Queue up all the people who want to explain that "queue" is both an intransitive verb meaning "to get into queue" ("I queued up for the big movie opening") and a transitive verb meaning "to put something into a queue" ("I queued up a bunch of music on my playlist").
Of course, neither have anything to directly to do with the original "cue" meme, which comes from direction and means to signal someone to begin performing their part.
I'm sure that's what you're on about.
That said, the "queue" (transitive verb) is a viable functional alternative: picture lining up people to say their piece about the subject at hand.
You can't really defend against it since it doesn't really leave any open vectors of attack to work with.
I'm aware of how hard it is to oppose that kind of humiliation. My usual response is to ignore it. It lets the mocker know exactly how much his "participation" is worth: nothing at all. Either they mock louder, which just tires them out (and frankly, very few can outshout me), or they escalate to something which is easier to directly counter.
As Ghandi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
"It's like telling someone being bullied that they just need to stand up for them self. Sure that might work but they are the ones in the underdog position.
True. Success is not assured. But the effort is its own form of self-expression, and a valiant effort, even ending in failure, is one hallmark of a truly human being.
It's hard to stand when people keeps on walking over you back.
I think you stopped too soon. You had the opportunity to distill GP's argument to its crystalline essence, its fundamental core beauty. And you didn't take the final step.
GP's argument, with all its rhetorical flourishes and baroque refinement stripped away, is:
Censorship comes in many forms including self censorship
Basically true.
and censorship by ridicule.
Now you lost it. Ridicule isn't censorship. If's freedom from censorship. If I ridicule you, I hope you keep talking, so I can keep ridiculing.
If ridicule censors you, that's you self-censoring for invalid reasons. Freedom requires courage sometimes. At some level, you can't blame someone else for your own lack of courage. (Yes, at the extreme, that means courage unto death. It's been done, and someday in the future it may need doing again.) But courage in the face of asshattery isn't so extreme, and the lack of it is properly risible.
starts to mean something when the prosecution has a vested interest
The prosecution always has a vested interest. It's called an adversarial justice system for a reason: there's one winner and one loser. And the prosecution certainly doesn't want to be the loser. Neither does the defense. In both cases, selfish interests (career goals, politics, pride) serve to apply pressure to that adversarial standing. As long as no one "cheats", the victory goes to the side with the better facts and better persuasion.
Sounds to me like Childs couldn't get his facts across sufficiently persuasively.
As to the unevenness of sentencing: I haven't studied the cases cited in TFA, but one looks like it's in a different jurisdiction (New Jersey), so the law broken may have been different and may have had different prescribed penalties. Even the California statute has (to my non-lawyer eyes) confusing variability.
Again. the unevenness of the sentencing tells us nothing, except that sentencing is uneven.
Well, guess what. No matter how much you may think it, generalized poor management is not actually a criminal offense. Whereas, denial of service is.
Justice is not about fairness. It's "did you break the law, and if so what's the stated punishment?"
Was the ordinance used to convict him fair and reasonably applied? The only opinion that matters is the jury's, and they thought it so.
IMHO, Childs may have started out with the best of intentions in his "stand", but it escalated into a pissing match. And you really can't out-piss senior municipal managers and politicians, so you can indict Childs for picking a losing fight.
And I'm point out that you're interpreting the marketing statement as someone versed and competent at arithmetic. I'm pointing out that it's marketing math, and therefore needs to be boiled down to 2nd-grade-level.
I stand by my interpretation: 100% (current Oracle RDBMS customers) - 40% (Oracle+Solaris customers) = 60%.
Remember: marketing math. Mathematics, Jim, but not as we know it.
It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
And that may be the sole bright spot in this sad saga. An opportunity to cleanly and distinctively fork, so there's clearly Oracle Solaris and Illumos Open Solaris. The weird, coy, half-open thing the community had before was a losing proposition.
I'm a little suspicious of the apparent over-simplicity of the interpretation I'm about to lay out here, but I temper that with the understanding that this is marketing math.
40% of Oracle's enterprise customers are running Oracle (the RDBMS... remember that?) on Solaris. That means that 60% are running Oracle on some other OS. (Linux is prominent in that, I think. Can anyone find some statistics?)
Anyways, that 60% (Oracle on non-Oracle OS) is the "60% growth opportunity" the market-droid is spewing about.
Once, in a Microsoft interview, I was asked to write a memory allocator. I always assumed that after I left, the conversation went like:
"Great, copy this down.
You might think that, but let's face it, memory management in Windows hasn't visibly improved in decades*. Any number of interview candidate submissions could have helped, and yet it hasn't.
*I kid. I'm not a Windows fanboi, but at least Win 7 x64 isn't thrashing all the damn time on my system at home. It's almost Linux-grade!
We were never allowed calculators in university, why do they give them to kids?
Actually, there's an interesting insight in that statement. If most of the arithmetic you've ever done is just poking digits and operations into a calculator, this math problem looks like a simple chained addition with a running equals sign. I'm not sure if any other of the commentators in this thread picked up on this (mostly because you'd have to RTFA, and we know that's pretty much unheard of.) The summary doesn't mention calculators, but the entire cargo-cult handling of numbers implied by this reported mathematical literacy problem is pretty much driven by calculators.
Kinda makes me think we should abolish infix-entry calculators and stick with RPN like God intended.
Interesting. I guess we can look forward to less obscenity in the comments of released FOSS source code. As well as the stated goal of making "sure developers did not leave comments in the source code about future products, product code names, mention of competitors, etc."
Well, ok, that last bit about competitors may be a reference to swearing.
Yes. The summary makes this article look like a complete case of "Not News for Nerds, Stuff That Doesn't Matter". (Most of the article is, but there appears to be some geek goodness toward the end. And some of the über nerds here will sniff that dependency and library management isn't an issue if you'd just compile it all from source every time.)
And Article 15 is Commander's Non-Judicial Punishment, which amounts to "We drop the charges if you accept your commander's non-sentence sentence." Not quite a plea bargain, but a similar concept.
If you knew how military officers work, it goes like this: Something is wrong, they do *SOMETHING*.
I was never an officer, just a senior noncom. And a technical one, to boot. As an enlisted tech, the general attitude is "get it as right as you can in the time you have, and if time isn't an object get it completely right." It took me a while to grok that the basic rule of officer leadership is "It's better to be decisive than right."
More powerpoints.
If you ask me, that's the problem. It definitely appeals to the "decision now" mindset by reducing the situation to bullet points (the management equivalent to sound bites). But a leader should be more situationally aware than can be instilled with PowerPoint. Snap decisions based on real on-the-ground knowledge has a significantly greater chance of being right than snap decisions based on bullet papers.
is called "Desertion" and a capital offense in wartime. "Cowardice before the enemy" is also traditionally a capital offense in wartime.
The fundamental principle is this: if you're a lawful uniformed combatant in a combat situation, you have two legal choices: fight or die. And if you're gonna die, you're supposed to die fighting. "Surrender" is a viable option, but if you do it before justifiable in the eyes of your command that's probably unlawful.
Self-preservation is not a prized personal value in warfare.
Oh well. In my military career, the existence of the "unlimited liability" of a sworn military member gave me an excellent explanation to my wife when my commanders wanted me to do something uncomfortable, inconvenient, or silly: "'Reasonable' does not apply to an organization which can require me to lay down my life for absolutely no good reason."
Slashdot Mirror
Queue up all the people who want to explain that "queue" is both an intransitive verb meaning "to get into queue" ("I queued up for the big movie opening") and a transitive verb meaning "to put something into a queue" ("I queued up a bunch of music on my playlist").
Of course, neither have anything to directly to do with the original "cue" meme, which comes from direction and means to signal someone to begin performing their part.
I'm sure that's what you're on about.
That said, the "queue" (transitive verb) is a viable functional alternative: picture lining up people to say their piece about the subject at hand.
"Server is too busy. Please try visiting us in a few minutes."
No, wait, that's Slashdot taking over that blog. Never mind. Carry on.
(So much for reading TFA.)
You can't really defend against it since it doesn't really leave any open vectors of attack to work with.
I'm aware of how hard it is to oppose that kind of humiliation. My usual response is to ignore it. It lets the mocker know exactly how much his "participation" is worth: nothing at all. Either they mock louder, which just tires them out (and frankly, very few can outshout me), or they escalate to something which is easier to directly counter.
As Ghandi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
"It's like telling someone being bullied that they just need to stand up for them self. Sure that might work but they are the ones in the underdog position.
True. Success is not assured. But the effort is its own form of self-expression, and a valiant effort, even ending in failure, is one hallmark of a truly human being.
It's hard to stand when people keeps on walking over you back.
It's harder to stand up if you don't even try.
I think you stopped too soon. You had the opportunity to distill GP's argument to its crystalline essence, its fundamental core beauty. And you didn't take the final step.
GP's argument, with all its rhetorical flourishes and baroque refinement stripped away, is:
"You're different from me so you suck. Derp."
Censorship comes in many forms including self censorship
Basically true.
and censorship by ridicule.
Now you lost it. Ridicule isn't censorship. If's freedom from censorship. If I ridicule you, I hope you keep talking, so I can keep ridiculing.
If ridicule censors you, that's you self-censoring for invalid reasons. Freedom requires courage sometimes. At some level, you can't blame someone else for your own lack of courage. (Yes, at the extreme, that means courage unto death. It's been done, and someday in the future it may need doing again.) But courage in the face of asshattery isn't so extreme, and the lack of it is properly risible.
Every good nerd knows that justice can never be as simple as a rulebook.
Ah, the "no true Scotsman" argument.
Justice has to start out with a rulebook. That's what the phrases "justice before the law" and "a nation of laws" are about.
If you want justice systems based on the alternative, here you go
Now, which instrument of justice is your personal favorite? The noose, the torch, or the bullet-hole-ridden brick wall?
starts to mean something when the prosecution has a vested interest
The prosecution always has a vested interest. It's called an adversarial justice system for a reason: there's one winner and one loser. And the prosecution certainly doesn't want to be the loser. Neither does the defense. In both cases, selfish interests (career goals, politics, pride) serve to apply pressure to that adversarial standing. As long as no one "cheats", the victory goes to the side with the better facts and better persuasion.
Sounds to me like Childs couldn't get his facts across sufficiently persuasively.
As to the unevenness of sentencing: I haven't studied the cases cited in TFA, but one looks like it's in a different jurisdiction (New Jersey), so the law broken may have been different and may have had different prescribed penalties. Even the California statute has (to my non-lawyer eyes) confusing variability.
Again. the unevenness of the sentencing tells us nothing, except that sentencing is uneven.
Well, guess what. No matter how much you may think it, generalized poor management is not actually a criminal offense. Whereas, denial of service is.
Justice is not about fairness. It's "did you break the law, and if so what's the stated punishment?"
Was the ordinance used to convict him fair and reasonably applied? The only opinion that matters is the jury's, and they thought it so.
IMHO, Childs may have started out with the best of intentions in his "stand", but it escalated into a pissing match. And you really can't out-piss senior municipal managers and politicians, so you can indict Childs for picking a losing fight.
No, I think it's better to use car analogies instead of big words here.
Sorry, my car-ma ran over your dogma.
And I'm point out that you're interpreting the marketing statement as someone versed and competent at arithmetic. I'm pointing out that it's marketing math, and therefore needs to be boiled down to 2nd-grade-level.
I stand by my interpretation: 100% (current Oracle RDBMS customers) - 40% (Oracle+Solaris customers) = 60%.
Remember: marketing math. Mathematics, Jim, but not as we know it.
It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
And that may be the sole bright spot in this sad saga. An opportunity to cleanly and distinctively fork, so there's clearly Oracle Solaris and Illumos Open Solaris. The weird, coy, half-open thing the community had before was a losing proposition.
I'm a little suspicious of the apparent over-simplicity of the interpretation I'm about to lay out here, but I temper that with the understanding that this is marketing math.
"top customers" == "Oracle's enterprise customers".
40% of Oracle's enterprise customers are running Oracle (the RDBMS... remember that?) on Solaris. That means that 60% are running Oracle on some other OS. (Linux is prominent in that, I think. Can anyone find some statistics?)
Anyways, that 60% (Oracle on non-Oracle OS) is the "60% growth opportunity" the market-droid is spewing about.
What does Netcraft say?
Once, in a Microsoft interview, I was asked to write a memory allocator. I always assumed that after I left, the conversation went like:
"Great, copy this down.
You might think that, but let's face it, memory management in Windows hasn't visibly improved in decades*. Any number of interview candidate submissions could have helped, and yet it hasn't.
*I kid. I'm not a Windows fanboi, but at least Win 7 x64 isn't thrashing all the damn time on my system at home. It's almost Linux-grade!
My takeaway from all of this is that it reaffirms my opinion of software patents, that it's poison.
FTFY.
We were never allowed calculators in university, why do they give them to kids?
Actually, there's an interesting insight in that statement. If most of the arithmetic you've ever done is just poking digits and operations into a calculator, this math problem looks like a simple chained addition with a running equals sign. I'm not sure if any other of the commentators in this thread picked up on this (mostly because you'd have to RTFA, and we know that's pretty much unheard of.) The summary doesn't mention calculators, but the entire cargo-cult handling of numbers implied by this reported mathematical literacy problem is pretty much driven by calculators.
Kinda makes me think we should abolish infix-entry calculators and stick with RPN like God intended.
For example a=b as statement could have meant "set a so that it is less or equal to b", i.e. if a is larger than b, then set it equal to b.
I think Slashdot ate your <. Maybe you typed "a<=b".
Anyways, arithmetic syntax jokes on Slashdot can break down unless you know your HTML entities table.
Ungentle and a little over-the-top, but you make a good point. Even the strictest bedtime regime can make this much allowance.
And, frankly, one of the nicer ways to fall asleep as a child is laying back on the blanket watching the meteors go by.
Interesting. I guess we can look forward to less obscenity in the comments of released FOSS source code. As well as the stated goal of making "sure developers did not leave comments in the source code about future products, product code names, mention of competitors, etc."
Well, ok, that last bit about competitors may be a reference to swearing.
Yes. The summary makes this article look like a complete case of "Not News for Nerds, Stuff That Doesn't Matter". (Most of the article is, but there appears to be some geek goodness toward the end. And some of the über nerds here will sniff that dependency and library management isn't an issue if you'd just compile it all from source every time.)
Oh, I see what you did there.
Lazy
A word used by the obsessed to describe the sane.
Coming from a probable troll, I'll take that for a compliment.
And yeah, as another of your respondents pointed out, "could be Air Force." Assumed eyeroll and all.
And Article 15 is Commander's Non-Judicial Punishment, which amounts to "We drop the charges if you accept your commander's non-sentence sentence." Not quite a plea bargain, but a similar concept.
If you knew how military officers work, it goes like this: Something is wrong, they do *SOMETHING*.
I was never an officer, just a senior noncom. And a technical one, to boot. As an enlisted tech, the general attitude is "get it as right as you can in the time you have, and if time isn't an object get it completely right." It took me a while to grok that the basic rule of officer leadership is "It's better to be decisive than right."
More powerpoints.
If you ask me, that's the problem. It definitely appeals to the "decision now" mindset by reducing the situation to bullet points (the management equivalent to sound bites). But a leader should be more situationally aware than can be instilled with PowerPoint. Snap decisions based on real on-the-ground knowledge has a significantly greater chance of being right than snap decisions based on bullet papers.
leaving when they know its unhealthy
is called "Desertion" and a capital offense in wartime. "Cowardice before the enemy" is also traditionally a capital offense in wartime.
The fundamental principle is this: if you're a lawful uniformed combatant in a combat situation, you have two legal choices: fight or die. And if you're gonna die, you're supposed to die fighting. "Surrender" is a viable option, but if you do it before justifiable in the eyes of your command that's probably unlawful.
Self-preservation is not a prized personal value in warfare.
Oh well. In my military career, the existence of the "unlimited liability" of a sworn military member gave me an excellent explanation to my wife when my commanders wanted me to do something uncomfortable, inconvenient, or silly: "'Reasonable' does not apply to an organization which can require me to lay down my life for absolutely no good reason."