African-Americans play so much video games, that they never really amount to much and thus never end up in the video game industry. Simple causation.:)
There's hope in America, I see:) Good for you -- warms the heart to see Slashdot has people like this, and not just a bunch of brainwashed Libertarian sociopaths. I'm in Europe, and despite some of our Conservatives hopelessly trying to parrot American arguments, people just simply see that the universal health care system *works*... it may not be 100% perfect, but those issues are fixable. Mostly it just comes down to providing resources and making them to best use through appropriate logistics. No need to resort to the American model of "having the best healthcare in the world for those who can pay". Personally, I don't really even want to deal with people who would consider your situation has being somehow "normal", it is, as you said, a barbaric way to think about things.
Americans haven't had an example of a working universal system, so it is easy for them to believe the bullshit they hear from their radio talkshow hosts... fortunately I feel the USA is in for some really hard times economically in general, and that too without even having any of the social safety net that usually always gets the blame -- so maybe, when enough of the electorate suffers enough, they will take a little look across the Atlantic and wonder how the hell the Europeans do it...
Science has always been a collaborative grind, and is becoming more and more that. In the past, we had a bunch of geniuses that single-handedly took their fields forward, but even those weren't motivated by money to be made, and even they stood on the shoulders of giants... do you really think Newton or Darwin would have been "better" if there had been a huge prize waiting for them? I think not.
Even those who do get the new major insights in science just... get them -- after a lot of work of course. Sure they deserve accolades and recognition and even money, but I have this strange feeling that just making them win the lottery is somewhat oddly unfair towards those who partake in the noble pursuit but don't get similarly "blessed".
In the meantime, in order to actually have those flashes occurring in the heads of some young scientists, they need to eat. THAT lures people into science, not taking huge personal risks -- and the intense pressure that comes with it -- with their life. For example I quit thinking about staying in academia when I realized that I would perform poorly if my life really depended on getting great ideas from grant to grant. So science needs to be funded as a whole... you toss a whole lot of them at the wall and see which ones stick.:-)
There is an economic equivalent to eugenics; communism.
It is also interesting to note that both Nazis and Ayn Rand Libertarians both get hard over Darwinism for exactly the same reasons. The only difference is that Hitler uses the State to enforce survival of the fittest, Libertarians essentially put the burden on the Market -- and prefer to blur the distinction between Nazism and Communism because the former hits a bit too close to home as long as only the end result is concerned. Remove the state and substitute nations/races for individuals and make things "voluntary" and Mein Kampf BECOMES Atlas Shrugged.
Of course the Commies were despised by the Nazis exactly because of the refusal to embrace survival of the fittest (and thus protecting and producing degeneracy), and in that sense this of course is interference in natural selection (and in this case you really need to be hardcore social-darwinist), but the underlying ideological differences are way more substantial than Libertarians make it seem like...
They talk about a "formal approach to code scavenging" without even coming close to explaining what exactly that MEANS.
It's just another made-up specialization field for software engineering academics who didn't quite cut it in the real compsci stuff... even they need to write their papers on something.
... I decided not to go to the USA any time soon right after GWB came into office. Fortunately, I haven't had to break my principles (I'm in Europe, of course).
The funny thing about these profiling things is that they can be used for so much more. For example one of my treehugging hippie political activist friends is on some kind of a terrorist watchlist to the US, and the funny thing is she wouldn't resort to violence to defend her own life, not to mention she's a small woman in a wheelchair... Another activist friend of hers always gets his book shipments from Amazon crudely opened along the way and then resealed. Mine always arrive untouched.
Apart from the fact that Slashdot is an unlikely place to get away from Picard, I must admit that you gave me some food for thought as to why me and my favourite fictional character are single and not parents...
We all know Picard is a non-parent geek and doesn't like children... and this is probably because when the SO came up all bothered and tried to suggest there probably should be some little ones around, the standard "make it so" probably wasn't the best possible answer... so she did, and switched males as first thing...
Yeah, but you still want to watch all the cool gcc output scrolling by as it makes you feel l33t, instead of staring into your girl's eyes, and the she is jealous that you're drooling your kernel build and getting all hard off your compiler optimization flags instead instead of her...
Certainly those motivations were there, most strongly the "getting back at them after Winter War", but IMO assuming some sort of benevolence from Stalin's part is an assumption way too far. Finland barely managed the Winter War, Barbarossa gave an option to try and neutralize both the most long-standing and immediate threat to Finland, and your position is essentially wishful thinking or perfect hindsight at best.
Been reading quite a lot of political blogs and forums tonight and it's pretty sad what I'm seeing.. those who have a systematic political agenda to attack the prevalent values in Finnish society (namely, that we aren't enough like what Auvinen wants in his manifesto but tend to prefer to be more inclusive), especially the more rabid Libertarians for whom the Nordic welfare state is an absolute red cloth, seem to just complain that the guy's PR skills were a bit bad when he did what he did, but that he was otherwise quite a great guy.... and some of them are barely managing to hide their gloating that something like this should happen in our "safe" society.
Need to go puke really. It's nice to get to see some true colours though.
You'd have more credibility if you were not posting as AC, but I'll respond anyway... Finland's existence was threatened both ways, and Stalin was particularly determined to make Finland pay for resistance during the Winter War. With the Germans you might have become some kind of a vassal state with the rest of Europe, but it wouldn't have ended up with people shipped to Siberia... I don't understand why you fail to see the choice that had to be made.
Mannerheim had to deal with Hitler because we needed the weapons. Doesn't mean you have to like the chap personally to do diplomacy.
I almost would have wanted him to live on as some half-conscious vegetable. You know, to be completely dependant -- something he apparently despised -- and still unable to kill himself...:-)
True, it is sad. I am currently reading one of the bigger economics and stock market -related forums in Finland and it's quite shocking how much understanding they actually have for the killer. "Great motives, bad implementation, should have shot some Social Democrats instead"... and of course it's all because the fault of the homogenizing influence of the public school system that oppresses obvious übermenschen like this one genius.
There is nothing secret about it -- it's basic Finnish history, and of course still a bit of a bone of contention among historians and even regular people whether joining Nazi Germany in Barbarossa was such a bright move. Personally I think there was not much choice -- had we just sat there on our hands, the possibility is high that Stalin would have attacked again after Winter War anyway, so some sort of pre-emption was logical when Germany was going strong. I probably would have made the same choice at that time of history. Finland has also always had a strong bond to Germany -- especially militarily -- that goes all the way back to our Civil War when the whites got training from Germany to suppress the communist rebellion. Essentially the officers of our WW2 were probably German-trained for a significant part.
This was a marriage of convenience, and it must be pointed out that for example Finland never joined Germany in their ethnic cleansing plans. We actually had a Jewish synagogue out there at the front -- fighting against the Soviets! Marshall Mannerheim, the country's lead figure at the time and a cosmopolitan gentleman and officer from the Czar's army originally, was personally disgusted by Hitler, whom he considered to be a barbarian. Yes, we have German ties and being made to march to Siberia by Stalin was the worse option. I would strongly disagree with your idea that we might have had much Fascist sympathies during the time -- our extreme right wing was suppressed during the 20s and 30s right after the extreme left wing was suppressed after Civil War. We remained remarkably centrist and democratic throughout the whole ordeal.
I used to dislike math in school almost until the last year, because I was the top student in everything else and Math was the only subject that was less than perfect (I was ok at it though). It didn't help that I am not fond of word problems or the "practical" way math is taught in school. It always made me feel like I was taking some IQ test that was somehow rigged against me and made me feel stupid. The systematic logic behind math never just showed up... it was always a matter of whether you are lucky enough to figure out the "trick" to it or not. Actually, I was so stressed by this magical requirement to just divine the result that I was actually scared of math enough to lock up, after which nothing would happen of course.
Anyway, during my last year I just finally understood what it is about... it's a combination of pattern-matching, logic (the 99% basics of which you'll mostly use are really simple) and finally some semantic understanding of what's behind those symbols. Mostly it's just manipulating the stuff through the rules you already know to get something you want out of it. At that point I was capable of relaxing and keeping on open mind with the problems I was presented... and I went on to study CS, liked university-level math and here we are with a theory-heavy Master's in algorithmics...
Slashdot Mirror
African-Americans play so much video games, that they never really amount to much and thus never end up in the video game industry. Simple causation. :)
Embryo diagnostics for Libertarianism!! Finally. I knew there is something physiologically wrong with them :)
There's hope in America, I see :) Good for you -- warms the heart to see Slashdot has people like this, and not just a bunch of brainwashed Libertarian sociopaths. I'm in Europe, and despite some of our Conservatives hopelessly trying to parrot American arguments, people just simply see that the universal health care system *works*... it may not be 100% perfect, but those issues are fixable. Mostly it just comes down to providing resources and making them to best use through appropriate logistics. No need to resort to the American model of "having the best healthcare in the world for those who can pay". Personally, I don't really even want to deal with people who would consider your situation has being somehow "normal", it is, as you said, a barbaric way to think about things.
Americans haven't had an example of a working universal system, so it is easy for them to believe the bullshit they hear from their radio talkshow hosts... fortunately I feel the USA is in for some really hard times economically in general, and that too without even having any of the social safety net that usually always gets the blame -- so maybe, when enough of the electorate suffers enough, they will take a little look across the Atlantic and wonder how the hell the Europeans do it...
Science has always been a collaborative grind, and is becoming more and more that. In the past, we had a bunch of geniuses that single-handedly took their fields forward, but even those weren't motivated by money to be made, and even they stood on the shoulders of giants... do you really think Newton or Darwin would have been "better" if there had been a huge prize waiting for them? I think not.
:-)
Even those who do get the new major insights in science just... get them -- after a lot of work of course. Sure they deserve accolades and recognition and even money, but I have this strange feeling that just making them win the lottery is somewhat oddly unfair towards those who partake in the noble pursuit but don't get similarly "blessed".
In the meantime, in order to actually have those flashes occurring in the heads of some young scientists, they need to eat. THAT lures people into science, not taking huge personal risks -- and the intense pressure that comes with it -- with their life. For example I quit thinking about staying in academia when I realized that I would perform poorly if my life really depended on getting great ideas from grant to grant. So science needs to be funded as a whole... you toss a whole lot of them at the wall and see which ones stick.
Looks more like "the pre-streching goatse crater"...
It's just you being Americans. Deal with it, or become Europeans, like me :)
Actually, they pretty much have nothing to do with each other except in the minds of gun-nut Americans. The rest of us have moved on.
... and to be slapped by an interstellar lawsuit 10 000 years later :-)
It is also interesting to note that both Nazis and Ayn Rand Libertarians both get hard over Darwinism for exactly the same reasons. The only difference is that Hitler uses the State to enforce survival of the fittest, Libertarians essentially put the burden on the Market -- and prefer to blur the distinction between Nazism and Communism because the former hits a bit too close to home as long as only the end result is concerned. Remove the state and substitute nations/races for individuals and make things "voluntary" and Mein Kampf BECOMES Atlas Shrugged.
Of course the Commies were despised by the Nazis exactly because of the refusal to embrace survival of the fittest (and thus protecting and producing degeneracy), and in that sense this of course is interference in natural selection (and in this case you really need to be hardcore social-darwinist), but the underlying ideological differences are way more substantial than Libertarians make it seem like...
It's just another made-up specialization field for software engineering academics who didn't quite cut it in the real compsci stuff... even they need to write their papers on something.
... I decided not to go to the USA any time soon right after GWB came into office. Fortunately, I haven't had to break my principles (I'm in Europe, of course).
The funny thing about these profiling things is that they can be used for so much more. For example one of my treehugging hippie political activist friends is on some kind of a terrorist watchlist to the US, and the funny thing is she wouldn't resort to violence to defend her own life, not to mention she's a small woman in a wheelchair... Another activist friend of hers always gets his book shipments from Amazon crudely opened along the way and then resealed. Mine always arrive untouched.
Apart from the fact that Slashdot is an unlikely place to get away from Picard, I must admit that you gave me some food for thought as to why me and my favourite fictional character are single and not parents...
We all know Picard is a non-parent geek and doesn't like children... and this is probably because when the SO came up all bothered and tried to suggest there probably should be some little ones around, the standard "make it so" probably wasn't the best possible answer... so she did, and switched males as first thing...
Hmm... so you are in some sort of a superposition of nerd and father until pregnancy test result is observed?
Can't work that way either, would have to somehow get to the point of having a possibly positive result, no?
Yeah, but you still want to watch all the cool gcc output scrolling by as it makes you feel l33t, instead of staring into your girl's eyes, and the she is jealous that you're drooling your kernel build and getting all hard off your compiler optimization flags instead instead of her...
Yeah, the girl usually starts to get freaked out when you're trying to father a child and just HAVE TO do some kernel hacking on the side... :\
Clearly, it is not possible to be a nerd and a father at the same time... the former should make the latter impossible.
Certainly those motivations were there, most strongly the "getting back at them after Winter War", but IMO assuming some sort of benevolence from Stalin's part is an assumption way too far. Finland barely managed the Winter War, Barbarossa gave an option to try and neutralize both the most long-standing and immediate threat to Finland, and your position is essentially wishful thinking or perfect hindsight at best.
Been reading quite a lot of political blogs and forums tonight and it's pretty sad what I'm seeing.. those who have a systematic political agenda to attack the prevalent values in Finnish society (namely, that we aren't enough like what Auvinen wants in his manifesto but tend to prefer to be more inclusive), especially the more rabid Libertarians for whom the Nordic welfare state is an absolute red cloth, seem to just complain that the guy's PR skills were a bit bad when he did what he did, but that he was otherwise quite a great guy.... and some of them are barely managing to hide their gloating that something like this should happen in our "safe" society.
Need to go puke really. It's nice to get to see some true colours though.
You'd have more credibility if you were not posting as AC, but I'll respond anyway... Finland's existence was threatened both ways, and Stalin was particularly determined to make Finland pay for resistance during the Winter War. With the Germans you might have become some kind of a vassal state with the rest of Europe, but it wouldn't have ended up with people shipped to Siberia... I don't understand why you fail to see the choice that had to be made.
Mannerheim had to deal with Hitler because we needed the weapons. Doesn't mean you have to like the chap personally to do diplomacy.
I almost would have wanted him to live on as some half-conscious vegetable. You know, to be completely dependant -- something he apparently despised -- and still unable to kill himself... :-)
True, it is sad. I am currently reading one of the bigger economics and stock market -related forums in Finland and it's quite shocking how much understanding they actually have for the killer. "Great motives, bad implementation, should have shot some Social Democrats instead"... and of course it's all because the fault of the homogenizing influence of the public school system that oppresses obvious übermenschen like this one genius.
So, he was Libertarian... it's almost like from the pen of Ayn Rand, except that she made it all voluntary :)
There is nothing secret about it -- it's basic Finnish history, and of course still a bit of a bone of contention among historians and even regular people whether joining Nazi Germany in Barbarossa was such a bright move. Personally I think there was not much choice -- had we just sat there on our hands, the possibility is high that Stalin would have attacked again after Winter War anyway, so some sort of pre-emption was logical when Germany was going strong. I probably would have made the same choice at that time of history. Finland has also always had a strong bond to Germany -- especially militarily -- that goes all the way back to our Civil War when the whites got training from Germany to suppress the communist rebellion. Essentially the officers of our WW2 were probably German-trained for a significant part.
This was a marriage of convenience, and it must be pointed out that for example Finland never joined Germany in their ethnic cleansing plans. We actually had a Jewish synagogue out there at the front -- fighting against the Soviets! Marshall Mannerheim, the country's lead figure at the time and a cosmopolitan gentleman and officer from the Czar's army originally, was personally disgusted by Hitler, whom he considered to be a barbarian. Yes, we have German ties and being made to march to Siberia by Stalin was the worse option. I would strongly disagree with your idea that we might have had much Fascist sympathies during the time -- our extreme right wing was suppressed during the 20s and 30s right after the extreme left wing was suppressed after Civil War. We remained remarkably centrist and democratic throughout the whole ordeal.
Math just needs to "click" in your head.
I used to dislike math in school almost until the last year, because I was the top student in everything else and Math was the only subject that was less than perfect (I was ok at it though). It didn't help that I am not fond of word problems or the "practical" way math is taught in school. It always made me feel like I was taking some IQ test that was somehow rigged against me and made me feel stupid. The systematic logic behind math never just showed up... it was always a matter of whether you are lucky enough to figure out the "trick" to it or not. Actually, I was so stressed by this magical requirement to just divine the result that I was actually scared of math enough to lock up, after which nothing would happen of course.
Anyway, during my last year I just finally understood what it is about... it's a combination of pattern-matching, logic (the 99% basics of which you'll mostly use are really simple) and finally some semantic understanding of what's behind those symbols. Mostly it's just manipulating the stuff through the rules you already know to get something you want out of it. At that point I was capable of relaxing and keeping on open mind with the problems I was presented... and I went on to study CS, liked university-level math and here we are with a theory-heavy Master's in algorithmics...
Why the hell not power your homes and iPods with this thing instead of oil so you don't need to go to that damned battlefield in the first place?
On the other hand, I'm all for sharks... with SOLAR-POWERED LASERS!