From my experience, when someone seems clueless or illogical, it's just that they're not saying which problem they're really trying to solve.
E.g., if I were to come and say that my team needs a pony, and it would be great for team morale, and double as company car too, you might think, "WTF? Is he that retarded? Who rides a pony through town to a meeting with the customers?" The issue is that I'm not solving the problem I'm claiming to. The real problem might be that my daughter wants a pony, and I figure, maybe the company can pay for it. But of course, now I can't go to a management meeting and say, "I want the company to buy my daughter a pony." So now I'll work backwards from the solution I wish ("the company should buy a pony that I can use") to an acceptable problem it would solve (e.g., "we need environmentally friendly transportation!") And maybe I already have a second phase of that plan in mind, but I'm not telling it to you yet, either.
The same applies to a lot of seemingly retarded managers. It may be just that they're not solving the problem you think, or that their job title says they should solve.
E.g., if he comes up with a vision towards "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications", maybe really he's just trying to play bullshit bingo with the CEO or the investors. You're not the one he's trying to impress, the guy signing his paycheck is.
Or maybe he's got a second phase in mind too, like that next he'll need more hardware for that, and he's already bribed by some vendor. Or that he already knows which graphics company he wants to outsource some of that to and what bribe he'll get.
Literally, I've seen one project where their visionary wanted to have at least 1MB graphics in an applet, and that was back in the dialup and ISDN days, just because his best buddy had a graphics design company, and he wanted to outsource those graphics to that. Corruption by any other name, but there you go.
Or maybe he just wants more budget and a bigger team under him, because that raises his perceived status and importance.
Or maybe he just wants to be able to keep the current team, in the face of some retarded budget allocation which would otherwise have him fire everyone now because there are no projects in the pipeline for July, only to re-hire them in August when the next projects kick in. So he's creating some grand task as some make-work solution.
Or maybe he's just strategically gaming the budget rules in advance. In a lot of places they have retarded processes like that if you didn't use all your budget this year, you get a budget cut next year. So people end up turning the heating on in March, because the winter was mild and otherwise they'd get no heating budget next year, when maybe the winter will be worse. Same here. You don't really know what you'll have to do next year, so you essentially have to burn some money in advance to be sure you'll get a budget for it next year. A case of "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications" is something so overachieving and nebulous that it can burn any amount of money you want it to burn.
Etc.
Firing everyone competent and hiring the cheapest burger flippers, well, again I've seen it done for strategic reasons.
E.g., because with the same budget you can have more people under you, which raises your own status. And some places also have rules for what your job title and/or salary can be, based on the number of people under you. Ok, it wasn't at CEO level, but I do know someone who raised from a minor team leader to mid-level manager just by having his team inflate like a blowfish. He kept hiring incompetents and still needing more... and got rewarded for it.
Well, the problem is that those positions even got to be called "officer" in the first place. All of them.
"Officer" used to mean, you know, army or navy. Even using it for the police is as recent as the end of the 19'th century, though it could be argued as a continuation from the times when the city guards acted as both police and garrison. Even the use for someone who holds an office of the state, was originally reserved for judges, but, anyway, the key words were: of the state. You know, someone acting in an official government job.
So at the very least I have to wonder about the original shallow souls who thought they need an even funkier title.
Now I won't blame the ones who just get such a stupid title thrust upon them; after all, they're the victims there. But I have to wonder about the original ones who just had to invent some new titles for themselves.
That seems pretty harsh judgment, considering that it's not a title he thought up personally. Someone else did. So you're telling me _you_ would refuse a promotion, just because the title sounds retarded? In a job you'd presumably do if it were named differently? That sounds kind of shallow.
A name is just a name. It has only as much meaning as is assigned to it. You could name the Sun server admin, say, "High Priest of the Sun", and he'll still be an admin.
Getting hung up about just a name is just as silly in either direction. Either seeking some bullshit-bingo title, or having some silly phobia about it.
Yes, the MBA world does play bullshit bingo, and tries to come up with funky meaningless words and expressions to seem like they too have their jargon. But you have to realize that some people are as much on the wrong end of it as you are. The CxO thing is so established by now, it would take a nuke to dislodge it. You might get away with changing it if you're the CEO, but even then everyone else would still talk about your CxO. Might as well just go with the flow and treat it as any other word.
Well, I dunno. It sounds like she did figure out that it was junk. Otherwise it would be more like, "OMG, now the Nigerian prince's inheritance will be sent to McAffee's non-existent alias!";) Plus, it doesn't say that she answered to any spam before McAffee paid her to. So she must have already figured out there's something fishy about it.
Way I read it, it's just the difference between having figured something out, and actually seeing it. So to speak, the same difference as between figuring out that the goatse.cx link all over the place must be some kind of trick or scam, and actually seeing it.
Basically, she's had to wade through the proverbial shit-clogged stables of Augeas. Or the Internet version thereof. Most people seem to assume each other nice, so the sheer amount of nastiness must have been amazing. Even if you know it's there, it's one thing to just know it as an abstract notion and wade through it for an hour or two a day.
So she says she's amazed. Well, blimey, I'd probably be amazed too.
There's really nothing there that says "OMG, corporate-brainwashed idiot" in that confession of amazement.
Hmm, well, if I remember physics at all, gravity would be an even bigger bitch to measure. Really, it's a very weak force. It only does anything measurable for _huge_ masses. You know, stars, planets, etc. The space curvature is observed around stars and the like. Measuring it around a 1 kilo sphere, well, you're probably worse off than counting atoms.
Plus, if you think about it, it also doesn't help that we're already in a huge gravity well. So it's a bit like measuring the brightness of a lightbulb, near the Sun. At the very least, the measurement would be pretty darn anisotropic, so to speak.
Plus, I'm guessing that even if you had the accuracy to measure the deviation around a 1 kilo sphere and somehow compensated for the Earth's gravity well, the table you're measuring it on weighs more. The building you're in weighs hundreds of tons. And depending on where you measure it, you might have a mountain nearby.
Not saying it wouldn't be theoretically possible. Just pretty impractical at our tech level.
Well, it's sorta like this: a standard is only useful if you have some effective way to reproduce it or measure with it.
1. time. You can essentially just make a MASER, which means basically a cavity which resonates at that frequency. The nice part is that it can be tuned, and even continuously tuned, by just measuring the amplitude of the signal. When you've reached the maximum power, the thing is tuned to that frequency.
2. length. It's measured by Interferometry, so you have a meaningful way to transform a wavelength into any given distance.
At any rate, the transition for these two only happened when someone build a device which could actually measure one second or one metre that way.
3. mass. Well, that's the tricky one. Saying that you define a kilogram as one bazillion silicium atoms is useless unless you can somehow actually produce a lump with that many atoms. As long as we can't actually be sure how many atoms are in there, it would be a useless standard.
These guys claim to have been able to do just that: say with a high degree of confidence that, yep, their spheres contain exactly that many atoms. If they're right, then we're finally ready to move the kilo to that standard.
FYI: That someone should be the USERS, not the marketing.
And FYI: someone has to interact with that large mass of users, and figure out what they want, and how much they're willing to pay for it. And which of those users can actually be used to advertise your cool new program to people. That's often quite a different feature set than what engineers find cool.
So, I guess, you could make the coders also run focus groups and figure market share on their own. Which is turning them into (often unwilling) marketing, and is a waste of their time and real skills. Or you could let marketing do it.
No man, you are a manager, and that is pretty laughable. From your post(it may over-stress the opposing POV) you look like a close minded, Dilbert like PHB, who likes the "PROCESS", and can't have enough of the "PROCESS". The task of that principle is to force the geeks to interact and not be closed off. And the review process is the whip here... I bet the manager is still the one to hire or fire a person, no matter how good his reviews from other devs may be.
Heh. Nope, not really. I don't have the authority to tell anyone to do anything whatsoever. I made sure to tell every employer in advance that I'm not interested in any kind of management position, because, frankly, I don't have the personality type or inclination or talent for it.
I just don't find chaos fun. I've been over-managed, and I've been under-managed, and you know what? The under-managed situation was less fun. Yeah, so you get ad-hoc groups deciding what to do next. How do you even know if what you decided to do is even needed by anyone? How do you know if it fits together with what the ad-hoc group on the next floor decided to do? Ah, so you talk to the "USERS". It's one giant waste of money, brains and resources, where a working hierarchy and a simple process would have worked better and with less wasted man-hours.
My favouring having some discipline and process is very much based on that first hand experience.
Or let me qualify that better. A lot of people come straight out of college with the idea that those cute little 1000 line assignments are everything. Or worked on some cute little web-site in PHP. And think that, bah, they don't need any management, discipline or marketing. And indeed, for something that scope, they don't.
Now try working on something several million lines large, and involving several different teams. (And that's not even the largest project nowadays.) If everyone pulls in a different directions, disjointed groups manage themselves, and the only cohesion is what the people themselves negotiate with each other, and testing is just some theoretical thing that everyone does for himself, it _will_ fail. Even getting the same requirement from end A to end B of that people graph, becomes something that depends on too many informal hops, and gets horribly distorted in the process. It's also a waste of everyone's time. If you have, say, one manager for each team, then it's his job to manage that information flow too. If it's everyone for himself, or by ad-hoc committees, it just doesn't scale. Instead of having a handful of managers who form a small graph for that information flow, you have an awfully tangled graph of dozens of people as nodes, where every single developer must somehow get the information to and from everyone else who's even remotely interested in his code. It's lossy and it's a waste of time.
_That_ is why we have some attempts at defining a process, and some kind of hierarchy. Because otherwise the overhead grows pretty much exponentially with the total team size.
But, heh, if your fantasy world is that "us vs them" as to not have room for a developer who thinks that discipline and correct management are there for a reason, so be it. Feel free to imagine anything you wish about me, that makes your fantasy world be simple and comfortable again. Far from me to want to drag you to RL if you don't want to.
Yeah! They should be run by marketing and management people, just like at Microsoft! Everyone knows that engineers can't be relied upon to produce enterprise quality software without marketing's careful guidance and input.
Well, rather than "Funny", I'd call that "Informative." A tool is only as useful as it fits someone's needs. I don't care how cool your ballpoint-pen/hatchet/banana-carrying-case combo is from an engineering viewpoint, if it doesn't do what I need, I'm not buying it.
Now I'm not saying one should put marketing completely in charge either, but _someone_ has to give some input about what the customers want too.
That said, having actually RTFA, I'm surprised that Google doesn't have bigger problems. Letting the engineers run things by committee sounds like a recipe for trouble, and I'm saying that as an engineer. Point in case:
- from my experience testers are a valuable resource, and too often the coders (and particularly stupid managers) see them as the enemy, the guys who pick on our lovely code and get in the way of our getting the praise we deserve. They're also easy to bully or otherwise silence. That's also speaking from practice. E.g., you tell one to leave a module alone 'cause you plan to fix it later, lo and behold, a year later he's still leaving it alone 'cause you "forgot" to tell him that he can resume testing it.
At some point you need _someone_ to tell all the Wallys to get to fixing the stuff on that known bugs list already, or to decide, basically, OK, this thing goes into QA now. That someone is effectively a manager. Whether it's hired as one, or you have some fucked-up elective monarchy or committee, it's still a manager by any other name. He's doing a management job. Might as well just admit that that's a manager.
At any rate, well, big surprise, he then says that the testers are too few and they make no difference. Whop-de-do. You put the coders in charge and have a corporate mentality that it's ok to be a perpetual beta, you get just that. It's as predictable as leaving the schoolkids in charge, and then wondering why you have no teachers or exams.
Now it may be ok at Google, where they still claim to be a beta even after more than a decade, but it wouldn't work at most other companies. Can you imagine shipping an OS as a perpetual beta? Yes, I know, Windows, bla, bla, bla. Let's put it like this: it had all those problems when MS thought it's fully tested. Can you imagine how bad it would be if it were shipped as a beta and without much tester input at that? Right. That's what I'm trying to say.
- power vacuums don't work well with humans. Anarchy is a fine concept in theory, but it doesn't quite work in practice. Either someone effectively ends up the de-facto leader, or you get a chaos with lots of backroom politics and backstabbing games and committee groupthink games.
And whop-de-do, it sounds like he got fed up with the politics there. Who would have guessed? Right.
But neither is ideal. Just because someone knew how to pretend to be everyone's friend, to get himself accepted as a community leader, doesn't mean he also is any good as a manager. It's just Peter's Principle or the Dilbert Principle, except without a higher power which could remove or sideline an incompetent mid-level manager. And likely he'll not even have the authority to take any unpopular decision.
- just because someone is passionate about something, it doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to do something, or even necessary.
I just need to look around at work. There are plenty of people who are passionate about some cool technology aspect, but I see _none_ among the coders who are passionate about some business concept and almost none who even have any clue about usability. (We had a guy who thought he's qualified to talk about usability because he's a Mac user, but funnily he produced the worst GUI anyone had ever seen. The people who actually had to use it, quickly proclaimed it to be b
1. I have seen extreme cases where the talk included no intention of communicating anything whatsoever.
2. It was by men too.
The most pathologic case I've seen was one co-worker who just couldn't shut up. Literally. You could go out of the office and hear him still talking in an empty room.
But to illustrate why I say that communication was not the purpose: I've had him come to me once to ask about what one of my methods did. The talk went sorta like this:
Me: "Well, that's easy. Let's look at this data object, 'cause that's what tells it what to do..." Him: "Oh, I get it, it takes the user name and cross-references it in the other table and..." Me: "Err...nope..." Him: "... and then the contract number is put in an XML used via Wally's module and..." Me: "No, that's not..." Him: "... and then it prints stuff on the screen..." Me: "Dude, you came to ask me. Please _listen_." Him: "Yeah, but just to see if I got it right." Me: "No, you got it all wrong. It's not printing anything yet, and..." Him: "Oh, I get it. The user name is..." Me: "Stop! Here it's for logging purposes _only_!" Him: "... and then it's the other table that stores the rest of the info..."
I get annoyed at this point, go outside to smoke a cigarette. I take my time. I hear him faintly, still talking. I go back inside, he's still parked next to my desk, talking.
Him: "... and then I thought the chip was fried, but it turns out I just had to download new video drivers. But I had already reinstalled Windows, so I had to download all game patches all over again..."
I remember I needed some clarification from another guy on a totally unrelated matter. I was planning to write an email, but wth, let's see him in person. I leave Mr Chatterbox there and go talk to that other guy for some quarter of an hour. I come back, wouldn't you know it, he's still talking. I think he was up to what happened in his vacation.
It wasn't just signal-to-noise ratio. He just wasn't interested in anything I had to say about that module, or generally about anything. He just needed to ventilate his tonsils.
Ok, now that one was a pathologic case, and I'm not saying that anyone else is literally like that. (Hopefully;)
It does however make me think. I don't think most talks happen because we genuinely need to know something, or communicate something. Sure, it's inevitable that some information is exchanged too, even when it's useless and promptly forgotten. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is just to fill one's time.
Or to put it otherwise, look at Slashdot. How many people do you think are in this thread because they genuinely need to know about what you can infer from online profiles? How many are here genuinely to impart valuable expert knowledge? No, most of us are here simply to waste some time. The information exchange may exist, but it's more like side-effect than real purpose of the exercise.
Heck, in a lot of cases the actual topic isn't even side-effect, it's a mean to an end. The end being to have that Null conversation. See how many people watch football or whatever sport, just to have something to talk about at the pub the next day. They're not exchanging information about football, the information is just some extra effort in order to have a talk.
We're wired to need to _do_ something. Otherwise we get bored. And for some people (both men and women) talking is a way to not get bored. Nothing more.
And if I'm to get even more cynical, here's a parting thought: in a lot of cases the real information exchanged is neither the thing discussed, nor then "I am here for you, sharing my time with a Null topic, and I am available if you have something more difficult to discuss" message. I'm getting the impression that in a lot of cases the only real information is "let's see if you still pay attention to me" or similar.
Women have to manage with what they have: negotiation. Women have to manage with what they have: negotiation. If women simply point out mens' failings, men start pounding their chests to demonstrate their dominance.
"Negotiation" is one way to put it. In practice, you get a whole gamut ranging from outright submissive, to (rarely) threats of violence. I know at least one who's pretty proud that her negotiations with her late husband were along the lines of "you do thing my way, and I won't bash your head in." With various shades in between, that include:
- nagging. Literally pointing those perceived failings out again and again and again, until hopefully you get the idea that chest thumping doesn't work anyway.
- manipulation.
- indirect threats and manipulation. There are a couple of whole cultures where a woman's only power was gained by, for example, manipulating her sons against their father. Or I only have to look at my own deranged family, where grandma manipulated mom and dad against each other, and my mom tried more than once to manipulate me and my brother against each other. (Thankfully though, she's such a socially inept nerd, that it was just funny to see her try.)
- annoying passive aggression
- basically, "if you don't do as I say, you're getting no sex"
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically, _some_ women are nice, and _some_ are nasty in various ways. Sociopathy/Psychopathy exists in women too, not only in men, for example. Four times fewer, yes, but that's far from zero.
Note that I'm not especially vilifying women here. I'm just saying that there's a whole range of them, ranging from saint to Antichrist, so to speak. From Mother Theresa to such fine gals as Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandl, and Elisabeth Volkenrath, who led the women's camp at Auschwitz. IIRC Maria Mandl alone ordered the death of _half_ _a_ _million_ women. She was known as "The Beast" and also known to have people killed for as little as looking at her. Or Ilse Koch, The Witch of Buchenwald. Now that's a sadistic gal.
In other words, cute, but as false as all blanket generalizations.
Who needs a brain or tact when might makes right? Case in point... Behold: pedantic dweebs berating what is probably the only woman on/. for failing to use the — code to produce a -- symbol. Thanks to their quick actions, the female is quieted and they can resume wanking it and flaming each other to assert their dominance on the internet's biggest sausage party.
Again, spare me the blanket generalizations, please.
The grammar/spelling/punctuation trolls are a rather tiny group of trolls. Annoying and visible, yes, but in no way representative for a whole gender.
So, anyway, you found one message from one of those retards. And he was answering to a woman. Whop-de-do. They do that to anyone, and to each other.
How's that representative for males as a whole?
In fact, I'll go on a limb and say that most people on Slashdot, male or female, look down upon that group of retards. Most of us aim upwards, not find some "look, someone typoed a 5 letter words that I knew!" claims to glory. It's only when you're near the bottom of the proverbial barrel, that "look, there's someone (arguably) lower than me!!" starts looking like some claim to glory. Some people just are that low, have no achievements worth bragging about, and are building their sole claim to glory out of such "OMG, you typoed a 5 letter word that I know how to spell! You must be more stupid than me!!!" lameness. It's not even pedantry, it's being a worthless loser and knowing it. Nothing more.
Disclaimer: I'm not against MS products, I use both Windows and Linux for different purposes, and I've used enough other OSes before to not give much of a damn about any particular one. By Slashdot standards, I tend to actually count as pro-MS, mostly by virtue of where the reference point is.
That said:
I credit Windows for bringing the price of consumer hardware down, especially Vista. Just think, if Vista were not so HW-heavy would we have today Dual- and Quad- core processors and _Gigabytes_ of RAM for so cheap? People who use an OS that does not need all that (Ubuntu, for instance) can literally have a system that is four times as powerful as they need, for the same adjusted cost of what a regular system would have cost only three years ago.
You're saying, basically, that by making people pay for hardware and upgrades they didn't actually need, it's stimulated and created a bigger mass market for the hardware industry. That's on par with saying that if you break enough windows, the glass industry will benefit greatly, and it might even bring down the price of glass.
What makes it a fallacy is ignoring the cost of all that, and pretending that only the good effects exist. It didn't just wave a magic wand and created money for an industry. It made a bunch of people pay for something they didn't need.
More importantly: money which otherwise would have been used for something else. We don't know what exactly, but it wouldn't be money stuffed under the mattress. (There's a federal reserve, or similar in other countries, which sees to it that money circulates at roughly the desired speed.) Maybe they would have been used to buy something else, and stimulated another industry. Maybe they would have been put in pension funds which in turn get invested in whatever companies are growing fast, essentially giving them more money to grow.
Broken windows or Windows don't _create_ money or markets. They just force a transfer from one to another. Every cent earned by the glaziers for repairing a broken window, isn't a cent magicked out of thin air, but a cent that someone else didn't earn as a result. Every cent earned by MS or the hardware industry because of broken Windows, is a cent some other industry won't see.
So you can't just say that it was good for hardware prices, as if the alternative would have been nothing at all. If we didn't spend our collective money on subsidizing hardware research and bringing hardware prices down, we _would_ have something else instead. Maybe better cars, or maybe HDTV sets would have dropped in price instead, or maybe we'd just have more pizza shops. It's impossible to roll back history and peek down the other trouser leg, so we'll never know exactly what we're missing, or if it's better or worse than cheap hardware. But we would have used those money on _something_ anyway, and _some_ industries would have benefited from it instead.
Hmm, that's certainly interesting and worth thinking about. I'm guessing he meant more like social strata than proper rigid castes, though? There are very few countries today where you're legally fixed in a caste from birth to death, but I'm seeing not much reduction in how much people swear.
I'm not certain if you're trying to be offensive or what. The British army at the time was the premier army in the world. They did not "pout" over the loss of some officers.
Maybe not literally "pout", but they called the minutemen murderers for having sights on their guns. At any rate, my point is that they didn't change tactics to, I dunno, take cover or anything. They whined about the American snipers being murderers, and continued to send more officers to get sniped. That's what I'm trying to say.
Just pointing out that if any state were to revolt against the US government, they wouldn't have an ocean in between. War isn't _equally_ long distance every time.
Well, my guess is that that's more of a question of whether or not you have a culture which glorifies being an aggressive arsehole, and "gangsta" role models. Humans are good at adapting to the role they're given by society. If they're essentially taught that they have to prove their manhood to the community by being aggressive in defense of their "honour", or even that essentially they have to piss on everyone to mark their territory (figuratively speaking,) well, they'll do just that.
So, well, sometimes willpower may indeed be involved. Just not in the direction you assume it. Someone might actually muster their willpower to assault (verbally or physically) someone bigger and tougher, just so they don't lose face. Even as their fight-or-flight instinct is, basically, going, "flight, for the love of god, I said flight, not fight!!!"
While the word itself is no worse than any other word, I think it's the conveyed hostility that gets people's panties in a knot.
A word is just a word, and conveys no more and no less meaning that is assigned to it. That one word is obscene or offensive and another isn't, is, well, just because we needed to designate some words as offensive or obscene. Because essentially we needed to communicate just that message.
Even if you designed a language without swearwords, people will invent their own. See how people constructed a few for Esperanto.
But what gets people angry is the message, not the word. If I were to say, "You stupid arsehole!", it's not the individual words (after all, an arsehole is a vital part of the body;), it's the conveyed aggressive stance and intention to insult, demean, and diminish one's perceived worth.
And just as proof that it's not just the words: it can be done without words too. We already know from, say, MUD's and MMOs, that people get equally insulted when they're met with unwarranted hatred and aggression, out of nowhere. Almost everyone hates a ganker, even the other gankers that happen to end up on the wrong end of it, even if he doesn't say a single word.
It's that hostility which puts people in the only mode we're biologically programmed to use to deal with aggression: fight or flight. Once it's been triggered, well, you can override it by willpower, but essentially your programming says you either fight or go away from the source of the stress. If you're "cornered" and can't leave, you fight back. Verbally or otherwise. If you can't do either, you get frustrated.
At any rate, I don't think there is much of a qualitative difference between being called a "doodoo head" or a "cocksucker". The former is the child version of "I'm being aggressive and trying to demean you", the latter is the adult version. Different words, but the message is the same, and the reaction is the same.
As for why swearing is more acceptable today, I'd say that award should probably go to Hollywood. Everyone knows they're supposed to say "fuck" every other word. You can see the same in other countries too, albeit with different words, expressions, attitudes, etc. People find role models on the screen, and try to talk and act like them.
I wouldn't set my hopes too high, though. If a good, "fuck you, cocksucker" becomes devalued and useless to convey the insult as a message, we'll switch to other words. Or invent new words for that purpose.
The best you can do is just get people to play nice, and stop trying to act like aggressive chronic cases of testosterone poisoning. Not to get them to get over some words. If it's just the words, see the previous paragraph;)
Maybe stopping beating up children can help with that. But it'll be just because it stops teaching them early that violence is the solution to everything, the way to get anything done, and that when they grow up they have to be an aggressive arsehole like their dad too. It'll be the change in role models and attitudes, that will matter in the end, not just being allowed to say "fuck." Words come and go and can be invented or shanghaied for any purpose, including for verbal aggression. What'll make a difference is people not needing a hostile stance and message as often.
The difference is that they're very very different kinds of engines really. Sorta like the difference between a turbofan and a piston engine in an aircraft. Both suck in fuel and use a propeller to push the air towards the back, but they're very different engines anyway.
A scramjet is, sorta, an afterburner without the turbojet in front of it. Think just a de Laval nozzle, sorta, where the airplane's own speed shoves the air from the front, and you inject the fuel and light it in the back. It can only operate at hypersonic speeds, because it does need the air coming in really hard and fast, and it burns fuel continuously. There is no need for pulses or detonations.
A pulsejet, well, think a pipe with a valve in front. Sorta like this, with "front" being downwards:
|.| |.| |.| |T| +.+
The T is the valve.
Air comes in, you inject the fuel, and ignite it. The pressure closes the valve, so the only way the burnt gasses can go is backwards, pushing your aircraft forward. Then the pressure equalises, the valve opens again, and the cycle starts all over again.
This one can _only_ operate in pulses. On the up side, it can operate at subsonic speeds too. It's also a very simple and robust engine. The V1's pulsejet could be riddled with holes and still generate most of the thrust. The RAF found it easier to just tip it over, with the tip of the fighter's wing pushing the V1's wing upwards, than shoot them.
Downside, also generates massive vibrations. The buzz of the V1s could be heard from the ground. It's a bit like flying a jackhammer. Which is one reason it never got too popular for manned aircraft, or aircraft which were supposed to fly more than once.
Well, that's the simple explanation anyway. There are more modern designs which, for example, do away with the valve and essentially just choke the flow via a nozzle to achieve the same effect. But that's the general gist of it.
I hope you're not trying to draw a parallel between France (at the time of our Revolution) with what we are doing in Iraq right now.
Actually, my only point for now is that it took a massive effort of a foreign superpower, for that colonial revolt to succeed. If you revolted against the US government today, who would that superpower be? I don't think there are many people in the world who'd declare war on the USA just to help a revolt succeed.
1. a musket was the best any army had. Civilians even had the equivalent of sniper rifles, see the minutemen.
Heck, you could make a musket and ammo in a local smithy or in your shed. It was a simple weapon where the tolerances were _extremely_ generous.
Artillery? Sure. Anyone who could make a bell, could make a cannon just as good as the royal armourers in England.
Shock troops? That still meant cavalry. Any rancher who had a horse could be the equivalent of what today is a tank or a gunship.
2. Tactics were also more... lacklustre. Armies were trained to just march to 100 yards of each other and stand tall, shooting volley after volley at each other, until one looks like it's breaking. Then the other would do a cavalry charge or bayonet charge to finish it all. The only difference between a fully trained army and a militia was that the army was trained to stay in formation longer.
The Brits essentially did little more than pout when the rifled guns of the minutemen just sniped their officers in the first volley.
Modern infantry tactics and indeed combined arms tactics are a bit more effective than that. A militia whose claim to glory is shooting a few vermin now and then, and a bit of penis-size posturing at the shooting range on sundays, would sustain heavier casualties even if they had the exact same weapons the army had.
3. While willy-waving about the independence war is good and fine, let's not forget that it was mostly won because there was an ocean in between _and_ because France went bankrupt supporting you guys against the Brits. The whole French navy, as much as there was of it, fought hard to make that ocean a bigger problem for the Brits than it already was. And there was military help on the ground too from the French and from the northern indian tribes they had worked hard to befriend.
In fact, if you look at the French Revolution, soon there after, and at the king getting beheaded, that's what started it: eventually the peasants and burgeoisie had enough of paying the debt for a war that wasn't theirs and gained nothing for them. But I digress.
At any rate, you fought, only a fraction of the English army and you didn't fight it alone. And yeah, you repeated it a few years later, when the Brits were busy with Napoleon and made little more than a token show of force to keep you from trading with Napoleon. And gave up as soon as Napoleon was no longer a threat, and they had no more reason to keep you from trading with France.
Don't let it go to your head. Just a few rag-tag militias against the full might of England, _could_ have went a lot differently.
Funnily enough, though, if it's white skin on a redheaded girl (natural redheads don't tan, what with the melanin-producing gene being broken), nobody has an objection to _that_.
Well, they actually were a bunch of examples. I suppose I could put some filler in between them, or make it a bulleted list, so every other sentence doesn't begin with "E.g." But then my messages are already huge, and I'm not sure if making them any longer would be an improvement. I think I'll stick to the repetition, until I get a better idea.
Actually, we have better statistics than that. Say, from the Egyptians, we have plenty of records left of when someone died. You know, plaques, inscriptions, etc. So you have a somewhat random sample, and the ages at which they died.
So you can sorta plot a gauss curve, albeit one with a massive spike in the first 3 years, due to the infant mortality that you mention. But the more interesting part is what happens when you look past that spike, at the peak of the proper gauss curve. That's basically the age where, if you survived those infant years, you'd have a 50%-50% chance to be dead anyway.
And for the Old Kingdom period (i.e., a bit over 4000 years ago) that peak was in the 30's for men and in the 20's for women. By the New Kingdom (a bit over 3000 years ago), it had progressed to 40's and respectively 30's.
So, yes, they did live less. Seriously. Yes, there was massive infant mortality, but, no, you can't dismiss everything based on just that.
Yes, like with anything statistical, there were exceptions in both directions. There were the occasional guys who lived very long lives, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. They also tended to be the rather rich guys.
And I think one funny thing that may have helped confuse people about life expectancy back then, is the egyptian expression that someone lived to 110 years old. It's funny because it's just a metaphor. In their numerology, 110 was the perfect number, and they believed it to be also the absolute maximum someone can live, if they led a perfect life. So "he lived to 110", was basically just a way to say, "he lived a perfect life." Meaning typically that he was really well liked guy in the community. In practice most of those were dead in their 30's and 40's.
Basically it's just as much a metaphor as when we say that someone was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or jumped the shark, or put his foot in his mouth, or the like. We don't mean it literally, and it's silly to build biological explanation based on it.
As far as other myths go, don't forget that a lot of people claim that Jesus was an actual person, but in an era that had an extensive bureaucratic system and census, no record was ever made of him, and he was much, much more recent than Odysseus...
To be entirely fair, though:
1. Jesus seemed to have been a pretty common name back then. So basically it's like having a myth in the USA about a guy called John or in Russia about a guy called Ivan. There were plenty of Jesuses around and there are a few mentions of some unrelated ones in the chronicles. Whether one was actually the son of God or not, is a completely other issue.
2. A lot of records from that era don't exist any more, or are incomplete. Seriously, we're left scratching our heads even when it comes to such issues of state interest as what the strength of the roman legions were, at almost any given point, or what were their generals.
So assuming that you can just find out about some John Doe (for the Romans, Jesus was just another nutter executed for speaking against the emperor, not anyone special in any way,) and that you can take lack of a signal as confirmation that such a person existed, is kind of ignorant. Again, even from Rome itself we don't actually have the records of everyone they executed, and we _can't_ say that, for example, someone called Bigus Dickus never existed because we didn't find his records.
Plus that area had some bloody revolts, very soon thereafter, and some very brutal and devastating roman retaliation, followed by pretty much forced exodus at sword point. There are more than enough records that were lost in that chaos.
3. There seems to have been an interesting early sect, namely the Ebionites, which actually had a bunch of people who knew Jesus and supposedly _relatives_ of Jesus. They actually insisted that the leadership of the church should go to the relatives of Jesus, not to Peter, which wouldn't make sense if they didn't have such among them.
The interesting thing is that they seem to have had a very different view of Christianity and Jesus than what the apostles mangled it into, and even more so than what the Byzantines later decided it should be. What we inherited as Christianity is a long series of deviations, starting with Paul who basically insisted to throw away half the old Judaism (i.e., of the Old Testament) to make the new religion more palatable to non-jews and thus easier to proselitize. The Ebionites actually called Paul an apostate.
At any rate, these guys had a much more... down to earth view of it all, and viewed Jesus as just, you know, a human. A prophet and divinely inspired, to be sure. But not the divine "superuser" that later Christianity made him into. And while a lot of information about them is lost, from what the mainstream christians said about them, it seems that these guys thought Mary was _not_ a virgin at birth, Jesus _didn't_ come back from the dead, etc. The bugger just died on the cross, like everyone else, and stayed dead.
At any rate, I'd say that a sect based on a group of his friends and relatives makes no sense at all, if he didn't exist. Or let me qualify that better: if _a_ Jesus didn't exist.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should be a christian or anything. Note that, going by the views of, you know, those who actually knew him and didn't have to embelish the story to proselitise, he was just a guy. Maybe divinely inspired, if you want to believe that, or maybe he just got a sunstroke there in the desert or ate some funny mushrooms and had visions of what didn't actually exist, if you want to take the skeptical view. Take your pick.
I'm only saying that _a_ guy called Jesus _might_ have actually have existed and started the whole madness. Of course, we don't know for sure, but it's not too ludicrious a hypothesis, even if the evidence is less than bullet-proof. On the other hand, exactly what he was, and if he's even vaguely like what your local pastor claims, that's another story.
Well, the surrounding medium in this case is vacuum.
But, still, while your objections are valid, you have to take into consideration how damn small the result is anyway. Take a moving black hole. Heck, make it charged. Spinning. You name it. How much does it affect that radius? By ten? A thousand? A billion? When you have to write 42 zeroes after the decimal point just to compare it to a helium atom, and even more if you measure in metres, even erasing 1 or 3 or 9 of those zeroes, well, still leaves it really damn small.
And, as another poster correctly noted, it's still smaller than the Planck length. I must admit that that makes an even better argument against it, within the limits of physics as we know it.
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience, when someone seems clueless or illogical, it's just that they're not saying which problem they're really trying to solve.
E.g., if I were to come and say that my team needs a pony, and it would be great for team morale, and double as company car too, you might think, "WTF? Is he that retarded? Who rides a pony through town to a meeting with the customers?" The issue is that I'm not solving the problem I'm claiming to. The real problem might be that my daughter wants a pony, and I figure, maybe the company can pay for it. But of course, now I can't go to a management meeting and say, "I want the company to buy my daughter a pony." So now I'll work backwards from the solution I wish ("the company should buy a pony that I can use") to an acceptable problem it would solve (e.g., "we need environmentally friendly transportation!") And maybe I already have a second phase of that plan in mind, but I'm not telling it to you yet, either.
The same applies to a lot of seemingly retarded managers. It may be just that they're not solving the problem you think, or that their job title says they should solve.
E.g., if he comes up with a vision towards "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications", maybe really he's just trying to play bullshit bingo with the CEO or the investors. You're not the one he's trying to impress, the guy signing his paycheck is.
Or maybe he's got a second phase in mind too, like that next he'll need more hardware for that, and he's already bribed by some vendor. Or that he already knows which graphics company he wants to outsource some of that to and what bribe he'll get.
Literally, I've seen one project where their visionary wanted to have at least 1MB graphics in an applet, and that was back in the dialup and ISDN days, just because his best buddy had a graphics design company, and he wanted to outsource those graphics to that. Corruption by any other name, but there you go.
Or maybe he just wants more budget and a bigger team under him, because that raises his perceived status and importance.
Or maybe he just wants to be able to keep the current team, in the face of some retarded budget allocation which would otherwise have him fire everyone now because there are no projects in the pipeline for July, only to re-hire them in August when the next projects kick in. So he's creating some grand task as some make-work solution.
Or maybe he's just strategically gaming the budget rules in advance. In a lot of places they have retarded processes like that if you didn't use all your budget this year, you get a budget cut next year. So people end up turning the heating on in March, because the winter was mild and otherwise they'd get no heating budget next year, when maybe the winter will be worse. Same here. You don't really know what you'll have to do next year, so you essentially have to burn some money in advance to be sure you'll get a budget for it next year. A case of "massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications" is something so overachieving and nebulous that it can burn any amount of money you want it to burn.
Etc.
Firing everyone competent and hiring the cheapest burger flippers, well, again I've seen it done for strategic reasons.
E.g., because with the same budget you can have more people under you, which raises your own status. And some places also have rules for what your job title and/or salary can be, based on the number of people under you. Ok, it wasn't at CEO level, but I do know someone who raised from a minor team leader to mid-level manager just by having his team inflate like a blowfish. He kept hiring incompetents and still needing more... and got rewarded for it.
Well, the problem is that those positions even got to be called "officer" in the first place. All of them.
"Officer" used to mean, you know, army or navy. Even using it for the police is as recent as the end of the 19'th century, though it could be argued as a continuation from the times when the city guards acted as both police and garrison. Even the use for someone who holds an office of the state, was originally reserved for judges, but, anyway, the key words were: of the state. You know, someone acting in an official government job.
So at the very least I have to wonder about the original shallow souls who thought they need an even funkier title.
Now I won't blame the ones who just get such a stupid title thrust upon them; after all, they're the victims there. But I have to wonder about the original ones who just had to invent some new titles for themselves.
That seems pretty harsh judgment, considering that it's not a title he thought up personally. Someone else did. So you're telling me _you_ would refuse a promotion, just because the title sounds retarded? In a job you'd presumably do if it were named differently? That sounds kind of shallow.
A name is just a name. It has only as much meaning as is assigned to it. You could name the Sun server admin, say, "High Priest of the Sun", and he'll still be an admin.
Getting hung up about just a name is just as silly in either direction. Either seeking some bullshit-bingo title, or having some silly phobia about it.
Yes, the MBA world does play bullshit bingo, and tries to come up with funky meaningless words and expressions to seem like they too have their jargon. But you have to realize that some people are as much on the wrong end of it as you are. The CxO thing is so established by now, it would take a nuke to dislodge it. You might get away with changing it if you're the CEO, but even then everyone else would still talk about your CxO. Might as well just go with the flow and treat it as any other word.
Well, I dunno. It sounds like she did figure out that it was junk. Otherwise it would be more like, "OMG, now the Nigerian prince's inheritance will be sent to McAffee's non-existent alias!" ;) Plus, it doesn't say that she answered to any spam before McAffee paid her to. So she must have already figured out there's something fishy about it.
Way I read it, it's just the difference between having figured something out, and actually seeing it. So to speak, the same difference as between figuring out that the goatse.cx link all over the place must be some kind of trick or scam, and actually seeing it.
Basically, she's had to wade through the proverbial shit-clogged stables of Augeas. Or the Internet version thereof. Most people seem to assume each other nice, so the sheer amount of nastiness must have been amazing. Even if you know it's there, it's one thing to just know it as an abstract notion and wade through it for an hour or two a day.
So she says she's amazed. Well, blimey, I'd probably be amazed too.
There's really nothing there that says "OMG, corporate-brainwashed idiot" in that confession of amazement.
Hmm, well, if I remember physics at all, gravity would be an even bigger bitch to measure. Really, it's a very weak force. It only does anything measurable for _huge_ masses. You know, stars, planets, etc. The space curvature is observed around stars and the like. Measuring it around a 1 kilo sphere, well, you're probably worse off than counting atoms.
Plus, if you think about it, it also doesn't help that we're already in a huge gravity well. So it's a bit like measuring the brightness of a lightbulb, near the Sun. At the very least, the measurement would be pretty darn anisotropic, so to speak.
Plus, I'm guessing that even if you had the accuracy to measure the deviation around a 1 kilo sphere and somehow compensated for the Earth's gravity well, the table you're measuring it on weighs more. The building you're in weighs hundreds of tons. And depending on where you measure it, you might have a mountain nearby.
Not saying it wouldn't be theoretically possible. Just pretty impractical at our tech level.
Well, it's sorta like this: a standard is only useful if you have some effective way to reproduce it or measure with it.
1. time. You can essentially just make a MASER, which means basically a cavity which resonates at that frequency. The nice part is that it can be tuned, and even continuously tuned, by just measuring the amplitude of the signal. When you've reached the maximum power, the thing is tuned to that frequency.
2. length. It's measured by Interferometry, so you have a meaningful way to transform a wavelength into any given distance.
At any rate, the transition for these two only happened when someone build a device which could actually measure one second or one metre that way.
3. mass. Well, that's the tricky one. Saying that you define a kilogram as one bazillion silicium atoms is useless unless you can somehow actually produce a lump with that many atoms. As long as we can't actually be sure how many atoms are in there, it would be a useless standard.
These guys claim to have been able to do just that: say with a high degree of confidence that, yep, their spheres contain exactly that many atoms. If they're right, then we're finally ready to move the kilo to that standard.
And FYI: someone has to interact with that large mass of users, and figure out what they want, and how much they're willing to pay for it. And which of those users can actually be used to advertise your cool new program to people. That's often quite a different feature set than what engineers find cool.
So, I guess, you could make the coders also run focus groups and figure market share on their own. Which is turning them into (often unwilling) marketing, and is a waste of their time and real skills. Or you could let marketing do it.
Heh. Nope, not really. I don't have the authority to tell anyone to do anything whatsoever. I made sure to tell every employer in advance that I'm not interested in any kind of management position, because, frankly, I don't have the personality type or inclination or talent for it.
I just don't find chaos fun. I've been over-managed, and I've been under-managed, and you know what? The under-managed situation was less fun. Yeah, so you get ad-hoc groups deciding what to do next. How do you even know if what you decided to do is even needed by anyone? How do you know if it fits together with what the ad-hoc group on the next floor decided to do? Ah, so you talk to the "USERS". It's one giant waste of money, brains and resources, where a working hierarchy and a simple process would have worked better and with less wasted man-hours.
My favouring having some discipline and process is very much based on that first hand experience.
Or let me qualify that better. A lot of people come straight out of college with the idea that those cute little 1000 line assignments are everything. Or worked on some cute little web-site in PHP. And think that, bah, they don't need any management, discipline or marketing. And indeed, for something that scope, they don't.
Now try working on something several million lines large, and involving several different teams. (And that's not even the largest project nowadays.) If everyone pulls in a different directions, disjointed groups manage themselves, and the only cohesion is what the people themselves negotiate with each other, and testing is just some theoretical thing that everyone does for himself, it _will_ fail. Even getting the same requirement from end A to end B of that people graph, becomes something that depends on too many informal hops, and gets horribly distorted in the process. It's also a waste of everyone's time. If you have, say, one manager for each team, then it's his job to manage that information flow too. If it's everyone for himself, or by ad-hoc committees, it just doesn't scale. Instead of having a handful of managers who form a small graph for that information flow, you have an awfully tangled graph of dozens of people as nodes, where every single developer must somehow get the information to and from everyone else who's even remotely interested in his code. It's lossy and it's a waste of time.
_That_ is why we have some attempts at defining a process, and some kind of hierarchy. Because otherwise the overhead grows pretty much exponentially with the total team size.
But, heh, if your fantasy world is that "us vs them" as to not have room for a developer who thinks that discipline and correct management are there for a reason, so be it. Feel free to imagine anything you wish about me, that makes your fantasy world be simple and comfortable again. Far from me to want to drag you to RL if you don't want to.
Well, rather than "Funny", I'd call that "Informative." A tool is only as useful as it fits someone's needs. I don't care how cool your ballpoint-pen/hatchet/banana-carrying-case combo is from an engineering viewpoint, if it doesn't do what I need, I'm not buying it.
Now I'm not saying one should put marketing completely in charge either, but _someone_ has to give some input about what the customers want too.
That said, having actually RTFA, I'm surprised that Google doesn't have bigger problems. Letting the engineers run things by committee sounds like a recipe for trouble, and I'm saying that as an engineer. Point in case:
- from my experience testers are a valuable resource, and too often the coders (and particularly stupid managers) see them as the enemy, the guys who pick on our lovely code and get in the way of our getting the praise we deserve. They're also easy to bully or otherwise silence. That's also speaking from practice. E.g., you tell one to leave a module alone 'cause you plan to fix it later, lo and behold, a year later he's still leaving it alone 'cause you "forgot" to tell him that he can resume testing it.
At some point you need _someone_ to tell all the Wallys to get to fixing the stuff on that known bugs list already, or to decide, basically, OK, this thing goes into QA now. That someone is effectively a manager. Whether it's hired as one, or you have some fucked-up elective monarchy or committee, it's still a manager by any other name. He's doing a management job. Might as well just admit that that's a manager.
At any rate, well, big surprise, he then says that the testers are too few and they make no difference. Whop-de-do. You put the coders in charge and have a corporate mentality that it's ok to be a perpetual beta, you get just that. It's as predictable as leaving the schoolkids in charge, and then wondering why you have no teachers or exams.
Now it may be ok at Google, where they still claim to be a beta even after more than a decade, but it wouldn't work at most other companies. Can you imagine shipping an OS as a perpetual beta? Yes, I know, Windows, bla, bla, bla. Let's put it like this: it had all those problems when MS thought it's fully tested. Can you imagine how bad it would be if it were shipped as a beta and without much tester input at that? Right. That's what I'm trying to say.
- power vacuums don't work well with humans. Anarchy is a fine concept in theory, but it doesn't quite work in practice. Either someone effectively ends up the de-facto leader, or you get a chaos with lots of backroom politics and backstabbing games and committee groupthink games.
And whop-de-do, it sounds like he got fed up with the politics there. Who would have guessed? Right.
But neither is ideal. Just because someone knew how to pretend to be everyone's friend, to get himself accepted as a community leader, doesn't mean he also is any good as a manager. It's just Peter's Principle or the Dilbert Principle, except without a higher power which could remove or sideline an incompetent mid-level manager. And likely he'll not even have the authority to take any unpopular decision.
- just because someone is passionate about something, it doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to do something, or even necessary.
I just need to look around at work. There are plenty of people who are passionate about some cool technology aspect, but I see _none_ among the coders who are passionate about some business concept and almost none who even have any clue about usability. (We had a guy who thought he's qualified to talk about usability because he's a Mac user, but funnily he produced the worst GUI anyone had ever seen. The people who actually had to use it, quickly proclaimed it to be b
To be entirely fair, though:
1. I have seen extreme cases where the talk included no intention of communicating anything whatsoever.
2. It was by men too.
The most pathologic case I've seen was one co-worker who just couldn't shut up. Literally. You could go out of the office and hear him still talking in an empty room.
But to illustrate why I say that communication was not the purpose: I've had him come to me once to ask about what one of my methods did. The talk went sorta like this:
Me: "Well, that's easy. Let's look at this data object, 'cause that's what tells it what to do..."
Him: "Oh, I get it, it takes the user name and cross-references it in the other table and..."
Me: "Err...nope..."
Him: "... and then the contract number is put in an XML used via Wally's module and..."
Me: "No, that's not..."
Him: "... and then it prints stuff on the screen..."
Me: "Dude, you came to ask me. Please _listen_."
Him: "Yeah, but just to see if I got it right."
Me: "No, you got it all wrong. It's not printing anything yet, and..."
Him: "Oh, I get it. The user name is..."
Me: "Stop! Here it's for logging purposes _only_!"
Him: "... and then it's the other table that stores the rest of the info..."
I get annoyed at this point, go outside to smoke a cigarette. I take my time. I hear him faintly, still talking. I go back inside, he's still parked next to my desk, talking.
Him: "... and then I thought the chip was fried, but it turns out I just had to download new video drivers. But I had already reinstalled Windows, so I had to download all game patches all over again..."
I remember I needed some clarification from another guy on a totally unrelated matter. I was planning to write an email, but wth, let's see him in person. I leave Mr Chatterbox there and go talk to that other guy for some quarter of an hour. I come back, wouldn't you know it, he's still talking. I think he was up to what happened in his vacation.
It wasn't just signal-to-noise ratio. He just wasn't interested in anything I had to say about that module, or generally about anything. He just needed to ventilate his tonsils.
Ok, now that one was a pathologic case, and I'm not saying that anyone else is literally like that. (Hopefully;)
It does however make me think. I don't think most talks happen because we genuinely need to know something, or communicate something. Sure, it's inevitable that some information is exchanged too, even when it's useless and promptly forgotten. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is just to fill one's time.
Or to put it otherwise, look at Slashdot. How many people do you think are in this thread because they genuinely need to know about what you can infer from online profiles? How many are here genuinely to impart valuable expert knowledge? No, most of us are here simply to waste some time. The information exchange may exist, but it's more like side-effect than real purpose of the exercise.
Heck, in a lot of cases the actual topic isn't even side-effect, it's a mean to an end. The end being to have that Null conversation. See how many people watch football or whatever sport, just to have something to talk about at the pub the next day. They're not exchanging information about football, the information is just some extra effort in order to have a talk.
We're wired to need to _do_ something. Otherwise we get bored. And for some people (both men and women) talking is a way to not get bored. Nothing more.
And if I'm to get even more cynical, here's a parting thought: in a lot of cases the real information exchanged is neither the thing discussed, nor then "I am here for you, sharing my time with a Null topic, and I am available if you have something more difficult to discuss" message. I'm getting the impression that in a lot of cases the only real information is "let's see if you still pay attention to me" or similar.
"Negotiation" is one way to put it. In practice, you get a whole gamut ranging from outright submissive, to (rarely) threats of violence. I know at least one who's pretty proud that her negotiations with her late husband were along the lines of "you do thing my way, and I won't bash your head in." With various shades in between, that include:
- nagging. Literally pointing those perceived failings out again and again and again, until hopefully you get the idea that chest thumping doesn't work anyway.
- manipulation.
- indirect threats and manipulation. There are a couple of whole cultures where a woman's only power was gained by, for example, manipulating her sons against their father. Or I only have to look at my own deranged family, where grandma manipulated mom and dad against each other, and my mom tried more than once to manipulate me and my brother against each other. (Thankfully though, she's such a socially inept nerd, that it was just funny to see her try.)
- annoying passive aggression
- basically, "if you don't do as I say, you're getting no sex"
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically, _some_ women are nice, and _some_ are nasty in various ways. Sociopathy/Psychopathy exists in women too, not only in men, for example. Four times fewer, yes, but that's far from zero.
Note that I'm not especially vilifying women here. I'm just saying that there's a whole range of them, ranging from saint to Antichrist, so to speak. From Mother Theresa to such fine gals as Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandl, and Elisabeth Volkenrath, who led the women's camp at Auschwitz. IIRC Maria Mandl alone ordered the death of _half_ _a_ _million_ women. She was known as "The Beast" and also known to have people killed for as little as looking at her. Or Ilse Koch, The Witch of Buchenwald. Now that's a sadistic gal.
In other words, cute, but as false as all blanket generalizations.
Again, spare me the blanket generalizations, please.
The grammar/spelling/punctuation trolls are a rather tiny group of trolls. Annoying and visible, yes, but in no way representative for a whole gender.
So, anyway, you found one message from one of those retards. And he was answering to a woman. Whop-de-do. They do that to anyone, and to each other.
How's that representative for males as a whole?
In fact, I'll go on a limb and say that most people on Slashdot, male or female, look down upon that group of retards. Most of us aim upwards, not find some "look, someone typoed a 5 letter words that I knew!" claims to glory. It's only when you're near the bottom of the proverbial barrel, that "look, there's someone (arguably) lower than me!!" starts looking like some claim to glory. Some people just are that low, have no achievements worth bragging about, and are building their sole claim to glory out of such "OMG, you typoed a 5 letter word that I know how to spell! You must be more stupid than me!!!" lameness. It's not even pedantry, it's being a worthless loser and knowing it. Nothing more.
Disclaimer: I'm not against MS products, I use both Windows and Linux for different purposes, and I've used enough other OSes before to not give much of a damn about any particular one. By Slashdot standards, I tend to actually count as pro-MS, mostly by virtue of where the reference point is.
That said:
You're saying, basically, that by making people pay for hardware and upgrades they didn't actually need, it's stimulated and created a bigger mass market for the hardware industry. That's on par with saying that if you break enough windows, the glass industry will benefit greatly, and it might even bring down the price of glass.
What makes it a fallacy is ignoring the cost of all that, and pretending that only the good effects exist. It didn't just wave a magic wand and created money for an industry. It made a bunch of people pay for something they didn't need.
More importantly: money which otherwise would have been used for something else. We don't know what exactly, but it wouldn't be money stuffed under the mattress. (There's a federal reserve, or similar in other countries, which sees to it that money circulates at roughly the desired speed.) Maybe they would have been used to buy something else, and stimulated another industry. Maybe they would have been put in pension funds which in turn get invested in whatever companies are growing fast, essentially giving them more money to grow.
Broken windows or Windows don't _create_ money or markets. They just force a transfer from one to another. Every cent earned by the glaziers for repairing a broken window, isn't a cent magicked out of thin air, but a cent that someone else didn't earn as a result. Every cent earned by MS or the hardware industry because of broken Windows, is a cent some other industry won't see.
So you can't just say that it was good for hardware prices, as if the alternative would have been nothing at all. If we didn't spend our collective money on subsidizing hardware research and bringing hardware prices down, we _would_ have something else instead. Maybe better cars, or maybe HDTV sets would have dropped in price instead, or maybe we'd just have more pizza shops. It's impossible to roll back history and peek down the other trouser leg, so we'll never know exactly what we're missing, or if it's better or worse than cheap hardware. But we would have used those money on _something_ anyway, and _some_ industries would have benefited from it instead.
Hmm, that's certainly interesting and worth thinking about. I'm guessing he meant more like social strata than proper rigid castes, though? There are very few countries today where you're legally fixed in a caste from birth to death, but I'm seeing not much reduction in how much people swear.
Maybe not literally "pout", but they called the minutemen murderers for having sights on their guns. At any rate, my point is that they didn't change tactics to, I dunno, take cover or anything. They whined about the American snipers being murderers, and continued to send more officers to get sniped. That's what I'm trying to say.
Just pointing out that if any state were to revolt against the US government, they wouldn't have an ocean in between. War isn't _equally_ long distance every time.
Well, my guess is that that's more of a question of whether or not you have a culture which glorifies being an aggressive arsehole, and "gangsta" role models. Humans are good at adapting to the role they're given by society. If they're essentially taught that they have to prove their manhood to the community by being aggressive in defense of their "honour", or even that essentially they have to piss on everyone to mark their territory (figuratively speaking,) well, they'll do just that.
So, well, sometimes willpower may indeed be involved. Just not in the direction you assume it. Someone might actually muster their willpower to assault (verbally or physically) someone bigger and tougher, just so they don't lose face. Even as their fight-or-flight instinct is, basically, going, "flight, for the love of god, I said flight, not fight!!!"
While the word itself is no worse than any other word, I think it's the conveyed hostility that gets people's panties in a knot.
A word is just a word, and conveys no more and no less meaning that is assigned to it. That one word is obscene or offensive and another isn't, is, well, just because we needed to designate some words as offensive or obscene. Because essentially we needed to communicate just that message.
Even if you designed a language without swearwords, people will invent their own. See how people constructed a few for Esperanto.
But what gets people angry is the message, not the word. If I were to say, "You stupid arsehole!", it's not the individual words (after all, an arsehole is a vital part of the body;), it's the conveyed aggressive stance and intention to insult, demean, and diminish one's perceived worth.
And just as proof that it's not just the words: it can be done without words too. We already know from, say, MUD's and MMOs, that people get equally insulted when they're met with unwarranted hatred and aggression, out of nowhere. Almost everyone hates a ganker, even the other gankers that happen to end up on the wrong end of it, even if he doesn't say a single word.
It's that hostility which puts people in the only mode we're biologically programmed to use to deal with aggression: fight or flight. Once it's been triggered, well, you can override it by willpower, but essentially your programming says you either fight or go away from the source of the stress. If you're "cornered" and can't leave, you fight back. Verbally or otherwise. If you can't do either, you get frustrated.
At any rate, I don't think there is much of a qualitative difference between being called a "doodoo head" or a "cocksucker". The former is the child version of "I'm being aggressive and trying to demean you", the latter is the adult version. Different words, but the message is the same, and the reaction is the same.
As for why swearing is more acceptable today, I'd say that award should probably go to Hollywood. Everyone knows they're supposed to say "fuck" every other word. You can see the same in other countries too, albeit with different words, expressions, attitudes, etc. People find role models on the screen, and try to talk and act like them.
I wouldn't set my hopes too high, though. If a good, "fuck you, cocksucker" becomes devalued and useless to convey the insult as a message, we'll switch to other words. Or invent new words for that purpose.
The best you can do is just get people to play nice, and stop trying to act like aggressive chronic cases of testosterone poisoning. Not to get them to get over some words. If it's just the words, see the previous paragraph ;)
Maybe stopping beating up children can help with that. But it'll be just because it stops teaching them early that violence is the solution to everything, the way to get anything done, and that when they grow up they have to be an aggressive arsehole like their dad too. It'll be the change in role models and attitudes, that will matter in the end, not just being allowed to say "fuck." Words come and go and can be invented or shanghaied for any purpose, including for verbal aggression. What'll make a difference is people not needing a hostile stance and message as often.
The difference is that they're very very different kinds of engines really. Sorta like the difference between a turbofan and a piston engine in an aircraft. Both suck in fuel and use a propeller to push the air towards the back, but they're very different engines anyway.
A scramjet is, sorta, an afterburner without the turbojet in front of it. Think just a de Laval nozzle, sorta, where the airplane's own speed shoves the air from the front, and you inject the fuel and light it in the back. It can only operate at hypersonic speeds, because it does need the air coming in really hard and fast, and it burns fuel continuously. There is no need for pulses or detonations.
A pulsejet, well, think a pipe with a valve in front. Sorta like this, with "front" being downwards:
The T is the valve.
Air comes in, you inject the fuel, and ignite it. The pressure closes the valve, so the only way the burnt gasses can go is backwards, pushing your aircraft forward. Then the pressure equalises, the valve opens again, and the cycle starts all over again.
This one can _only_ operate in pulses. On the up side, it can operate at subsonic speeds too. It's also a very simple and robust engine. The V1's pulsejet could be riddled with holes and still generate most of the thrust. The RAF found it easier to just tip it over, with the tip of the fighter's wing pushing the V1's wing upwards, than shoot them.
Downside, also generates massive vibrations. The buzz of the V1s could be heard from the ground. It's a bit like flying a jackhammer. Which is one reason it never got too popular for manned aircraft, or aircraft which were supposed to fly more than once.
Well, that's the simple explanation anyway. There are more modern designs which, for example, do away with the valve and essentially just choke the flow via a nozzle to achieve the same effect. But that's the general gist of it.
Actually, my only point for now is that it took a massive effort of a foreign superpower, for that colonial revolt to succeed. If you revolted against the US government today, who would that superpower be? I don't think there are many people in the world who'd declare war on the USA just to help a revolt succeed.
The difference is that 230 years ago,
1. a musket was the best any army had. Civilians even had the equivalent of sniper rifles, see the minutemen.
Heck, you could make a musket and ammo in a local smithy or in your shed. It was a simple weapon where the tolerances were _extremely_ generous.
Artillery? Sure. Anyone who could make a bell, could make a cannon just as good as the royal armourers in England.
Shock troops? That still meant cavalry. Any rancher who had a horse could be the equivalent of what today is a tank or a gunship.
2. Tactics were also more... lacklustre. Armies were trained to just march to 100 yards of each other and stand tall, shooting volley after volley at each other, until one looks like it's breaking. Then the other would do a cavalry charge or bayonet charge to finish it all. The only difference between a fully trained army and a militia was that the army was trained to stay in formation longer.
The Brits essentially did little more than pout when the rifled guns of the minutemen just sniped their officers in the first volley.
Modern infantry tactics and indeed combined arms tactics are a bit more effective than that. A militia whose claim to glory is shooting a few vermin now and then, and a bit of penis-size posturing at the shooting range on sundays, would sustain heavier casualties even if they had the exact same weapons the army had.
3. While willy-waving about the independence war is good and fine, let's not forget that it was mostly won because there was an ocean in between _and_ because France went bankrupt supporting you guys against the Brits. The whole French navy, as much as there was of it, fought hard to make that ocean a bigger problem for the Brits than it already was. And there was military help on the ground too from the French and from the northern indian tribes they had worked hard to befriend.
In fact, if you look at the French Revolution, soon there after, and at the king getting beheaded, that's what started it: eventually the peasants and burgeoisie had enough of paying the debt for a war that wasn't theirs and gained nothing for them. But I digress.
At any rate, you fought, only a fraction of the English army and you didn't fight it alone. And yeah, you repeated it a few years later, when the Brits were busy with Napoleon and made little more than a token show of force to keep you from trading with Napoleon. And gave up as soon as Napoleon was no longer a threat, and they had no more reason to keep you from trading with France.
Don't let it go to your head. Just a few rag-tag militias against the full might of England, _could_ have went a lot differently.
Funnily enough, though, if it's white skin on a redheaded girl (natural redheads don't tan, what with the melanin-producing gene being broken), nobody has an objection to _that_.
Well, they actually were a bunch of examples. I suppose I could put some filler in between them, or make it a bulleted list, so every other sentence doesn't begin with "E.g." But then my messages are already huge, and I'm not sure if making them any longer would be an improvement. I think I'll stick to the repetition, until I get a better idea.
Actually, we have better statistics than that. Say, from the Egyptians, we have plenty of records left of when someone died. You know, plaques, inscriptions, etc. So you have a somewhat random sample, and the ages at which they died.
So you can sorta plot a gauss curve, albeit one with a massive spike in the first 3 years, due to the infant mortality that you mention. But the more interesting part is what happens when you look past that spike, at the peak of the proper gauss curve. That's basically the age where, if you survived those infant years, you'd have a 50%-50% chance to be dead anyway.
And for the Old Kingdom period (i.e., a bit over 4000 years ago) that peak was in the 30's for men and in the 20's for women. By the New Kingdom (a bit over 3000 years ago), it had progressed to 40's and respectively 30's.
So, yes, they did live less. Seriously. Yes, there was massive infant mortality, but, no, you can't dismiss everything based on just that.
Yes, like with anything statistical, there were exceptions in both directions. There were the occasional guys who lived very long lives, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. They also tended to be the rather rich guys.
And I think one funny thing that may have helped confuse people about life expectancy back then, is the egyptian expression that someone lived to 110 years old. It's funny because it's just a metaphor. In their numerology, 110 was the perfect number, and they believed it to be also the absolute maximum someone can live, if they led a perfect life. So "he lived to 110", was basically just a way to say, "he lived a perfect life." Meaning typically that he was really well liked guy in the community. In practice most of those were dead in their 30's and 40's.
Basically it's just as much a metaphor as when we say that someone was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or jumped the shark, or put his foot in his mouth, or the like. We don't mean it literally, and it's silly to build biological explanation based on it.
To be entirely fair, though:
1. Jesus seemed to have been a pretty common name back then. So basically it's like having a myth in the USA about a guy called John or in Russia about a guy called Ivan. There were plenty of Jesuses around and there are a few mentions of some unrelated ones in the chronicles. Whether one was actually the son of God or not, is a completely other issue.
2. A lot of records from that era don't exist any more, or are incomplete. Seriously, we're left scratching our heads even when it comes to such issues of state interest as what the strength of the roman legions were, at almost any given point, or what were their generals.
So assuming that you can just find out about some John Doe (for the Romans, Jesus was just another nutter executed for speaking against the emperor, not anyone special in any way,) and that you can take lack of a signal as confirmation that such a person existed, is kind of ignorant. Again, even from Rome itself we don't actually have the records of everyone they executed, and we _can't_ say that, for example, someone called Bigus Dickus never existed because we didn't find his records.
Plus that area had some bloody revolts, very soon thereafter, and some very brutal and devastating roman retaliation, followed by pretty much forced exodus at sword point. There are more than enough records that were lost in that chaos.
3. There seems to have been an interesting early sect, namely the Ebionites, which actually had a bunch of people who knew Jesus and supposedly _relatives_ of Jesus. They actually insisted that the leadership of the church should go to the relatives of Jesus, not to Peter, which wouldn't make sense if they didn't have such among them.
The interesting thing is that they seem to have had a very different view of Christianity and Jesus than what the apostles mangled it into, and even more so than what the Byzantines later decided it should be. What we inherited as Christianity is a long series of deviations, starting with Paul who basically insisted to throw away half the old Judaism (i.e., of the Old Testament) to make the new religion more palatable to non-jews and thus easier to proselitize. The Ebionites actually called Paul an apostate.
At any rate, these guys had a much more... down to earth view of it all, and viewed Jesus as just, you know, a human. A prophet and divinely inspired, to be sure. But not the divine "superuser" that later Christianity made him into. And while a lot of information about them is lost, from what the mainstream christians said about them, it seems that these guys thought Mary was _not_ a virgin at birth, Jesus _didn't_ come back from the dead, etc. The bugger just died on the cross, like everyone else, and stayed dead.
At any rate, I'd say that a sect based on a group of his friends and relatives makes no sense at all, if he didn't exist. Or let me qualify that better: if _a_ Jesus didn't exist.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should be a christian or anything. Note that, going by the views of, you know, those who actually knew him and didn't have to embelish the story to proselitise, he was just a guy. Maybe divinely inspired, if you want to believe that, or maybe he just got a sunstroke there in the desert or ate some funny mushrooms and had visions of what didn't actually exist, if you want to take the skeptical view. Take your pick.
I'm only saying that _a_ guy called Jesus _might_ have actually have existed and started the whole madness. Of course, we don't know for sure, but it's not too ludicrious a hypothesis, even if the evidence is less than bullet-proof. On the other hand, exactly what he was, and if he's even vaguely like what your local pastor claims, that's another story.
But we don't wants to, Master. It burnss us. Don't make uss go away from preciouss...
*huggles his monitor*
Well, the surrounding medium in this case is vacuum.
But, still, while your objections are valid, you have to take into consideration how damn small the result is anyway. Take a moving black hole. Heck, make it charged. Spinning. You name it. How much does it affect that radius? By ten? A thousand? A billion? When you have to write 42 zeroes after the decimal point just to compare it to a helium atom, and even more if you measure in metres, even erasing 1 or 3 or 9 of those zeroes, well, still leaves it really damn small.
And, as another poster correctly noted, it's still smaller than the Planck length. I must admit that that makes an even better argument against it, within the limits of physics as we know it.