Of course everyone has the right to judge, trying not to judge is like trying not to shit, your body won't allow it. Judgement is also like shit in that "other people's shit always smells worse than your own".
Rights (written or otherwise) are not a myth, they are bestowed on an individual by society. those individuals who trespass on those rights are (at best) ostracised by their society. This may not be the end result for every single "right trampling" that occurs between individuals, but when you consider an entire society or civilization, then it's a virtually a statistical certainty a "rights trampler" will be stomped on by society.
Rights are part of a highly evolved and ritualized trade-off between the safety of the heard and the liberty of the predator. In other words "rights" are a natural phenomena in all social animals, what those rights are is a matter of trial and error by the individual (ie:social skills). The uniquely human ability to chisel their rights into stone tablets and rub others noses in it is not a great deal different to a dog pissing on tree, at the end of the day they both serve the same basic purpose.
Unfortunately, it's deeply ingrained in their culture and will take decades or even centuries to beat it out of their institutions.
Yes it's deeply ingrained in their culture, it just so happens the opposite is "deeply ingrained" in your culture. To many Chinese "free speech" is just an excuse to be vulgar and disrespectful. At the end of the day "culturally blind" statistics show an individual has a much higher chance of being incarcerated by the state in the US than in China, yet I'm pretty sure I would feel more comfortable visiting the US than China (which as a British-Aussie is my own cultural bias at work).
It's also debatable just how "free" our speech is in the west, I grew up in the 60-70's, Mao's "little red book" was outright banned, we kids thought it had something to do with sex since adults were fond of hiding that sort of stuff. The only thing we knew about China was you had to eat your veggies because kids in China were starving, odd logic even as a kid, but they were starving and that's what our mother's told us. I also recall a major furor here in the early 70's because some gift shop had a replica statue of David in their window and he didn't have the requisite fig leaf. The basic laws have barely changed in my lifetime but the free speech culture I see today is not the same free speech culture I grew up with. I see that as an achievement of my generation, others of my vintage often see it as a lament.
Stop taking the USA citizens for rubes. We are smart, educated, and intelligent, something the Republican Party has feared for years.
Well said, I agree with Christopher Hicthens who thought putting Palin up for VP was a genuine insult to intelligence of "the people". Isn't the conservative side of politics supposed to shun shallow air-heads? Are they not supposed to hang on to established institutions rather than openly call for their abolishment? Was Nixon a commie because he didn't veto the clean air act? Was reagan a wetermellon becuse he pushed for and obtained an international cap and trade treaty for sulphur emissions which has been credited with significantly reducing the threat from acid rain?
Having grown up in the 60-70's the Tea Party's sucessful hijacking of the conservative brand name has left me speechless, how border line support for anarchy and a total disregard for well-established facts could be interpreted as 'conservative' is beyond me? Go back pre-911 and have a look at the senior republicans, where are the moderate right wingers in today's line up? - Oh wait....I think I get it now.....you guys just elected a moderate conservative as president, well done!;)
That's pretty twisted logic you have going there (or possibly an unorthodox definition of "disenfranchised"), taken to it's logical conclusion the only vote that counts is the single ballot that gets someone over the line. Truth is all the votes counted, the Rommney total was simply insufficient and the Obama total was more than required. US domestic politics has ( in my lifetime) always been highly polarised, which is kind of odd given the diverse sub-cultures found in the different states/regions, simply tweeking the election rules isn't going to change that cultural paradox.
Someone (or some group) has to pick the candidates at some point before it's possible for everyone else to vote. I have lived all my life under the Westminster system and figure the US electoral college thing is similar to what we would call a "caucus meeting". However I recently caught a 20 second soundbite from an American commentator. She said that while there are mathematical problems relating to the "fairness" of the election method, one of the GoodThings(TM) about it was that it would be near impossible for anyone to become POTUS without pleasing the majority of the states. This ensures that the president must at least have a significant level of approval across the very different sub-cultures that exist in the US. I don't know how much truth there is to that statement but it does ring true to my non-native ear. I'm old enough to realise that what little I was taught in the 60's about the US was about as real as the John Wayne movies (that I still enjoy). They didn't escape religious persecution they brought it with them and due to the lack of a uniting vision continued the practice with a great deal of enthusiasm. What the founding fathers did was pretty much what the Romans did with the Bible, they provided a vague and lofty common purpose and a simple list of agreed "commandments" in a surprisingly long-lived and successful attempt to restrain the worst excesses of human nature that surrounded them.
One thing I do know is that all geeks should go out of their way to read "science and the founding fathers", science was far more significant to their politics than Ben Franklin's lucky escape from a kite flying incident.;)
I think the GP was spot on. The key is there are very few absolutes in the real world that can be written down as rules. Safety and liberty is an evolutionary trade-off that all social animals must face, the rule that applies in this case is "survival of the fittest". From my personal experience, the US freedom train passengers don't want liberty they want freedom from the consequences of their actions. You are literally as free as a bird and a hell of a lot more powerful, fly as high as you like but don't bitch if someone blasts you out of the sky with a shotgun and has you for breakfast because everyone deserves freedom, right?
Or is it just the "innocent" who should be free to piss others off to the point where they attack them with exploding rocks?
I thought the whole point of American foreign policy was the furthering of democracy. Well Islamists were elected in Egypt and Algeria last year, and in Turkey a decade ago. Has one of those countries invaded Israel?
That whole thing where they surrounded Arrafat's compound for a year or two was about forcing him to hold elections, he didn't budge even when Colin Powell walked through the Israeli siege to have a word with him in private, unsurprisingly he dropped dead from a "mysterious illness" not long after that visit. After his death the west got the elections they wanted, they were even judged to be "free and fair" elections by western observers, problem was 70% of those silly Palestinians did exactly what Arrafat thought they would do, they voted for Hamas. What is it with Palestinians, why don't they just elect the right puppet so we can all be friends?
if you're programming in C/C++ and you're young, you'r eprobably using visual studio, which requires no make files. Just a bunch of options in the menu system
MSVC uses.vcproj and.sln files, these are very similar to hierarchical make files for projects with multiple binary targets but much easier to manage. Most commercial environments I have worked in use the same C code base for both windows and *nix builds and call the MSVC build from a script, the same as they would for a unix build. The current C source tree I work with contains well over 100 binary targets and millions of LOC, it builds in Windows (32 & 64), Linux (32 & 64), Solaris, HP and AIX, we recently dropped support for Itainium. Not all of the targets are intended to run on all of the environments but the majority do and share the same code.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world but if everyone assumes you suck because of the last few programmers they met that were your age sucked, you are probably going to be jobless.
As an "older programmer" I don't see how a "young one" can get there and still suck as bad as they did on the first day?
Old fart here, 20+yrs of experience, three grandchildren and still on the "shelf". I work as a developer for a Japanese mega-corp in Australia, the ~25 others who work in our department are all over 40 (except the secretary), all of them have 10+yrs of experience (including the secretary). Three of these people want to work at their projects for more than 8hrs a day, the others don't. Those 3 people are rewarded for their efforts but not sufficiently to encourage the others to do the same, they do it basically because they want to do it, not because they have to, in fact there are a few of us who could afford to retire but don't because they want to work. We are a well managed and happy crew because we know how to push back at our managers in a constructive manner, sure management would like us all to work as long and hard as those 3 people and have twice the man hours to play with but the managers are also experienced and know not to push it as an unwritten condition of employment.
You gotta learn to go with the flow and move to something more profitable.
Or in other words, you need to acquiesce to labor arbitrage being used to beat down your wages.
That's an odd interpretation? I'm pretty sure the GP was suggesting alternative ways to avoid "labor arbitrage being used to beat down your wages". Sure the boom days of the 90's for "one trick" coders are now nothing more than a fond memory, but there's nothing stopping you coding for fun, right?
Old Fart Trivia: During the 90's I worked as a developer at big blue for a few years. The then CEO, Lou Gerstner (sic?), made the announcement that "All code has been written, it just needs to be managed". We laughed our asses off at the time but here I am making good money "managing code" in a rather large, ancient, but very active and still growing CVS repository, we have 4-5 developer's with CVS access but many more without CVS access that work in Russia, China, Australia, Holland, UK and Japan. These days I probably write less than one line of production code per day, I've changed employer several times since the 90's but my job title is still the same as it was in the 90's - "Senior Software Engineer";)
Most large corporations are run like a herd of small businesses and potentially can do more with less due to their aligned purpose and economy of scale. Companies of all sizes exist because society allows them to exist, it's not the size of the company that matters, it's the cost/benefit to society that comes with it. Ideally the individual owners/workers of the company should be rewarded/punished for the cost/benefit to society of their company.
Of course if you don't want a society and would rather live without the "oppression" that comes with it, then your SOL because building societies is what humans do. The instant two or more people claim to have the same "right", a new "society" is created in the form of a company, tribe, nation, etc. Civilization is at heart a game we have invented to replace the "throwing rocks each other" game, at a minimum the rules of the game should be such that they benefit individual members without degrading the playing field.
Why not make laws to make it easier for the individual to take care of it themselves?
That is exactly what UHC does, but too many Americans have been frightened by the socialist boogeyman to actually look out how it works in the rest of the western world. From quotes people on slashdot have given me about the costs of health insurance in the US, $1000-1500/mo is not unusual for a family of four, here in Australia most young families would pay about that much for an entire year (UHC levy = 1.5% of taxable income). There's no such thing as a pre-existing condition, they are all ailments that need treating. And it's not like the US is getting more for the exorbitant cost of private insurance, you guys are rated ~#35 and Australia is rated in the top 10 for health outcomes. In fact statistically our health system would have to kill an extra ~20K people a year to be as good as the US.
As for unions, professionals don't need them, they have associations and employers are prepared to compete for their skills. If you don't understand why some blue collar workers need unions then I can only assume you never really got your hands dirty at an "unskilled" job. And no, it's not all about less hours and more wages, these days safety is a bigger issue for most unions.
Will they be smart enough to check that for every ballot received by mail, there was actually an application for a ballot by that person?
People all over the planet have been voting by snail mail throughout the 20th century, do you (and the mods) really think that your the first person "smart" enough to ask that question? Could it be that others have put more thought into running the election than you have put into your post?
The presumed first step is that employers require their employees vote while at work.
Agreed, the ideal is a secret ballot, but circumstances are currently less than ideal. If voting by email were the norm I'm sure some employers would try to bluntly coerce their employees, however I don't think they would succeed on a significant scale without getting caught. Also not all coercive employers are going to bend the vote in the same direction.
The obvious risks in this temporary measure is back-end fraud and man in the middle, again the lack of notice gives Dr. Evil very little time to organise a hijack and not get caught. The level of social dysfunction where roving gangs routinely bully old ladies into voting for them does not happen overnight, it would take decades to achieve.
I don't think (in this case) Frank has enough time to organise a gun and $100 for a significant number of Joe's. Beside Joe could simply lie to Frank and tell him he has already voted by email.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree, if every public service operated as poorly and unprofessionally as the BBC, the world would be a much better place.
Exactly, and this is nothing new, the pentagon has rated AGW as the number one medium-long term threat since well before Bush left the whitehouse.
Of course everyone has the right to judge, trying not to judge is like trying not to shit, your body won't allow it. Judgement is also like shit in that "other people's shit always smells worse than your own".
Rights (written or otherwise) are not a myth, they are bestowed on an individual by society. those individuals who trespass on those rights are (at best) ostracised by their society. This may not be the end result for every single "right trampling" that occurs between individuals, but when you consider an entire society or civilization, then it's a virtually a statistical certainty a "rights trampler" will be stomped on by society.
Rights are part of a highly evolved and ritualized trade-off between the safety of the heard and the liberty of the predator. In other words "rights" are a natural phenomena in all social animals, what those rights are is a matter of trial and error by the individual (ie:social skills). The uniquely human ability to chisel their rights into stone tablets and rub others noses in it is not a great deal different to a dog pissing on tree, at the end of the day they both serve the same basic purpose.
Unfortunately, it's deeply ingrained in their culture and will take decades or even centuries to beat it out of their institutions.
Yes it's deeply ingrained in their culture, it just so happens the opposite is "deeply ingrained" in your culture. To many Chinese "free speech" is just an excuse to be vulgar and disrespectful. At the end of the day "culturally blind" statistics show an individual has a much higher chance of being incarcerated by the state in the US than in China, yet I'm pretty sure I would feel more comfortable visiting the US than China (which as a British-Aussie is my own cultural bias at work).
It's also debatable just how "free" our speech is in the west, I grew up in the 60-70's, Mao's "little red book" was outright banned, we kids thought it had something to do with sex since adults were fond of hiding that sort of stuff. The only thing we knew about China was you had to eat your veggies because kids in China were starving, odd logic even as a kid, but they were starving and that's what our mother's told us. I also recall a major furor here in the early 70's because some gift shop had a replica statue of David in their window and he didn't have the requisite fig leaf. The basic laws have barely changed in my lifetime but the free speech culture I see today is not the same free speech culture I grew up with. I see that as an achievement of my generation, others of my vintage often see it as a lament.
Stop taking the USA citizens for rubes. We are smart, educated, and intelligent, something the Republican Party has feared for years.
Well said, I agree with Christopher Hicthens who thought putting Palin up for VP was a genuine insult to intelligence of "the people". Isn't the conservative side of politics supposed to shun shallow air-heads? Are they not supposed to hang on to established institutions rather than openly call for their abolishment? Was Nixon a commie because he didn't veto the clean air act? Was reagan a wetermellon becuse he pushed for and obtained an international cap and trade treaty for sulphur emissions which has been credited with significantly reducing the threat from acid rain?
;)
Having grown up in the 60-70's the Tea Party's sucessful hijacking of the conservative brand name has left me speechless, how border line support for anarchy and a total disregard for well-established facts could be interpreted as 'conservative' is beyond me? Go back pre-911 and have a look at the senior republicans, where are the moderate right wingers in today's line up? - Oh wait....I think I get it now.....you guys just elected a moderate conservative as president, well done!
That's pretty twisted logic you have going there (or possibly an unorthodox definition of "disenfranchised"), taken to it's logical conclusion the only vote that counts is the single ballot that gets someone over the line. Truth is all the votes counted, the Rommney total was simply insufficient and the Obama total was more than required. US domestic politics has ( in my lifetime) always been highly polarised, which is kind of odd given the diverse sub-cultures found in the different states/regions, simply tweeking the election rules isn't going to change that cultural paradox.
we'd finally enter the 18th century
Wonderfull, then you could catch up with more recent events in the UK.
Someone (or some group) has to pick the candidates at some point before it's possible for everyone else to vote. I have lived all my life under the Westminster system and figure the US electoral college thing is similar to what we would call a "caucus meeting". However I recently caught a 20 second soundbite from an American commentator. She said that while there are mathematical problems relating to the "fairness" of the election method, one of the GoodThings(TM) about it was that it would be near impossible for anyone to become POTUS without pleasing the majority of the states. This ensures that the president must at least have a significant level of approval across the very different sub-cultures that exist in the US. I don't know how much truth there is to that statement but it does ring true to my non-native ear. I'm old enough to realise that what little I was taught in the 60's about the US was about as real as the John Wayne movies (that I still enjoy). They didn't escape religious persecution they brought it with them and due to the lack of a uniting vision continued the practice with a great deal of enthusiasm. What the founding fathers did was pretty much what the Romans did with the Bible, they provided a vague and lofty common purpose and a simple list of agreed "commandments" in a surprisingly long-lived and successful attempt to restrain the worst excesses of human nature that surrounded them.
;)
One thing I do know is that all geeks should go out of their way to read "science and the founding fathers", science was far more significant to their politics than Ben Franklin's lucky escape from a kite flying incident.
I think the GP was spot on. The key is there are very few absolutes in the real world that can be written down as rules. Safety and liberty is an evolutionary trade-off that all social animals must face, the rule that applies in this case is "survival of the fittest". From my personal experience, the US freedom train passengers don't want liberty they want freedom from the consequences of their actions. You are literally as free as a bird and a hell of a lot more powerful, fly as high as you like but don't bitch if someone blasts you out of the sky with a shotgun and has you for breakfast because everyone deserves freedom, right?
Or is it just the "innocent" who should be free to piss others off to the point where they attack them with exploding rocks?
Climb down from that horse cowboy.China and India can do whatever the fuck they want, with or without the permmition of the POTUS.
My kids are adults now but I seem to recall they could concentrate on video games for hours (if not days) at a time.
I thought the whole point of American foreign policy was the furthering of democracy. Well Islamists were elected in Egypt and Algeria last year, and in Turkey a decade ago. Has one of those countries invaded Israel?
That whole thing where they surrounded Arrafat's compound for a year or two was about forcing him to hold elections, he didn't budge even when Colin Powell walked through the Israeli siege to have a word with him in private, unsurprisingly he dropped dead from a "mysterious illness" not long after that visit. After his death the west got the elections they wanted, they were even judged to be "free and fair" elections by western observers, problem was 70% of those silly Palestinians did exactly what Arrafat thought they would do, they voted for Hamas. What is it with Palestinians, why don't they just elect the right puppet so we can all be friends?
if you're programming in C/C++ and you're young, you'r eprobably using visual studio, which requires no make files. Just a bunch of options in the menu system
MSVC uses .vcproj and .sln files, these are very similar to hierarchical make files for projects with multiple binary targets but much easier to manage. Most commercial environments I have worked in use the same C code base for both windows and *nix builds and call the MSVC build from a script, the same as they would for a unix build. The current C source tree I work with contains well over 100 binary targets and millions of LOC, it builds in Windows (32 & 64), Linux (32 & 64), Solaris, HP and AIX, we recently dropped support for Itainium. Not all of the targets are intended to run on all of the environments but the majority do and share the same code.
Why is it that young developers imagine that older programmers can't program in a modern environment?
To set up a straw-man for TFA to knock down?
Odd? Most people attempt to stand on the shoulders of giants to avoid tripping over their footsteps.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world but if everyone assumes you suck because of the last few programmers they met that were your age sucked, you are probably going to be jobless.
As an "older programmer" I don't see how a "young one" can get there and still suck as bad as they did on the first day?
Old fart here, 20+yrs of experience, three grandchildren and still on the "shelf". I work as a developer for a Japanese mega-corp in Australia, the ~25 others who work in our department are all over 40 (except the secretary), all of them have 10+yrs of experience (including the secretary). Three of these people want to work at their projects for more than 8hrs a day, the others don't. Those 3 people are rewarded for their efforts but not sufficiently to encourage the others to do the same, they do it basically because they want to do it, not because they have to, in fact there are a few of us who could afford to retire but don't because they want to work. We are a well managed and happy crew because we know how to push back at our managers in a constructive manner, sure management would like us all to work as long and hard as those 3 people and have twice the man hours to play with but the managers are also experienced and know not to push it as an unwritten condition of employment.
You gotta learn to go with the flow and move to something more profitable.
Or in other words, you need to acquiesce to labor arbitrage being used to beat down your wages.
That's an odd interpretation? I'm pretty sure the GP was suggesting alternative ways to avoid "labor arbitrage being used to beat down your wages". Sure the boom days of the 90's for "one trick" coders are now nothing more than a fond memory, but there's nothing stopping you coding for fun, right?
;)
Old Fart Trivia: During the 90's I worked as a developer at big blue for a few years. The then CEO, Lou Gerstner (sic?), made the announcement that "All code has been written, it just needs to be managed". We laughed our asses off at the time but here I am making good money "managing code" in a rather large, ancient, but very active and still growing CVS repository, we have 4-5 developer's with CVS access but many more without CVS access that work in Russia, China, Australia, Holland, UK and Japan. These days I probably write less than one line of production code per day, I've changed employer several times since the 90's but my job title is still the same as it was in the 90's - "Senior Software Engineer"
Most large corporations are run like a herd of small businesses and potentially can do more with less due to their aligned purpose and economy of scale. Companies of all sizes exist because society allows them to exist, it's not the size of the company that matters, it's the cost/benefit to society that comes with it. Ideally the individual owners/workers of the company should be rewarded/punished for the cost/benefit to society of their company.
Of course if you don't want a society and would rather live without the "oppression" that comes with it, then your SOL because building societies is what humans do. The instant two or more people claim to have the same "right", a new "society" is created in the form of a company, tribe, nation, etc. Civilization is at heart a game we have invented to replace the "throwing rocks each other" game, at a minimum the rules of the game should be such that they benefit individual members without degrading the playing field.
Why not make laws to make it easier for the individual to take care of it themselves?
That is exactly what UHC does, but too many Americans have been frightened by the socialist boogeyman to actually look out how it works in the rest of the western world. From quotes people on slashdot have given me about the costs of health insurance in the US, $1000-1500/mo is not unusual for a family of four, here in Australia most young families would pay about that much for an entire year (UHC levy = 1.5% of taxable income). There's no such thing as a pre-existing condition, they are all ailments that need treating. And it's not like the US is getting more for the exorbitant cost of private insurance, you guys are rated ~#35 and Australia is rated in the top 10 for health outcomes. In fact statistically our health system would have to kill an extra ~20K people a year to be as good as the US.
As for unions, professionals don't need them, they have associations and employers are prepared to compete for their skills. If you don't understand why some blue collar workers need unions then I can only assume you never really got your hands dirty at an "unskilled" job. And no, it's not all about less hours and more wages, these days safety is a bigger issue for most unions.
Will they be smart enough to check that for every ballot received by mail, there was actually an application for a ballot by that person?
People all over the planet have been voting by snail mail throughout the 20th century, do you (and the mods) really think that your the first person "smart" enough to ask that question? Could it be that others have put more thought into running the election than you have put into your post?
You need both the carrot and the stick, if all you have is the stick then the donkey will eventually kick you in the head.
The presumed first step is that employers require their employees vote while at work.
Agreed, the ideal is a secret ballot, but circumstances are currently less than ideal. If voting by email were the norm I'm sure some employers would try to bluntly coerce their employees, however I don't think they would succeed on a significant scale without getting caught. Also not all coercive employers are going to bend the vote in the same direction.
The obvious risks in this temporary measure is back-end fraud and man in the middle, again the lack of notice gives Dr. Evil very little time to organise a hijack and not get caught. The level of social dysfunction where roving gangs routinely bully old ladies into voting for them does not happen overnight, it would take decades to achieve.
I don't think (in this case) Frank has enough time to organise a gun and $100 for a significant number of Joe's. Beside Joe could simply lie to Frank and tell him he has already voted by email.