Another alternative is to set up a merchant account for processing credit-card payments yourself, but you need to be a certain size for that to be a sensible option. The Minecraft guy probably is big enough now that a merchant account makes sense, but he wasn't when he started out as a random 1-man shop selling a $10 game on the internet.
I'm going to use this as an opportunity to plug BrainTree -- my new employer uses them as our payment gateway, and they're a dream to work with: They provide well-written APIs for all common platforms, and when I have a problem I get an email back from a member of their dev team typically in about 30 minutes.
Their front page says "We [heart] developers", and AFAICT they mean it. Github is one of their marquee customers.
I agree with the points you make. Even taking these as givens, however, I am not able to draw the conclusion that the principal text of one of the world's largest religions can or should be banned as hate speech.
Al-Quaeda is a recent phenomenon, and their existence can be directly tied back to secular sociopolitical causes; to the extent that they differ from recent conflicts in which one side has strongly self-identified with a Christian-derived religion (to pick recent examples -- the Lebanese civil war, the Troubles in Ireland), there is indeed a difference in the extent to which fundamentalist religion is acting as a visible recruiting tool (rather than recruiting principally on the merits of the conflict itself). That's a worrying difference, to be sure -- but regardless of recruiting techniques, the existence of the conflict itself is still grounded in more concrete causes.
Efforts to make the religion itself illegal will simply make the matter worse, adding fuel to the fires of those who would paint the relevant conflict as legitimate holy war.
Well contracts taken to a logical extreme could be used to discriminate[...]
...and if you'd taken a constitutional law class, you'd know how that came to be settled -- such contracts aren't illegal, per se, but government powers can't be used to enforce them. Private individuals still have full freedom of association, but the courts, being an arm of government, will refuse to take an action which they cannot constitutionally take on behalf of a contract's enforcement.
Given as we have a perfectly reasonable precedent on just how far freedom of contract goes, then, we don't need to go to hypothetical extremes -- we can respect the boundaries as they exist today.
Yes, Rackspace may have a right to put such PC lingo in their contract but maybe not
You'd trade on freedom of association and freedom of contract for such a marginal increase in ability to exercise freedom of speech? Seriously?
Taken to a logical extreme, if I hire an advertiser who happens to be staunchly pro-life, would you think it fair or conducive to freedoms for him to be unable to dump me as a client or refuse the work when I ask him to promote a benefit for a pro-choice cause? After all, by refusing to do that work for me, he would be restricting my freedom of speech... in just the same way as Rackspace is "muzzling" this church.
...you'd allow a web-hosting company whose CEO and Board of Directors was Pro-Life to shut down the accounts of any blogger who advocated for abortion rights?
If they're willing to piss off that large of a segment of their customer base? It's within their rights.
...you'd allow Comcast to shut down the blog of anyone arguing for 'Net neutrality?
Hosted on Comcast, or simply accessed through Comcast? Until network neutrality laws are passed, both of the above -- the latter would make a lovely story in the media, and a great one to tell to lawmakers too -- and afterwards, the former remains within their rights. The provisio about pissing off one's customers and getting media attention still applies, of course.
By the same measure, the Old Testament contains incitements to murder. We could get into a discussion about Jesus explicitly indicating that the old testament laws no longer need apply, or a discussion about how various old-testament passages do (or don't) get followed in practice by various subsets of the faith -- but that would be adding context, which critics of the Qu'ran are so often unwilling to do.
Judging any living religion outside the context of modern interpretations and practices (as there's never only one) is unreasonable and unfair.
Back towards the subject -- my view is as follows: This pastor is a despicable idiot. He has the right to do what he's doing, as harmful as it is -- and the rest of his community, including the business partners he's dealing with, have every right (and perhaps even a moral obligation) to publicly disassociate themselves from him.
Eradicate punks and idjits and people will ride the subways. Perverted forms of individual freedom and mass transit just don't mix.
At the risk of drifting even further from the topic at hand, let me suggest that you might find yourself living in a friendlier and more enjoyable community if you reconsider placement of the line between "perverted" and "interesting"; writing off any nonconformist as antisocial means missing out on some of the more interesting and memorable human interactions. (Also some stupid ones -- but even those are stories to tell). Of course, it could be that Austin has a better class of nonconformist -- we do cultivate them here.:)
Back towards topic -- I support mass transit, but not nearly as much as I support good city planning with a focus on minimizing the distance an average resident needs to travel day-to-day -- a goal towards which a wide array of tools (zoning, tax incentives and, yes, roadway design) can be applied. I'm putting my money where my mouth is: in 40 hours I close on my second property, a condo downtown, chosen to have work, shopping and entertainment all in cycling distance.
Roads are made for people driving safe and speedy to their chosen destinations, not DEFINING destinations to people.
The roads that are built define destinations despite themselves.
The modern road network -- a massive, government-funded project supported by massive corporate lobbying -- destroyed private commuter rail as a commercially-viable enterprise, in many cases deliberately, resulting in the sprawl we have today. This massive legacy of government-funded infrastructure means there is no level playing field to allow the market to select the most efficient option.
Societies which made different choices have different outcomes -- to take two cities of 10 million residents each, compare the Osaka rail map with the Los Angeles Metro rail map; the reason LA is a city of single-occupancy vehicles becomes clear -- not a result of individual agendas or goals being "subverted", as you put it, but because of different choices in the infrastructure to invest in. People in LA like their cars; people in Osaka like their trains. The reason for this difference? In either case, it's a matter of where past infrastructure investment has gone to make the most affordable and convenient day-to-day experience today.
Getting back to Austin -- giving everyone what they think they want is simply not an option here, because our population is growing but our roadways can't. There are decisions that have to be made, and it's foolhardy to ignore the consequences of those decisions on issues such a population density, transit and zoning which city planning is all about.
Severe, random punishment isn't nearly as effective as "swift and sure" -- punishment administered quickly and with a high probability, but not particularly severe. Harder to implement? Yes, absolutely -- but it works far better with human psychology, and doesn't have the massive inequity found in "severe and random" (consider the situation where you have 10 or 20 people losing everything they have for copyright infringement while millions of others engage in the same acts with no penalty at all; is this really the model you want to emulate?).
Universally optimizing for maximum speed would be hazardous to pedestrians, cyclists, sub-30mph motor scooters, neighborhood electric vehicles, and other lower-speed traffic. Moreover, speed costs power; comparing the efficiency curve for various modes of transportation makes it clear that optimizing for speed above all else is far from ideal, discouraging smaller, more efficient vehicles.
Further -- if you optimize for the maximum safe speed for the mix of vehicles on the road today, you discourage slower, more efficient vehicles from entering the road tomorrow, perpetuating the existing vehicle mix and supporting urban sprawl (as individuals tend to choose their homes to be no more than a 45-minute commute from work, higher-speed transportation leads to decreased population density, increasing the demands on road capacity in turn). I live in Austin, and we simply can't afford to keep the existing ratio of single-occupancy vehicles with our projected growth rate downtown -- widening the roads would be beyond our means, so we're making an effort to bring people closer to their jobs to reduce demand on both road capacity and parking. Efforts such as bicycle facilities and free downtown parking for motorcycles and scooters aren't being done to appease the hippie contingent -- they're being done to try to make our existing transportation and parking network that much easier to sustain on the projected budget available.
Increasing speeds, and in turn increasing sprawl, would be counter to that goal.
I have got a better solution. Let's build gated communities where the God fearing people can live a peaceful and quiet life. Leaving the other animals to roam the wilderness and do as nature dictates.
An ambitious plan; if you intend to make headway, I suggest getting to it.
What are you doing here on slashdot with us animals?
Perhaps not misleading, but almost utterly useless as a source of information.
It's an entirely suitable explanation of why the trustee decided to wait rather than taking their current course of action earlier, which is the context in which it was provided. The audience here isn't necessarily people who know or care about the SCO/IBM or SCO/Novell trials; it's discussing bankruptcies themselves, not their causes.
Reading that section, it would seem that SCO won their case against Novell.
"Clarified [their] rights" means clarified what they did or did not have. That it happened to lean decisively to the latter doesn't make the language inaccurate -- as a non-lawyer who maybe has read somewhat more legalese than the average layperson (a few law classes back in school, and my wife is a paralegal), I didn't even think it misleading.
There is no cure for the near-100% recidivism of violent felons except death or life imprisonment.
It's not the violent felons who make up the bulk of the prison population. Making non-violent felons into violent ones, on the other hand, is a substantial problem with our current "justice" system.
So noted -- explicit scare quotes it'll be next time, as in:
What's "wrong" with patriotism[...]
...to ensure that even folks who are making an effort towards finding fault rather than taking the most reasonable interpretation manage to grok intent. Or maybe not; fault isn't so very hard to find, if one gets one's kicks in looking for it.
"Guilt by association"? Much to the contrary; the post to which you reply defended patriotism by indicating that the only thing "wrong" with it is a misapprehension on the part of those who object (assisted by similar misapprehension on the part of those they find objectionable).
You started off by admitting you are not at the top of your field.
Something I know because I've gotten close enough to see the top. Being able to hobnob with the folks at the peak (one of my old friends is among Linus's lieutenants) has a tendency to put one's own skills in perspective. You know how Google's skill assessments work? Unless you're one of the people allowed to put a "10" down in any area (ie. literally wrote the language or the major, accepted book on the subject yourself), you're not top of your field. It's a high bar to meet, and personally, I'm perfectly fine being in the top 20% rather than the top 0.1%.
A major failure on the resume of someone at the top of their field looks like he has lost his edge.
Utter bull. An entrepreneur with 3 successful startups and 2 failures is not going to have any trouble at all finding venture funding -- he's still beat the odds by a long shot.
Doing risky things means failing sometimes, and out in the Real World, people know that. If you want to look like you're keeping your edge, you do that by going out and accomplishing hard things (and, yes, failing sometimes) -- not holing yourself up in a secure little cocoon.
To the contrary -- I strengthen it. Someone at the top of their field has less reason to worry about job security and more reason to care about their innovations making a difference. If you're having a good idea once a decade, maybe it doesn't matter so much if you don't have a direct path to get them implemented; if you have them every six months, it's a severely major bummer.
And, exactly what did you do at Dell.
I was half of the two-man team building automated deployment infrastructure for our largest software-as-a-service division.
Given the choice between working in a large, fairly safe corporate job and working for a start-up for the same salary, I have little doubt which a top-of-their field will take the corporate job every time
Hey there! No claims to be at the top of my field, but I just resigned from Dell to join a startup, so I'd like to think that my personal views might be topical. Big corporations have some nice advantages, to be sure -- the health plan, the performance bonus, the on-site doctor's office, the company gym. The problem is that they're quite substantially limiting in terms of freedom and flexibility.
Before Dell, I worked for a number of startups. Every so often I'd come up with an idea for how we could do something different -- talk it over with people, sell it to management, and go get it implemented. When I say "sell it to management" in the context of a startup, I don't mean my immediate management first, then getting approval to build a presentation to present to a committee one level up the chain, wash/rinse/repeat -- I mean walking straight into the CEO's office and going "Hey, Jim -- you know how we've been putting faxmodems into every box we ship, and having to send someone out when they fail? Why don't we just run a PRI into our colo, reduce the price on the individual machines, and sell it as a service?". There was a lot of talk at Dell around open-door policies -- but the level of institutional impediments to making changes or improvements was stifling.
At a startup, I could be proud of a profitable quarter -- because I, personally, was a major part of the work that went into building the company into what it was, same as every other person there. At a Fortune 50, by contrast, it's just too huge to have a sense or measure of your own scale or impact.
The "top-of-their-field" will have safety net such that if the startup they're at fails, they can land on their feet -- heck, all it took was one phone call to get me out of Dell, and I'm nowhere near top of my field -- and having the flexibility to form the world around you and take pride in what you've helped create is worth far more than the on-site clinic and the 401(k) match.
I mean how can you claim that it is valid and should be kept in practice when traditional teaching techniques achieve the same goals without teaching children to be terrorists and run afoul of the law?
Not "should be kept in practice". Rather, "should be quietly modified rather than shouted down, as the shouting-down process itself does more harm than good". Think of it as a correlary to the way an adult's shocked reaction to a bit of bare breast in public can make a far deeper impression on a child who happens to be present than the initial stimulus; the point I'm making is that the act of publicly sanctioning the teacher for posing a hypothetical exercise is more dangerous than the exercise itself. That doesn't mean that I support the exercise being replicated and reproduced in the future.
And yes, that's a modification from my original stance -- but one I've made explicit in my last few posts on the subject, if you'd bothered to read them closely. Part of the point of debate, after all, is discovering areas in which one's views are subject to refinement.
Have you ever heard of reading for details? The "innocent" descriptor explicitly mapped back to a defense of the argument that the assignment explicitly represented the hypothetical act as repugnant. The "zero sum gain" discussion was arguing that it's only "zero sum game" if you think only in terms of crime rate, and that there's more to the world from that. And while you keep insisting that I'm somehow claiming that this exercise offers benefits over "traditional teaching techniques", I have stated no such claim and do not rest my position on that premise.
And, frankly, I've got more to do with my life than shouting back and forth with someone on the Internet -- debate is fun when both sides actually listen to what the other is saying, but that's clearly not happening here. Ta ta for now; may we meet on better terms in the future.
Well, if there was an imaginary button that could do that, it would be a zero sum gain. You see, for each smarter criminal there will be smarter cops and we all know that criminals succeed only because cops are stupid.
Zero sum gain?! Only if the only people who exist in the world are cops and criminals. Some of us in a world that's big enough, and interesting enough, and safe enough that we can care a lot more about science, and engineering, and art, and industry, and all the other things in the world that aren't crime.
Getting back towards the topic, though, thinking about security can be fun -- it's a game of edge cases just like law or programming or chess, and making it a taboo subject for any law-abiding person to think about makes the world not only less safe but also intellectually poorer. It's the same mindset that took away the chemistry sets that gave us a generation of chemists, the same mindset that would hamstring today's inventors to prevent them from building a device that might possibly be used for (horror!) copyright infringement.
So why is planning a terrorist attack more suitable then traditional ways of teaching the same exact things?
I didn't say it's more suitable than "traditional ways" of teaching logistical skills. I said that banning that kind of exercise is actively harmful, in excess of the harm done by allowing it. Quietly suggest to the teacher that she develop a more tasteful lesson plan next year, perhaps -- perhaps a series of essays analyzing Corey Doctorow's Little Brother, if she wants to keep with the edgy public safety theme (presuming that they're an honors-level class and parental consent is forthcoming) -- but making a public lesson to the children that they aren't considered able to handle hypothetical exercises and need to make a habit of disengaging their brains and going immediately into flag-waving mode whenever the T word is mentioned lest they be considered un-Australian... that's a far worse lesson than the one it replaces.
Having a school require kids to plan how to kill people and use violence instead of speech or ideas to change political opinion does teach kids how to kill people, it does teach them how to commit various felonies.
Only to the extent that GTA4 teaches them the skills they need (much less confers the intent) to hijack cars, or to the extent that an encyclopedia article on nuclear weapons will create students who build them in their basements. The claim that hypothetical exercises -- particularly ones which emphasize the repugnance of the act[1] -- will somehow produce real-life criminals is fear-mongering bullshit and nothing more.
And with that, I'm done; the ad-hominems have gotten to be quite enough.
[1] - an assignment to plan an event which will kill as many "innocent" people as possible most certainly meets this criteria. Terrorists don't call their targets innocent.
You're hardly one to talk about rationality. Let's look at all the completely unfounded attacks just in the immediately preceding post:
It's as if the way others have learned throughout history is completely unacceptable in your view or something -- when I've never sold this exercise as a means of teaching history at all.
Yes, one sided thinking and your side is the only one that is right -- when at no point have I taken positions regarding the effectiveness of other approaches.
I'm wondering is you read the article - when I've repeatedly restated relevant portion of the article's contents on all the former occasions when you've made this now-tiring accusation.
The assignment wasn't about them watching or studying anything concerning terrorism and then discussing it's effectiveness or ineffectiveness (blah blah blah)......which is a complete dodge of the question I was asking -- specifically, as to what, specifically, constitute the "realities" to which children are unprepared to be exposed.
Now, that said, let's sift through the debris and see if I can find anything worth responding to:
The assignment was to develop ways to kill people for political purposes and examine how much of an impact their actions would make.
Right -- it's a planning exercise. Now, let's think about some of the things you need to do to successfully complete such an exercise:
Logistical planning and analysis -- materials, equipment, timing. These skills are needed for anything in life, from managing business operations to planning a party.
Contingency planning -- anticipating likely impediments and planning around them. Contingency planning is, again, necessary for any kind of business or personal preparedness -- for events ranging from job loss to flooding to being prepared to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity.
Model and argue the thought process of others -- necessary to argue the political effectiveness of the attack you've selected.
Note that I'm not selling this as a way to learn history; I'm selling it as a way to learn planning. I'm not saying that it's the best possible exercise to be used for this purpose, but I am saying that making a huge controversy over its selection does more harm than good by teaching children that some subjects are immoral to target for analysis.
Are we trying to teach kids that the way to win political battles [..is..] violence directed at totally innocent people[...]?
Are we a member of the ban-violent-media bandwagon too? If you think high school kids can't distinguish between reality and hypothetical or fantasy situations, we'd better not be letting them watch violent movies either.
"If you want your nation to be known for genius-level terrorists, you don't forbid its children from playing with terrorism tactics; much the contrary, you encourage them. Remember the study to the effect that genius-level skill in anything requires about 10,000 hours of practice, and that those hours almost always start in childhood?" what exactly is your goal again?
If you decide to make a concerted effort towards getting a nation of genius-level lockmakers, you're going to end up enabling a thief or two over the course of the process as a matter of course. On the other hand, that thief's much-more-numerous opposition will be similarly enhanced.
Moreover, you'll get not just lockmakers but also mechanical engineers, watchmakers, precision instruments -- anything which requires complimentary skills.
Let me ask you this hypothetical situation. Let's say you were given a button that would make everyone within 2000 miles of you 5 IQ points smarter. If you would ignore that button because it would make better criminals -- ignoring that it would also make better authors, teachers, inventors, scientists and engineers -- we don't have much to talk about.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to use this as an opportunity to plug BrainTree -- my new employer uses them as our payment gateway, and they're a dream to work with: They provide well-written APIs for all common platforms, and when I have a problem I get an email back from a member of their dev team typically in about 30 minutes.
Their front page says "We [heart] developers", and AFAICT they mean it. Github is one of their marquee customers.
Taking credit cards doesn't need to be awful.
I agree with the points you make. Even taking these as givens, however, I am not able to draw the conclusion that the principal text of one of the world's largest religions can or should be banned as hate speech.
Al-Quaeda is a recent phenomenon, and their existence can be directly tied back to secular sociopolitical causes; to the extent that they differ from recent conflicts in which one side has strongly self-identified with a Christian-derived religion (to pick recent examples -- the Lebanese civil war, the Troubles in Ireland), there is indeed a difference in the extent to which fundamentalist religion is acting as a visible recruiting tool (rather than recruiting principally on the merits of the conflict itself). That's a worrying difference, to be sure -- but regardless of recruiting techniques, the existence of the conflict itself is still grounded in more concrete causes.
Efforts to make the religion itself illegal will simply make the matter worse, adding fuel to the fires of those who would paint the relevant conflict as legitimate holy war.
...and if you'd taken a constitutional law class, you'd know how that came to be settled -- such contracts aren't illegal, per se, but government powers can't be used to enforce them. Private individuals still have full freedom of association, but the courts, being an arm of government, will refuse to take an action which they cannot constitutionally take on behalf of a contract's enforcement.
Given as we have a perfectly reasonable precedent on just how far freedom of contract goes, then, we don't need to go to hypothetical extremes -- we can respect the boundaries as they exist today.
You'd trade on freedom of association and freedom of contract for such a marginal increase in ability to exercise freedom of speech? Seriously?
Taken to a logical extreme, if I hire an advertiser who happens to be staunchly pro-life, would you think it fair or conducive to freedoms for him to be unable to dump me as a client or refuse the work when I ask him to promote a benefit for a pro-choice cause? After all, by refusing to do that work for me, he would be restricting my freedom of speech... in just the same way as Rackspace is "muzzling" this church.
If they're willing to piss off that large of a segment of their customer base? It's within their rights.
Hosted on Comcast, or simply accessed through Comcast? Until network neutrality laws are passed, both of the above -- the latter would make a lovely story in the media, and a great one to tell to lawmakers too -- and afterwards, the former remains within their rights. The provisio about pissing off one's customers and getting media attention still applies, of course.
By the same measure, the Old Testament contains incitements to murder. We could get into a discussion about Jesus explicitly indicating that the old testament laws no longer need apply, or a discussion about how various old-testament passages do (or don't) get followed in practice by various subsets of the faith -- but that would be adding context, which critics of the Qu'ran are so often unwilling to do.
Judging any living religion outside the context of modern interpretations and practices (as there's never only one) is unreasonable and unfair.
Back towards the subject -- my view is as follows: This pastor is a despicable idiot. He has the right to do what he's doing, as harmful as it is -- and the rest of his community, including the business partners he's dealing with, have every right (and perhaps even a moral obligation) to publicly disassociate themselves from him.
At the risk of drifting even further from the topic at hand, let me suggest that you might find yourself living in a friendlier and more enjoyable community if you reconsider placement of the line between "perverted" and "interesting"; writing off any nonconformist as antisocial means missing out on some of the more interesting and memorable human interactions. (Also some stupid ones -- but even those are stories to tell). Of course, it could be that Austin has a better class of nonconformist -- we do cultivate them here. :)
Back towards topic -- I support mass transit, but not nearly as much as I support good city planning with a focus on minimizing the distance an average resident needs to travel day-to-day -- a goal towards which a wide array of tools (zoning, tax incentives and, yes, roadway design) can be applied. I'm putting my money where my mouth is: in 40 hours I close on my second property, a condo downtown, chosen to have work, shopping and entertainment all in cycling distance.
The roads that are built define destinations despite themselves.
The modern road network -- a massive, government-funded project supported by massive corporate lobbying -- destroyed private commuter rail as a commercially-viable enterprise, in many cases deliberately, resulting in the sprawl we have today. This massive legacy of government-funded infrastructure means there is no level playing field to allow the market to select the most efficient option.
Societies which made different choices have different outcomes -- to take two cities of 10 million residents each, compare the Osaka rail map with the Los Angeles Metro rail map; the reason LA is a city of single-occupancy vehicles becomes clear -- not a result of individual agendas or goals being "subverted", as you put it, but because of different choices in the infrastructure to invest in. People in LA like their cars; people in Osaka like their trains. The reason for this difference? In either case, it's a matter of where past infrastructure investment has gone to make the most affordable and convenient day-to-day experience today.
Getting back to Austin -- giving everyone what they think they want is simply not an option here, because our population is growing but our roadways can't. There are decisions that have to be made, and it's foolhardy to ignore the consequences of those decisions on issues such a population density, transit and zoning which city planning is all about.
Two niggles:
Further -- if you optimize for the maximum safe speed for the mix of vehicles on the road today, you discourage slower, more efficient vehicles from entering the road tomorrow, perpetuating the existing vehicle mix and supporting urban sprawl (as individuals tend to choose their homes to be no more than a 45-minute commute from work, higher-speed transportation leads to decreased population density, increasing the demands on road capacity in turn). I live in Austin, and we simply can't afford to keep the existing ratio of single-occupancy vehicles with our projected growth rate downtown -- widening the roads would be beyond our means, so we're making an effort to bring people closer to their jobs to reduce demand on both road capacity and parking. Efforts such as bicycle facilities and free downtown parking for motorcycles and scooters aren't being done to appease the hippie contingent -- they're being done to try to make our existing transportation and parking network that much easier to sustain on the projected budget available.
Increasing speeds, and in turn increasing sprawl, would be counter to that goal.
An ambitious plan; if you intend to make headway, I suggest getting to it.
What are you doing here on slashdot with us animals?
It's an entirely suitable explanation of why the trustee decided to wait rather than taking their current course of action earlier, which is the context in which it was provided. The audience here isn't necessarily people who know or care about the SCO/IBM or SCO/Novell trials; it's discussing bankruptcies themselves, not their causes.
"Clarified [their] rights" means clarified what they did or did not have. That it happened to lean decisively to the latter doesn't make the language inaccurate -- as a non-lawyer who maybe has read somewhat more legalese than the average layperson (a few law classes back in school, and my wife is a paralegal), I didn't even think it misleading.
It's not the violent felons who make up the bulk of the prison population. Making non-violent felons into violent ones, on the other hand, is a substantial problem with our current "justice" system.
So noted -- explicit scare quotes it'll be next time, as in:
You read much too literally.
"Guilt by association"? Much to the contrary; the post to which you reply defended patriotism by indicating that the only thing "wrong" with it is a misapprehension on the part of those who object (assisted by similar misapprehension on the part of those they find objectionable).
What's wrong with patriotism is that it's oft confused with nationalism -- forgetting the second part of this phrase:
"My country, right or wrong; when right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right"
...and believing in a duty to defend a country's actions rather than its principals.
Something I know because I've gotten close enough to see the top. Being able to hobnob with the folks at the peak (one of my old friends is among Linus's lieutenants) has a tendency to put one's own skills in perspective. You know how Google's skill assessments work? Unless you're one of the people allowed to put a "10" down in any area (ie. literally wrote the language or the major, accepted book on the subject yourself), you're not top of your field. It's a high bar to meet, and personally, I'm perfectly fine being in the top 20% rather than the top 0.1%.
Utter bull. An entrepreneur with 3 successful startups and 2 failures is not going to have any trouble at all finding venture funding -- he's still beat the odds by a long shot.
Doing risky things means failing sometimes, and out in the Real World, people know that. If you want to look like you're keeping your edge, you do that by going out and accomplishing hard things (and, yes, failing sometimes) -- not holing yourself up in a secure little cocoon.
To the contrary -- I strengthen it. Someone at the top of their field has less reason to worry about job security and more reason to care about their innovations making a difference. If you're having a good idea once a decade, maybe it doesn't matter so much if you don't have a direct path to get them implemented; if you have them every six months, it's a severely major bummer.
I was half of the two-man team building automated deployment infrastructure for our largest software-as-a-service division.
Hey there! No claims to be at the top of my field, but I just resigned from Dell to join a startup, so I'd like to think that my personal views might be topical. Big corporations have some nice advantages, to be sure -- the health plan, the performance bonus, the on-site doctor's office, the company gym. The problem is that they're quite substantially limiting in terms of freedom and flexibility.
Before Dell, I worked for a number of startups. Every so often I'd come up with an idea for how we could do something different -- talk it over with people, sell it to management, and go get it implemented. When I say "sell it to management" in the context of a startup, I don't mean my immediate management first, then getting approval to build a presentation to present to a committee one level up the chain, wash/rinse/repeat -- I mean walking straight into the CEO's office and going "Hey, Jim -- you know how we've been putting faxmodems into every box we ship, and having to send someone out when they fail? Why don't we just run a PRI into our colo, reduce the price on the individual machines, and sell it as a service?". There was a lot of talk at Dell around open-door policies -- but the level of institutional impediments to making changes or improvements was stifling.
At a startup, I could be proud of a profitable quarter -- because I, personally, was a major part of the work that went into building the company into what it was, same as every other person there. At a Fortune 50, by contrast, it's just too huge to have a sense or measure of your own scale or impact.
The "top-of-their-field" will have safety net such that if the startup they're at fails, they can land on their feet -- heck, all it took was one phone call to get me out of Dell, and I'm nowhere near top of my field -- and having the flexibility to form the world around you and take pride in what you've helped create is worth far more than the on-site clinic and the 401(k) match.
Not "should be kept in practice". Rather, "should be quietly modified rather than shouted down, as the shouting-down process itself does more harm than good". Think of it as a correlary to the way an adult's shocked reaction to a bit of bare breast in public can make a far deeper impression on a child who happens to be present than the initial stimulus; the point I'm making is that the act of publicly sanctioning the teacher for posing a hypothetical exercise is more dangerous than the exercise itself. That doesn't mean that I support the exercise being replicated and reproduced in the future.
And yes, that's a modification from my original stance -- but one I've made explicit in my last few posts on the subject, if you'd bothered to read them closely. Part of the point of debate, after all, is discovering areas in which one's views are subject to refinement.
Have you ever heard of reading for details? The "innocent" descriptor explicitly mapped back to a defense of the argument that the assignment explicitly represented the hypothetical act as repugnant. The "zero sum gain" discussion was arguing that it's only "zero sum game" if you think only in terms of crime rate, and that there's more to the world from that. And while you keep insisting that I'm somehow claiming that this exercise offers benefits over "traditional teaching techniques", I have stated no such claim and do not rest my position on that premise.
And, frankly, I've got more to do with my life than shouting back and forth with someone on the Internet -- debate is fun when both sides actually listen to what the other is saying, but that's clearly not happening here. Ta ta for now; may we meet on better terms in the future.
Zero sum gain?! Only if the only people who exist in the world are cops and criminals. Some of us in a world that's big enough, and interesting enough, and safe enough that we can care a lot more about science, and engineering, and art, and industry, and all the other things in the world that aren't crime.
Getting back towards the topic, though, thinking about security can be fun -- it's a game of edge cases just like law or programming or chess, and making it a taboo subject for any law-abiding person to think about makes the world not only less safe but also intellectually poorer. It's the same mindset that took away the chemistry sets that gave us a generation of chemists, the same mindset that would hamstring today's inventors to prevent them from building a device that might possibly be used for (horror!) copyright infringement.
I didn't say it's more suitable than "traditional ways" of teaching logistical skills. I said that banning that kind of exercise is actively harmful, in excess of the harm done by allowing it. Quietly suggest to the teacher that she develop a more tasteful lesson plan next year, perhaps -- perhaps a series of essays analyzing Corey Doctorow's Little Brother, if she wants to keep with the edgy public safety theme (presuming that they're an honors-level class and parental consent is forthcoming) -- but making a public lesson to the children that they aren't considered able to handle hypothetical exercises and need to make a habit of disengaging their brains and going immediately into flag-waving mode whenever the T word is mentioned lest they be considered un-Australian... that's a far worse lesson than the one it replaces.
Only to the extent that GTA4 teaches them the skills they need (much less confers the intent) to hijack cars, or to the extent that an encyclopedia article on nuclear weapons will create students who build them in their basements. The claim that hypothetical exercises -- particularly ones which emphasize the repugnance of the act[1] -- will somehow produce real-life criminals is fear-mongering bullshit and nothing more.
And with that, I'm done; the ad-hominems have gotten to be quite enough.
[1] - an assignment to plan an event which will kill as many "innocent" people as possible most certainly meets this criteria. Terrorists don't call their targets innocent.
You're hardly one to talk about rationality. Let's look at all the completely unfounded attacks just in the immediately preceding post:
Now, that said, let's sift through the debris and see if I can find anything worth responding to:
Right -- it's a planning exercise. Now, let's think about some of the things you need to do to successfully complete such an exercise:
Note that I'm not selling this as a way to learn history; I'm selling it as a way to learn planning. I'm not saying that it's the best possible exercise to be used for this purpose, but I am saying that making a huge controversy over its selection does more harm than good by teaching children that some subjects are immoral to target for analysis.
Are we a member of the ban-violent-media bandwagon too? If you think high school kids can't distinguish between reality and hypothetical or fantasy situations, we'd better not be letting them watch violent movies either.
If you decide to make a concerted effort towards getting a nation of genius-level lockmakers, you're going to end up enabling a thief or two over the course of the process as a matter of course. On the other hand, that thief's much-more-numerous opposition will be similarly enhanced.
Moreover, you'll get not just lockmakers but also mechanical engineers, watchmakers, precision instruments -- anything which requires complimentary skills.
Let me ask you this hypothetical situation. Let's say you were given a button that would make everyone within 2000 miles of you 5 IQ points smarter. If you would ignore that button because it would make better criminals -- ignoring that it would also make better authors, teachers, inventors, scientists and engineers -- we don't have much to talk about.
Progressives here in Texas tend to be offended when we're lumped in with the anti-gun nutters on the coasts.
And we're armed. :)