had a chance to go to a kick ass school. I should also be very very glad that I can afford to pay back my loans. (that's the non whiny pull myself up by my bootstraps part of me talking)
On the other hand, it wasn't until about a year ago that I realized that I would've rathter hacked it out in some other field, or at a cheaper school. Now I'm stuck with a shitload of debt. (whine, whine, poor me)
One thing to keep in mind is that your interest on student loans is tax deductable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that stupid people from great schools get hired just about as often as smart people from less reputable schools. I would recommend the cheaper option.
A final thing to keep in mind is that we are all going to have to work in the bleach mines after the nano-wars of 2037 so you should probably do something cool like go to Clown School.
Zelda Windwaker too difficult? I'm not tooting my own horn, but I beat it without dying once. That qualifies the game as rediculously easy in my book. Maybe I should take up that arcade game I saw down the street at my trailer park. What was it called...The Last Starfighter?
2002/2003. Same year, different number. I'm glad that we could Mini-Ego battle. I hope your extra two little points of esteem will go well with the other four. Hear is a spelling error for you to comment on as well.
While I'm at it, try reading "Moldies and Meatbops" by Rudy Rucker. That one was compiled around 1997, but for some damn reason that one counts for 2003 too. Maybe because it's good.
I don't know why I wasn't logged in when I made that quip, but it came as an AC. My MO is to be a well known coward.
At any rate, the only reason I noticed it was marked as AC is because I wanted to apologize for being an asshole. I'm sorry.
The sequel to Trainspotting starts off with Sickboy wanking it to Hillary and Monica by page 3. The characters are truly depraved and messed up. While not all of us are perfect, most of us slashdotters avoid the dregs of society and all their ills. It's good to get some insight to the book's underworld.
"The US has killed far more people than Saddam ever hoped to"
Look, I wish we didn't start the war the way that we did, but I don't think the above statement is true. Maybe if you count the Civil war. And Phillip Morris.
"If you liberals had your way, Saddam would still be killing these people, instead, we stayed strong and now he's been captured."
Um...no. If we liberals had our way we wouldn't have been seling him WMD in the first place. We wouldn't have stood for the UN sanctions that helped kill millions in the 90s. We wouldn't have used depleted uranium shells in the 1991 war.
I think that the main reason why so many left wing thinkers appear to be Saddam Huggers right now is because we are mad at the president. We are mad at the way he acts, we are mad at the way he talks. If this were a war of liberation, and always was one from the beginning, then yes, he would have my full support. But there's something fishy about the Pres and his actions. It's hard to support war when you can't trust the leader's motives. He wouldn't give a rats ass about the Iraqi people if he weren't scared shitless that the Saddam would razzle the youths into making one way trips to America.
Am I happy he's captured? Damn Straight. Hopefully this will take the wind out of a lot of the "terrorism" guerilla fighting. I want peace in Iraq and I want our soldiers to be safe.
Why am I still bitching? Because the president has the gall to call his critics "revisionist historians." Because everytime we try and bring up the shortcomings of America we are told that we are "out of step" with mainstream America.
We're targets for terror for some very good reasons. There is a simple way to address those reasons and still go kick some terrorist ass. We're bitching even though they've captured Saddam, because the president says things like "The terrorists hate us because we support freedom." Yes the terrorists hate us because we have ways of life that are unacceptable in a more strict conservative culture. But they also hate us because we're swaggering assholes.
I'm sick of it being either or. Either you support the president or you support the terrorists. Either you support the troops or you personally sleep with a grin everytime a soldier is killed. We are all on the same side. Some of us are just very very scared that Bush has this much power. It doesn't take much to make things escalate, and the president doesn't always demonstrate wise decision makeing skills. We should all be very thankfull the surrounding countries have been level headed.
"So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power? All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters."
It's simple. The US has proven themselves multiple times to be complete dicks. They lie, spy, and try and set up insurrections or assasinations.
I love so many aspects about America and freedom, it makes me so mad when our leaders do something to make me ashamed of this country. I'm not excusing SH for acting the way he did, but if the US was bullying me, I would definitely fuck with their heads.
From here on when discussing Iraq and Terrorism, I want to take a center line. Yes, we are doing the right thing and are heroes. No, we are doing the wrong thing because we are not admitting to how much of US action helped create this situation in the first place. US citizens who criticize the US are just as big patriots as those who love the country no matter what.
Again I hate replying to ACs but once again nationalism has gotten in the way of truth. Yes the USA does do good. It also does bad. Ignoring the bad is one of the worst things that can be done. Most of the US citizens that criticize the US would probably settle down a little bit if the popular self-perception of the US was a little bit less glazed over.
Yes, we're heroes in the middle east. But no we're not, because we contributed heavily to the whole situation. Admitting that the US is also wrong isn't cozying up to hitler, it's the truth.
I hate replying to ACs, but the whole point of pointing out what's wrong is to bring it into the discussion. If everyone is complacent with a problem it will never get dealt with.
As for not having the guts to get up and put it all on the line, how the hell does one "put it all on the line" I'm supposed to get off the couch and fight all the major media outlets, all the backwards social groups, all the corrupt corporations and the powerhungry military complex to boot? It's not like we can put on fatigues and start shooting at people. The only power this worker bee has is to "whine" about what is wrong, and try to make it an issue, so more than one person can focus it.
If you define innovation as successful technology solutions that make a lot of money by being accepted by large amounts of people because the ideas came from a large company with lots of cash, then yes, innovation only comes from large companies Larry. (I protect this run-on fragment from all grammatical criticism. Just sit on your hands and silently tsk tsk)
I would agree with the ban on family assistance, except for guilt inspired love based exchange of services. My mother not only carried me in her womb, but raised me for 18 years of my life. She gets tech support into her golden years.
My siblings on the other hand only get free advice.
Aunts and Uncles? I only help the ones without children.
Crap. I must have not said what I thought I said because I misspelled it. Too bad I'm not speaking a language where people appreciate that the redundancies allow us to still communicate.
You are looking at this all wrong. This small change in linguistics prevents the worldwide destruction in the Moldie-Cyborg war of 2139. This prevents the Socialist "Autobots" from teaming up with the biohacked humans to fight against the controling Right Wing "Decepticons." The robot/mold people of the future fully accept the replacement terms of "Pimp" and "Bitch."
The same way Neo learns kung fu in M1. They upload a program which rewrites the neural layout of the brain.
Agent Smith figures out a way to take the neurological stimulus to the brain in the stim-connection and translate that into neurological. It's a brain hack.
Our neurological paths are all changed by our observations and senses. Since the exact nature of the stim-connection is never explained, I can only speculate as to it's nature. There is obviously something from the "real world" side that can write to the brain to train Neo and the like. Smith transferered code through the pirate link, and used those routines to overwrite the neural network.
As the assistant to the deputy mayor of the internet I hereby shield the above post from any flames, attacks, or corrections from any typographical errors. This shield specifically covers, but is not limited to, the misplacement of commas.
Any future posts referring to typos that do not change the contextual message of the above post will be considered posted by a jerk.
I find it ironic that an article about substance over style has over 137 comments to it, but every one of them is below my (relatively lax) threshold level. What gives? No substance?
No amount of electronic wizardry will help the problem of commuter traffic. A few rotten apples spoil the whole bunch.
All it takes is a few people zooming around inserting them selves rudely to slow down the traffic flow. Some drops in speed provide room for others to merge, but most drops in speed make it easier for cars to pack in. When cars can't merge in, traffic has to stop in order for them to be let in.
I have a secret suspicion that there are less than 20 people messing up the commute (per roadway). Those days that the traffic flows uncannily smooth is when most of those people call in sick.
Sometimes the geek/technology solution can't overcome social patterns.
Why are the roadways clogged?
"Because they're stupid, that's why everyone does everything." - Homer Simpson
Slashdot Mirror
Just like a picture is worth a thousand words, words themselves are worth more than their "text" value.
Some people read too much into things to impress others (or themselves), while other people are discounted as reading too much into things while in the pursuit of a deeper meaning (when there actually is deeper meaning). There can even be a deeper meaning than the author ever intended in putting into a text. The author can steadfastly refuse that it is even there, but it can still be there.
The reason why I get upset at this anti-intellectualism is that there is actual purpose to understanding things at a deeper level. It's not just artsy-fartsy claptrap. It's an attempt to challenge ourselves and our societies to improvement though understanding communication.
At a very simple level I can offer analogies of usefulness of decostruction. If you understand why someone is saying something, you can second guess them. If you understand that a person coming from a certain point of view says certain things then you can use "intuition" to anticipate and respond accordingly sometimes contrary to literal speach and action. This gives us such bounty as knowing when someone is lying to us, Understanding when we are going to get fired, and when a cute person is flirting with us. These are simple uncluttered things that we deconstruct instantly and silently all the time. The deconstruction that others do is a more complicated more time consuming process, but a process that yields results nonetheless.
I guess the best engineering analogy would be that deconstructing something gives us feedback and closes the loop on expression and thought. Now some deconstrution is so annoying and flamboyant that it does seem intelectually bankrupt, and it produces zero feedback value (or even worse deconstructive feedback (mind the pun)). Some deconstruction has valuable elements that are thrown out due to anti-intellectualism, eliminating a valuable feedback network.
It's as if there is this giant control system that encompases all of us, affects the way we interact with one another globally, and locally, yet we eschew a method to make our orchestrations more wieldly. Look it up, it's "meta-communication." It's subjective but damn interesting.
As a final thought to a poorly composed rant: you can either sift through the crap and get some value out of these intellectual pursuits, or you can be a linguistic/intellectual luddite.
Oh, and John F. Kennedy was not a Homosexual.
Then some bozo took that data from the actual study and then in a press release extrapolated the data and marred the information to be 15 to 37 percent of plants and animals all dead and gone by 2050. The actual people who did the study were very upset that their data was manipulated like that, because it winds up coming off as being a very unlikely and unreasonable result.
I can think of another piece of hardware that Sony makes, what is it called? The Playstation?
But you're right on this MD being part of Voltron. Most likely the green lion.
Sneakernet. 1 Gb/s data transfer rate.
I like to think of it as a portable removable drive with music player (albiet a lossy music player).
I have mixed feelings about the whole sense of "indentured servitude."
On one hand I should feel lucky as hell I grew up when I did, and that I had a chance to go to a kick ass school. I should also be very very glad that I can afford to pay back my loans. (that's the non whiny pull myself up by my bootstraps part of me talking)
On the other hand, it wasn't until about a year ago that I realized that I would've rathter hacked it out in some other field, or at a cheaper school. Now I'm stuck with a shitload of debt. (whine, whine, poor me)
One thing to keep in mind is that your interest on student loans is tax deductable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that stupid people from great schools get hired just about as often as smart people from less reputable schools. I would recommend the cheaper option.
A final thing to keep in mind is that we are all going to have to work in the bleach mines after the nano-wars of 2037 so you should probably do something cool like go to Clown School.
I've never actually seen a DDR game in RL. I always see them in movies or commercials. I will check it out.
PS 12 Year old girls are so Punk Rock.
Zelda Windwaker too difficult? I'm not tooting my own horn, but I beat it without dying once. That qualifies the game as rediculously easy in my book. Maybe I should take up that arcade game I saw down the street at my trailer park. What was it called...The Last Starfighter?
While I'm at it, try reading "Moldies and Meatbops" by Rudy Rucker. That one was compiled around 1997, but for some damn reason that one counts for 2003 too. Maybe because it's good.
I don't know why I wasn't logged in when I made that quip, but it came as an AC. My MO is to be a well known coward.
At any rate, the only reason I noticed it was marked as AC is because I wanted to apologize for being an asshole. I'm sorry.
The sequel to Trainspotting starts off with Sickboy wanking it to Hillary and Monica by page 3. The characters are truly depraved and messed up. While not all of us are perfect, most of us slashdotters avoid the dregs of society and all their ills. It's good to get some insight to the book's underworld.
But if you have to interact with people, go with a pen and paper role playing game. People love that shit.
Look, I wish we didn't start the war the way that we did, but I don't think the above statement is true. Maybe if you count the Civil war. And Phillip Morris.
Um...no. If we liberals had our way we wouldn't have been seling him WMD in the first place. We wouldn't have stood for the UN sanctions that helped kill millions in the 90s. We wouldn't have used depleted uranium shells in the 1991 war.
I think that the main reason why so many left wing thinkers appear to be Saddam Huggers right now is because we are mad at the president. We are mad at the way he acts, we are mad at the way he talks. If this were a war of liberation, and always was one from the beginning, then yes, he would have my full support. But there's something fishy about the Pres and his actions. It's hard to support war when you can't trust the leader's motives. He wouldn't give a rats ass about the Iraqi people if he weren't scared shitless that the Saddam would razzle the youths into making one way trips to America.
Am I happy he's captured? Damn Straight. Hopefully this will take the wind out of a lot of the "terrorism" guerilla fighting. I want peace in Iraq and I want our soldiers to be safe.
Why am I still bitching? Because the president has the gall to call his critics "revisionist historians." Because everytime we try and bring up the shortcomings of America we are told that we are "out of step" with mainstream America.
We're targets for terror for some very good reasons. There is a simple way to address those reasons and still go kick some terrorist ass. We're bitching even though they've captured Saddam, because the president says things like "The terrorists hate us because we support freedom." Yes the terrorists hate us because we have ways of life that are unacceptable in a more strict conservative culture. But they also hate us because we're swaggering assholes.
I'm sick of it being either or. Either you support the president or you support the terrorists. Either you support the troops or you personally sleep with a grin everytime a soldier is killed. We are all on the same side. Some of us are just very very scared that Bush has this much power. It doesn't take much to make things escalate, and the president doesn't always demonstrate wise decision makeing skills. We should all be very thankfull the surrounding countries have been level headed.
It's simple. The US has proven themselves multiple times to be complete dicks. They lie, spy, and try and set up insurrections or assasinations.
I love so many aspects about America and freedom, it makes me so mad when our leaders do something to make me ashamed of this country. I'm not excusing SH for acting the way he did, but if the US was bullying me, I would definitely fuck with their heads.
From here on when discussing Iraq and Terrorism, I want to take a center line. Yes, we are doing the right thing and are heroes. No, we are doing the wrong thing because we are not admitting to how much of US action helped create this situation in the first place. US citizens who criticize the US are just as big patriots as those who love the country no matter what.
Yes, we're heroes in the middle east. But no we're not, because we contributed heavily to the whole situation. Admitting that the US is also wrong isn't cozying up to hitler, it's the truth.
As for not having the guts to get up and put it all on the line, how the hell does one "put it all on the line" I'm supposed to get off the couch and fight all the major media outlets, all the backwards social groups, all the corrupt corporations and the powerhungry military complex to boot? It's not like we can put on fatigues and start shooting at people. The only power this worker bee has is to "whine" about what is wrong, and try to make it an issue, so more than one person can focus it.
If you define innovation as successful technology solutions that make a lot of money by being accepted by large amounts of people because the ideas came from a large company with lots of cash, then yes, innovation only comes from large companies Larry. (I protect this run-on fragment from all grammatical criticism. Just sit on your hands and silently tsk tsk)
My siblings on the other hand only get free advice.
Aunts and Uncles? I only help the ones without children.
Crap. I must have not said what I thought I said because I misspelled it. Too bad I'm not speaking a language where people appreciate that the redundancies allow us to still communicate.
I really don't see how they can achieve this with cascaded style sheets (CSS).
You are looking at this all wrong. This small change in linguistics prevents the worldwide destruction in the Moldie-Cyborg war of 2139. This prevents the Socialist "Autobots" from teaming up with the biohacked humans to fight against the controling Right Wing "Decepticons." The robot/mold people of the future fully accept the replacement terms of "Pimp" and "Bitch."
Agent Smith figures out a way to take the neurological stimulus to the brain in the stim-connection and translate that into neurological. It's a brain hack.
Our neurological paths are all changed by our observations and senses. Since the exact nature of the stim-connection is never explained, I can only speculate as to it's nature. There is obviously something from the "real world" side that can write to the brain to train Neo and the like. Smith transferered code through the pirate link, and used those routines to overwrite the neural network.
Ahhh Sarcasm.
As the assistant to the deputy mayor of the internet I hereby shield the above post from any flames, attacks, or corrections from any typographical errors. This shield specifically covers, but is not limited to, the misplacement of commas. Any future posts referring to typos that do not change the contextual message of the above post will be considered posted by a jerk.
I find it ironic that an article about substance over style has over 137 comments to it, but every one of them is below my (relatively lax) threshold level. What gives? No substance?
All it takes is a few people zooming around inserting them selves rudely to slow down the traffic flow. Some drops in speed provide room for others to merge, but most drops in speed make it easier for cars to pack in. When cars can't merge in, traffic has to stop in order for them to be let in.
I have a secret suspicion that there are less than 20 people messing up the commute (per roadway). Those days that the traffic flows uncannily smooth is when most of those people call in sick.
Sometimes the geek/technology solution can't overcome social patterns.
Why are the roadways clogged?
"Because they're stupid, that's why everyone does everything." - Homer Simpson