If that really is your view of the world today I feel sorry for you. There is not that much time left to enjoy the relatively peacefull world we have now (as compared to the last five decades I have wittnesed first hand). We have real potential for a cRash of civilizations due to "peak-oil" and the "sixth great extinction". The current skirmish in the ME is a just another proxy war between the five permenant members, it will get worse as oil, food and water resources dry up around the planet over the next 50 years or so.
"I see 10 million nut-cases with bomb belts"
Where? Small "doomsday" groups such as OBL's followers pop up in every war, OBL has pulled off some spectacular stunts but his CIA trained group are nothing new to politics or warfare. AQ may have 10 even 100 million sympathisers but I assure you they are not all wearing bomb belts and they do not all want OBL in charge. However keep shooting up their villages and cities and they will happily assist ANYONE in their endevours to kill you. How popular is Hezbolla (sic?) since the Lebannon mis-adventure? They no longer need anything from Iran, all of Lebannon now thinks they are fucking heros.
""If you decide to make conversion-by-suicide-bomber a part of your theology, then you will pay. Not just the suicide bombers, but the preachers, their parents, their children, their cousins, the entire world will pay for your crime.""
That sentiment is your crime and is the reason people want to kill you. Like OBL you have every "right" to go off and change the world by preaching death and destruction, I hope to be around for a few more decades to see how it pans out for you.
OTOH: If you are trully interested in "understanding the enemy" I can recommend no better starting point than Robert Fisk.
The worlds "leaders" (not just bush in isolation) have all made speaches about how serious a "threat" this development is. Do you think they would like to hear that they were wrong? How can they be shown to be wrong when NK is not going to let anyone inspect the site? Remeber both Saddam and the West wanted the world to belive Iraq either had nukes or was close to obtaining them, it served immediate political interests on both sides to lie about the situation. I don't think the "worlds leaders" are lying this time but they could be wrong and will "spin the truth" rather than be made to look like fools.
The NK regime is known for it's "brinkmanship", a polite way of saying they bullshit and bluff so often that others rarely take them seriously. The yeild makes this "test" look suspisious and quite a few "knowlageable observers" were already suspisious before it went off, 4kt is a small nuke and 0.5kt yeild is either a fizzer, not a nuke, or a very advanced "bunker busting" type nuke (unlikely). We will probably never know for sure until someone inspects the site, but lets just assume it was a small nuke....what makes you think anyone should/could do anything different from last week?
It's a pity that the US didn't start direct talks before the test, if they start now it looks like NK has "forced them to the table", the only real options now are attack or continue with the same useless indignation. The same can be said about Iran and Hamas, except not talking to them becuse of the dogma surrounding "Isreal's right to exist" is even more childish and assinine.
I would just like to add there is no money in protecting grandma's machine with a VM but if you love granny and want more spare time it's a good idea.
Just to be sure, the reason developers praise vmare is money disguised as an "elegant solution". Large technically savy companies won't let anyone "fix" anything on their systems without first proving the fix will work, many are so parinoid they won't let you run diagnostic tools that are not already installed on their "train set".
To a "mission critical" commericial/inhouse software endevour that develops for and/or supports a few different O/S's, combined with a few DBMS's, combined with a couple of web severs,...and top it off with a few versions of their own stuff. If you have "finicky" customers who are prepared to pay for such "assurance", vmware is worth every penny.
Something I forgot in my other post but might be usefull to other geeks at the mercy of PHB malpractice:
If the boss asks you to write a test to give to applicants, (trait of many PHB's), suggest that such tests are worthless and he should let you talk to the applicants for 5-10min. If you are any good yourself it won't take longer than that to get an idea of someone's technical skills and how well they can communicate them.
Make sure you give a discrete thumbs up/down/shakey to your PHB before the end of the interview.
Agreed, dropping out is at best a bumpy shortcut to financial success, and I am also not advocating that one should remain permenantly ignorant just because they can afford too do so financially. What I do say is that an opportunity like this kid has been handed should not be dismissed just for the sake of completing his education. He is young and will have many years (and plenty of cash) to catch up later in life.
Fair point, I also accept "suck it and see" as an answer. The general principle is to sort out the "I know it all" types, what I am looking for is someone who is secure enough in their personality to admit they don't know everything, but I also expect them to go away and "find out". How they find out I couldn't care less but the quicker the better.
BTW: I have been programming C++ for 15+yrs and I don't know what any compiler would do with your example....until I try it.
You don't seem to realise that overreaction to "islamic nationalists" is what brings them attention in the ME and around the world. Bombing those that are paying attention is doing the opposite of what YOU desire as an outcome.
The Nazi's attacked the rest of us with a huge fucking army from the center of Europe, where is the "islamo-facist" army? All I see is a few nut-cases with bomb belts and a whole lot of muslims that want the US to fuck off out of their country.
Global politics has not "failed", the last time that happened the league of nations was disbanded and WW2 broke out. Global politics today consists of the winners of WW2 dividing up the planet via the UNSC, they don't directly attack each other but they do use proxy wars, Israel, Iran, Cuba, ect. When/if global politics fails you will know all about it my friend.
There was a paragaph after that but I screwed up the html. Basically the explosion of new life after a major extinction event (such as the one we are experiencing now) is due to the lack of competition from the species that have been wiped out. I have no doubt that if/when humans are wiped out the planet will expolode back into new life once again.
This study does not really add anything to the global warming "debate", for a start it is too specific in location and species. The effect on the biosphere depends on the rate of change as well as the actual level of CO2, and although the earth has had CO2 levels almost 3 times as high as today, never has the rate of change been so dramatic.
If the change is rapid (
There are problems worse than AGW for humans but that does not mean we should keep ingnoring obvious warning signs until it really does bite hard.
to truly understand one's enemy, you must become that enemy
That means understanding his culture, family, religion, language, motivations, past behaviour,... The one thing it does not mean is imitating the enemy, that is covered by the use of spies.
As someone wiser than me once said "war is the failure of politics", now that politics is global the last thing we need is another Roman style failure.
Good point, when I was a kid I used to run barefoot across the tarmac and we would get out of the local pool and lay on the concrete (wet body), both were very hot but not totally unbearable. OTOH: Put a bucket of engine oil out in the sun all day and it gets so hot you can't put your hand in it.
Having said that, I still don't belive a 53C cup of liquid poured on to bare skin would require a graft. Why, because once I fish the chain out of the bucket of hot oil I can immediately hold it in my hand (mind you, it's still hot).
OT: Speaking of warm weather, it was 37C here in Melbourne today.....it's OCTOBER for fuck sake!!!!!
Does the USA have the concept of a "mature age student"? I'm not bagging the US ( this time:), I only ask because that is how I got my BSc in Australia. Most of the posts I have seen so far seem to assume that if you return to formal education you will have to directly compete against school leavers for a place.
In Australia, universities select school leavers by a score, similar to SAT's in the US, but it has little bearing on educational opportunities once you reach the ripe old age of 23. When I applied to enter a BSc course I was interviewed by the department head, he asked me to complete some remedial maths via correspondence and reapply next year, I did that and they were happy to let me in. Of course if you have the cash you can keep paying them for a place until you pass the exams, there are plenty of international students willing to do that but very few locals go down that path. (Note: over here the Govt pays ~85% of the bill for students selected on merit, the student pays the rest as a tax levy when/if ever they start earning $XYZpa, the tax debt is accumulated by the hour ).
There is a compelling reason why universities are "soft" on entry criteria for mature age students: Mature age students really do want to "get the bit of paper", their motives vary from money to self satisfaction. Many school leavers don't understand "the bit of paper", they are motivated by social factors and hormones. My anecdotal "proof": I started along side 160 others, three years later only 30 odd of those graduated, ALL of the original dozen or so mature age students were amongst those who "got the bit of paper".
Disclaimer: The above facts and figures are based on shakey recolections dating back to 1989-1991, the system may have changed in detail since then but it still operates along the same lines.
"What exactly is the marketable skill in signing a contract that says 'give me loads of money'?"
None at that stage, but getting someone to offer you a genorous contract in the first place is a "marketable skill". If this kid has any financial smarts he will suck that contract dry and get a renewal, if not he will get bored, throw a "party", and watch it slip through his fingers.
I dropped out of high school at 16 (Australia), it did not stop me from renting a house, buying a car, raising a family... Sure I completed a BSc when I was 30 because by that time I had figured out what I wanted to do, now I am 47 my pay pack is well above average. To be honest, I would have to say that making a living is less "financialy challenging" when you have the right bits of paper, but that still doesn't mean your life is ruined without them.
However the notion that dropping out of school will ruin the rest of your life is false and usually promoted by those who stayed at school and have yet to find out what earning a pay packet is all about. And no, a couple of years burger flipping while leeching off your friends and relatives does not qualify.
BTW: Please excuse my spelling, as I said, I'm a high school dropout.
"3rd degree burns happen at 130 degrees, how the fuck should that happen? Thats just 53 degrees celsius!"
Indeed, I live in Australia, a hot summers day over here can reach 45C in the shade. I don't know how hot that is when under direct sunlight but it must be close to 130F. Naturally you can get seriously burnt if you run around semi-naked for an hour or more in that sort of weather.
Re:And unfortunately right about YouTube
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
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· Score: 1
I think Google has a strong bargaining position with the big distributors: We are keeping youtubes "instant posting" policy, now we can come to an agreement about that or we can start litigating each and every "properly prepared" takedown notice.
Your right, I probably oversimpified the human mind a bit, how about: The human mind is really like one of those massive domino setups, except it's recursive.
"If you think that anyone who uses any open source app is also a software developer... and a good one at that... well, no wonder Linux isn't more popular."
In the 90's I was working for IBM, the CEO made a speech and said "all software has been written, it just needs to be managed". All of the developers snickered, but the longer I stay in the bussiness the more it appears he was right.
I have a BSc in computer science and have been contracting as a C/C++ developer since 1991, I "specialize" in Windows (ie: I know the tools better than *nix tools). I don't use GPL code in commercial software but I often use "free" stuff, particularly in multi-platform source code. eg: zlib and sqlite (interesting wording on the sqlite license).
There are plenty more examples of high quality "free stuff", all of which have been mentioned elsewhere on slashdot.
I can only imagine that "toe some kind of party line" has something to do with kicking arses.
BTW: Your whole argument amounts to "towing the line" because you are willfully ignoring and/or distorting the science. You see it's not who funds the research that matters, what matters is if the research can withstand skeptical scientific scrutiny.
"I suspect you see it because it is a valid argument.....Tenure, funding, pride of place at cocktail parties, self-respect."
These things do not come from discredited research, coming up with the "right" answer for a corporation can definitely increase your personal wealth. Anyone who harps on that AGW is some kind of conspiracy to gain funding does not understand either science or humans.
Lemmings don't jump they are pushed by other lemmings, large crowds of humans frequently display the same behavior. Human intelligence is no more than a bunch of neurons acting like Lemmings.
Slashdot Mirror
If that really is your view of the world today I feel sorry for you. There is not that much time left to enjoy the relatively peacefull world we have now (as compared to the last five decades I have wittnesed first hand). We have real potential for a cRash of civilizations due to "peak-oil" and the "sixth great extinction". The current skirmish in the ME is a just another proxy war between the five permenant members, it will get worse as oil, food and water resources dry up around the planet over the next 50 years or so.
"I see 10 million nut-cases with bomb belts"
Where? Small "doomsday" groups such as OBL's followers pop up in every war, OBL has pulled off some spectacular stunts but his CIA trained group are nothing new to politics or warfare. AQ may have 10 even 100 million sympathisers but I assure you they are not all wearing bomb belts and they do not all want OBL in charge. However keep shooting up their villages and cities and they will happily assist ANYONE in their endevours to kill you. How popular is Hezbolla (sic?) since the Lebannon mis-adventure? They no longer need anything from Iran, all of Lebannon now thinks they are fucking heros.
""If you decide to make conversion-by-suicide-bomber a part of your theology, then you will pay. Not just the suicide bombers, but the preachers, their parents, their children, their cousins, the entire world will pay for your crime.""
That sentiment is your crime and is the reason people want to kill you. Like OBL you have every "right" to go off and change the world by preaching death and destruction, I hope to be around for a few more decades to see how it pans out for you.
OTOH: If you are trully interested in "understanding the enemy" I can recommend no better starting point than Robert Fisk.
The worlds "leaders" (not just bush in isolation) have all made speaches about how serious a "threat" this development is. Do you think they would like to hear that they were wrong? How can they be shown to be wrong when NK is not going to let anyone inspect the site? Remeber both Saddam and the West wanted the world to belive Iraq either had nukes or was close to obtaining them, it served immediate political interests on both sides to lie about the situation. I don't think the "worlds leaders" are lying this time but they could be wrong and will "spin the truth" rather than be made to look like fools.
The NK regime is known for it's "brinkmanship", a polite way of saying they bullshit and bluff so often that others rarely take them seriously. The yeild makes this "test" look suspisious and quite a few "knowlageable observers" were already suspisious before it went off, 4kt is a small nuke and 0.5kt yeild is either a fizzer, not a nuke, or a very advanced "bunker busting" type nuke (unlikely). We will probably never know for sure until someone inspects the site, but lets just assume it was a small nuke....what makes you think anyone should/could do anything different from last week?
It's a pity that the US didn't start direct talks before the test, if they start now it looks like NK has "forced them to the table", the only real options now are attack or continue with the same useless indignation. The same can be said about Iran and Hamas, except not talking to them becuse of the dogma surrounding "Isreal's right to exist" is even more childish and assinine.
Thank god someone here understands it.
I would just like to add there is no money in protecting grandma's machine with a VM but if you love granny and want more spare time it's a good idea.
Just to be sure, the reason developers praise vmare is money disguised as an "elegant solution". Large technically savy companies won't let anyone "fix" anything on their systems without first proving the fix will work, many are so parinoid they won't let you run diagnostic tools that are not already installed on their "train set".
To a "mission critical" commericial/inhouse software endevour that develops for and/or supports a few different O/S's, combined with a few DBMS's, combined with a couple of web severs,...and top it off with a few versions of their own stuff. If you have "finicky" customers who are prepared to pay for such "assurance", vmware is worth every penny.
Something I forgot in my other post but might be usefull to other geeks at the mercy of PHB malpractice:
If the boss asks you to write a test to give to applicants, (trait of many PHB's), suggest that such tests are worthless and he should let you talk to the applicants for 5-10min. If you are any good yourself it won't take longer than that to get an idea of someone's technical skills and how well they can communicate them.
Make sure you give a discrete thumbs up/down/shakey to your PHB before the end of the interview.
Glad to see another Carlin fan in here.
Agreed, dropping out is at best a bumpy shortcut to financial success, and I am also not advocating that one should remain permenantly ignorant just because they can afford too do so financially. What I do say is that an opportunity like this kid has been handed should not be dismissed just for the sake of completing his education. He is young and will have many years (and plenty of cash) to catch up later in life.
Fair point, I also accept "suck it and see" as an answer. The general principle is to sort out the "I know it all" types, what I am looking for is someone who is secure enough in their personality to admit they don't know everything, but I also expect them to go away and "find out". How they find out I couldn't care less but the quicker the better.
BTW: I have been programming C++ for 15+yrs and I don't know what any compiler would do with your example....until I try it.
"As for the rest, you're entitled to your opinions, of course."
It's easy to belive what you want to belive when you reduce everything to opinion. Still it doesn't change the facts.
You don't seem to realise that overreaction to "islamic nationalists" is what brings them attention in the ME and around the world. Bombing those that are paying attention is doing the opposite of what YOU desire as an outcome.
The Nazi's attacked the rest of us with a huge fucking army from the center of Europe, where is the "islamo-facist" army? All I see is a few nut-cases with bomb belts and a whole lot of muslims that want the US to fuck off out of their country.
Global politics has not "failed", the last time that happened the league of nations was disbanded and WW2 broke out. Global politics today consists of the winners of WW2 dividing up the planet via the UNSC, they don't directly attack each other but they do use proxy wars, Israel, Iran, Cuba, ect. When/if global politics fails you will know all about it my friend.
"If the change is rapid ( "
There was a paragaph after that but I screwed up the html. Basically the explosion of new life after a major extinction event (such as the one we are experiencing now) is due to the lack of competition from the species that have been wiped out. I have no doubt that if/when humans are wiped out the planet will expolode back into new life once again.
This study does not really add anything to the global warming "debate", for a start it is too specific in location and species. The effect on the biosphere depends on the rate of change as well as the actual level of CO2, and although the earth has had CO2 levels almost 3 times as high as today, never has the rate of change been so dramatic.
If the change is rapid (
There are problems worse than AGW for humans but that does not mean we should keep ingnoring obvious warning signs until it really does bite hard.
to truly understand one's enemy, you must become that enemy
That means understanding his culture, family, religion, language, motivations, past behaviour,... The one thing it does not mean is imitating the enemy, that is covered by the use of spies.
As someone wiser than me once said "war is the failure of politics", now that politics is global the last thing we need is another Roman style failure.
Good point, when I was a kid I used to run barefoot across the tarmac and we would get out of the local pool and lay on the concrete (wet body), both were very hot but not totally unbearable. OTOH: Put a bucket of engine oil out in the sun all day and it gets so hot you can't put your hand in it.
Having said that, I still don't belive a 53C cup of liquid poured on to bare skin would require a graft. Why, because once I fish the chain out of the bucket of hot oil I can immediately hold it in my hand (mind you, it's still hot).
OT: Speaking of warm weather, it was 37C here in Melbourne today.....it's OCTOBER for fuck sake!!!!!
Does the USA have the concept of a "mature age student"? I'm not bagging the US ( this time :), I only ask because that is how I got my BSc in Australia. Most of the posts I have seen so far seem to assume that if you return to formal education you will have to directly compete against school leavers for a place.
In Australia, universities select school leavers by a score, similar to SAT's in the US, but it has little bearing on educational opportunities once you reach the ripe old age of 23. When I applied to enter a BSc course I was interviewed by the department head, he asked me to complete some remedial maths via correspondence and reapply next year, I did that and they were happy to let me in. Of course if you have the cash you can keep paying them for a place until you pass the exams, there are plenty of international students willing to do that but very few locals go down that path. (Note: over here the Govt pays ~85% of the bill for students selected on merit, the student pays the rest as a tax levy when/if ever they start earning $XYZpa, the tax debt is accumulated by the hour ).
There is a compelling reason why universities are "soft" on entry criteria for mature age students: Mature age students really do want to "get the bit of paper", their motives vary from money to self satisfaction. Many school leavers don't understand "the bit of paper", they are motivated by social factors and hormones. My anecdotal "proof": I started along side 160 others, three years later only 30 odd of those graduated, ALL of the original dozen or so mature age students were amongst those who "got the bit of paper".
Disclaimer: The above facts and figures are based on shakey recolections dating back to 1989-1991, the system may have changed in detail since then but it still operates along the same lines.
"What exactly is the marketable skill in signing a contract that says 'give me loads of money'?"
None at that stage, but getting someone to offer you a genorous contract in the first place is a "marketable skill". If this kid has any financial smarts he will suck that contract dry and get a renewal, if not he will get bored, throw a "party", and watch it slip through his fingers.
I dropped out of high school at 16 (Australia), it did not stop me from renting a house, buying a car, raising a family... Sure I completed a BSc when I was 30 because by that time I had figured out what I wanted to do, now I am 47 my pay pack is well above average. To be honest, I would have to say that making a living is less "financialy challenging" when you have the right bits of paper, but that still doesn't mean your life is ruined without them.
However the notion that dropping out of school will ruin the rest of your life is false and usually promoted by those who stayed at school and have yet to find out what earning a pay packet is all about. And no, a couple of years burger flipping while leeching off your friends and relatives does not qualify.
BTW: Please excuse my spelling, as I said, I'm a high school dropout.
"If the future is bleak for humanity, it may be less so for simpler, more robust organisms."
As George Carlin once said: "It's not the planet that needs saving, it's us!"
"3rd degree burns happen at 130 degrees, how the fuck should that happen? Thats just 53 degrees celsius!"
Indeed, I live in Australia, a hot summers day over here can reach 45C in the shade. I don't know how hot that is when under direct sunlight but it must be close to 130F. Naturally you can get seriously burnt if you run around semi-naked for an hour or more in that sort of weather.
I think Google has a strong bargaining position with the big distributors: We are keeping youtubes "instant posting" policy, now we can come to an agreement about that or we can start litigating each and every "properly prepared" takedown notice.
Your right, I probably oversimpified the human mind a bit, how about: The human mind is really like one of those massive domino setups, except it's recursive.
Doh!!!
Heh, this is fun...
"Python rocks" - 6 results, (one refering to "monty").
"Pearl rocks" - 0 results.
"love python" - 50 results, (some may refer to male anatomy)
"love pearl" - 0 results, (no false positives that refer to female anatomy)
"If you think that anyone who uses any open source app is also a software developer... and a good one at that... well, no wonder Linux isn't more popular."
In the 90's I was working for IBM, the CEO made a speech and said "all software has been written, it just needs to be managed". All of the developers snickered, but the longer I stay in the bussiness the more it appears he was right.
I have a BSc in computer science and have been contracting as a C/C++ developer since 1991, I "specialize" in Windows (ie: I know the tools better than *nix tools). I don't use GPL code in commercial software but I often use "free" stuff, particularly in multi-platform source code. eg: zlib and sqlite (interesting wording on the sqlite license).
There are plenty more examples of high quality "free stuff", all of which have been mentioned elsewhere on slashdot.
The GP is correct the word is "tow".
I can only imagine that "toe some kind of party line" has something to do with kicking arses.
BTW: Your whole argument amounts to "towing the line" because you are willfully ignoring and/or distorting the science. You see it's not who funds the research that matters, what matters is if the research can withstand skeptical scientific scrutiny.
"I suspect you see it because it is a valid argument.....Tenure, funding, pride of place at cocktail parties, self-respect."
These things do not come from discredited research, coming up with the "right" answer for a corporation can definitely increase your personal wealth. Anyone who harps on that AGW is some kind of conspiracy to gain funding does not understand either science or humans.
A different response to the impossible.
And a few religious constatnts to ignite a flame war.
Lemmings don't jump they are pushed by other lemmings, large crowds of humans frequently display the same behavior. Human intelligence is no more than a bunch of neurons acting like Lemmings.