So now your saying that the government should get involved with how we throw our fucking trash away?!? Geez..what's next?
I mean, if someone wants to voluntarily sort through all their garbage to recycle things as somepeople do nowdays, that's fine. But to mandate that everyone has to sort through their trash, have 16 different trash cans to keep up with, and I guess you somehow want to employ 'garbage police' to go through said trash and fine those who don't participate....?
Erm..., yes. Exactly
I live in Houston, where "the government" does nothing of the sort. Recycling is, or rather was, until a few months ago, a concept totally foreign to citizen and government alike. The result is, predictably, that this city is a festering shit hole of refuse and pollution. I have also lived in cities where recycling (into three bins - not "16") is mandatory. No, there are no "garbage police", but most people find that recycling is not the onerous task you seem to think it is. The result, just as predictably, is a much lower impact on the planet when it comes to the load of refuse that must be carted off somewhere and buried.
Look up the word "unsustainable".
Look, I am all for alternative transportation and dedicated bike lanes, but this is just stupid. Near the top of the list of stupid ideas, in fact, is the idea of cyclists (too many of whom already have a badly skewed sense of entitlement when it comes to roadways) "creating" their own lanes and expecting everyone else to respect them.
Revenues are falling because people buy/use less gas. (debatable, but let's just say...)
Roadway maintenance and other costs are going up.
Fine. Raise the gas tax to the point where revenue is adequate. Econo-car drivers still get a break, gas-hog drivers don't. So what's the problem?
I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who can't figure out what a DOS-compatible OS is good for...
No more puzzled than I am about why it is that the ability to grasp sarcasm is so elusive to so many slashdotters, not to mention why moderators would find such dimness (in an AC, no less) "insightful".
(shakes head)
It is a truly baffling statement to make that appears to have absolutely no understanding of how things work in politics, and government. And, how that ignorant statement got modded +5, Insightful, just amazes me.
There be ditto-heads, even here, my friend, and it would appear that at least a few of them would rather spend mod points than engage in a discussion where their "facts" are so likely to be laid asunder.
Get off my lawn, #864176.
I am, almost certainly, older than you think, and your assumption that I am unaware of things like the "Alien and Sedition Acts", and other assorted attempts to step on The Constitution, is badly off the mark. But we are talking about issues which, as a nation, we are facing today, so arguing that something bad was done last century, or the one before that, or the one before that, has what relevance, exactly? It was wrong then, and it is just as wrong now, perhaps even more so for the willful ignorance of history that had to have been a part of Cheney's war on our rights, I mean "war on terror".
Yeah, because burning through fossil fuel like there will never be a shortage of it has worked out so well for our economy so far, let's keep acting like ass-hats and not look for a better way to do things.
Sorry, but I call bullshit right back at you. The whole mess our country finds itself in, with this any number of other threats to our Constitutional protections still ongoing, is a direct result of the over-reaching of neo-con ideologues like Cheney and the hand-picked to team of "reliable" lawyers who drafted the various rationales intended to support the sundering of those protections. The fact that the various agencies are still operating under heretofore unconscionable guidelines is exactly the kind of thing cooler heads tried to warn us about as far back as 2001. Not being able to "put the genie back in the bottle" is a weak metaphor when one considers the damage that has been done.
If you want a real eye-opener, read Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals". It is a very well researched and scholarly summary of the horrible things that have been done to your rights as an American citizen, and it will make it chillingly clear to you, how and why that damage will be a very, very long time in being undone, if it ever is.
Perhaps we need a blog czar. That would be change I can believe in.
We don't more government "interference" ruining things for our corporate friends. Don't you know that the "free market" will magically take care of everything?
I'd love to jump on the Republican-bashing bandwagon, but to be honest, there a good many Democratic legislators who, having taken large campaign contributions from health care vendors and insurers, are perfectly willing to sabotage any meaningful reform of our health care system. I'd love to believe otherwise, but I fear that what we are likely to get will be worse than useless when it comes to solving the staggering economic and social problem that is the health care compensation system in this country.
At least the Bozeman city officials had some idea about "how them internets work". When their bad judgement was pointed out to them, they took the right path instead of digging in their heels and making complete asses of themselves
Quite right, and in a country such as the U.S., where there is only a fast-diminishing distinction between corporate will and government will, what will be allowed to see and hear, not to mention speak and write, may well become subject to the fiat of a body or bodies quite apart from "the people". Consider the fact that, by many measures, the telecom lobby is the most powerful in Washington. Now consider that the telecoms do indeed hold the Internet's infrastructure in their hands. Now consider that for a just a bit longer, and then tell me that the Internet is safe from censorship.
There are volunteer fire departments that are indeed 100% private, and which survive on donations or "subscriptions", but those are extremely rare. So rare are they, that I would bet money that the parent is mistaken about the exact nature of his local VFD. But that's neither here nor there. The "efficiency" of a fire department is a slippery term indeed. If nothing burns in my community with an assessed valuation of 650 million dollars, is my fire department more efficient than the one that let 100 million dollars of property burn in a city with an assessed valuation of 6.5 billion? You get the idea. More to the point, simply comparing budgets is folly. I know of a few VFD's that despite extremely limited budgets, have an exemplary level of readiness and expertise. Their apparatus may be a decade or two old, and it might not shine like some, but it is well maintained and is wielded with the highest proficiency by a well trained group of dedicated men and women. Looking a little deeper, you notice that the crews' safety gear, turnouts, helmets, gloves, etc., is markedly newer in appearance. The hoses, nozzles, SCBA's, and hand tools obviously receive a disproportionate amount of attention (and probably funds). Down the road might be another volunteer department. None of their vehicles are more than 10 years old. Their immaculate paint and extensive gold leaf work are kept spotless and shiny. And the crew are a bunch of undisciplined laggards, who spend more time applying wax, playing pool and drinking beer than they do training with and maintaining the tools that will actually stand between them and the flame. Which department do you want protecting you? Does it matter where their funds come from?
Somehow, I rather doubt that your supermarket checkout queue queries were couched in terms that came anywhere close to illuminating the full consequences of taking the "club card" deal. If they had been, I'm certain that the responses would have been substantially different. The sad fact is that people often are stupid, like when they decline to (or are simply unable to) exercise enough discretion to read and understand the terms of some legal agreement they're about to enter into. It is not that they don't care about their privacy, it is that they are ignorant of the consequences, and are deliberately kept so by those exploiting their ignorance.
People do care about privacy. Your example is lame in that it excuses (ignores) the deliberately obfuscated consequences of "agreeing" to the terms attached to the club card "deal". If the supermarket told their customers, right up front, something like "...and in addition to using it for our own marketing purposes, we will be selling the information we collect about you and your shopping habits to as many takers as we can scare up, and there are plenty of them.", I'd hazard that far fewer customers would take the "deal". And let's not even waste time discussing those companies that have no compunction at all when it comes to reserving the right to "...change the terms of this agreement at any time..." in the way-fine print of the agreement.
Do you know how long it takes to drop 15 mortar rounds in tube?
Do you have any idea how hard a mortar team in an alley would be to spot from 500 feet?
And since that alley might be half a mile from the stadium, do you know how long getting cops over there would take?
Like I said, this is a pointless technology.
On the assumption of gunmen, we agree. There are other, probably more effective means to accomplish the terrorists goal. As for the mortars...
One tube and crew? If not, how many? Answer... yes, I do.
Spotting the source of mortar fire? The technology to do that, while the first round is still on it's way up, has been around for quite some time. So let's see, about 5 seconds sounds about right.
Why do you assume that "sending the cops" is the only possible response?
I, for one, have nothing against "free markets". Alas, there is no such thing. Ever. Unrestrained, every market will devolve into fascism of some form, where the "civil authority" (often nothing more than the gang with the most power) exists to enforce the dominant players' monopoly.
As for Constitution, please, spare me. I live in the buckle of the Bible belt. Every day I hear fake Libertarians piss on the Constitution and the principles it stands for. Their hypocrisy appears to be unbounded, so you'll pardon me if I don't trust them when it comes to "providing a level playing field" for commerce.
But the original point of the article is about teaching people who are mathematicians (not programmers) FORTRAN or a newer language such as Python. These aren't people who, most probably, won't be coding for a living. Although knowing how a code a little will come in handy. To that extent it's more like the fact that most homeowner own a hammer and know how to use it, but don't have a need to buy a nail gun and learn how to use that. (admittedly buying a nail gun for a homeowner is really about how much FUN it is to have a nail gun handy all the time!)
On a side note : How many of those roofers and framers learned to use a nail gun before a hammer?
Most roofers and framers learned to use a nail gun first, and many, if not most, will never learn to use a hammer at any level that could be called proficient in the real-world "production" environment of housebuilding. Remember, we're talking mastery of the tools at a level that allows "efficiency". That's a plateau that is far lower for the nail gun.
Same goes for programming skills. Python, for example, is far easier to master at that level (efficient production) than FORTRAN, for most tasks. Yes, there are those tasks for which FORTRAN is the right tool for the job (number crunching), but such a case is a very rare exception. So if "knowing how to code a little" is a good thing, spending x hours of the undergraduate's time teaching him a more utilitarian tool is the better expenditure of time, is it not? And BTW, let's dispense with the "but it doesn't teach good programming practice". We're not talking about BASIC here. There are a number of candidates that would fit the bill. Hell, I'd suggest that PERL is a far better choice than FORTRAN.
Errrmmm..., you haven't built many houses, have you? If you had, you'd know that nail guns are far more efficient for most fastening tasks. Even the fastest old-school framer or roofer with a hammer can't come close to keeping up with a worker armed with a nailer. Yes, there are tasks where the nailer won't do the job; because it's to big to fit into the work area, or because the work demands a level of precision that the nailer can't provide. Both cases represent a tiny fraction of the set. So to, I guess, is the case for data processing tools.
Seriously. I have no doubt that Jeff has the chops and the "perspective" that has definitely been "missing". I watched the eyes of Richard Clarke and his entourage glaze over at a "town hall" meeting with the "President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board" (or whatever they called it then) in Portland about 8 or 9 years ago, as some very smart security folks told them what was coming and what needed to be done. Honestly, I don't know if they just couldn't grasp the issues or if they were more interested in political play, but the message was quite plain; "the government" was going to be no help in securing things. Political inertia being what it is, I doubt that much as changed, the current administration's well-meaning efforts notwithstanding. Jeff is in for a frustrating ride, I fear.
I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
And that will be their undoing. Never mind the fact that, at the price point in place before electronic distribution became reasonable the dentist would never have purchased all those songs (thus putting the lie to all the "lost revenue" bullshit), the record companies, if they had had any fucking vision at all, would have seen that this was a money making opportunity and built it (Napster) first, along with a pricing model and payment scheme that leveraged the almost zero distribution costs. Instead, they have tried to protect their buggy-whip industry to through litigation.
When employed by DoJ they don't care about the RIAA the govenment is paying them so they do what the government wants and if the govenment doesnt care they use their own views..
(chuckles...) My, what a charmingly innocent view. Influence is a commodity in our system of government. It is bought, sold, and traded. To even speculate that there might be an issue, especially one which has reached the DoJ and/or SCOTUS, has not attracted a market for "caring" individuals is depressingly naive.
Slashdot Mirror
So now your saying that the government should get involved with how we throw our fucking trash away?!? Geez..what's next?
I mean, if someone wants to voluntarily sort through all their garbage to recycle things as somepeople do nowdays, that's fine. But to mandate that everyone has to sort through their trash, have 16 different trash cans to keep up with, and I guess you somehow want to employ 'garbage police' to go through said trash and fine those who don't participate....?
Erm..., yes. Exactly
I live in Houston, where "the government" does nothing of the sort. Recycling is, or rather was, until a few months ago, a concept totally foreign to citizen and government alike. The result is, predictably, that this city is a festering shit hole of refuse and pollution. I have also lived in cities where recycling (into three bins - not "16") is mandatory. No, there are no "garbage police", but most people find that recycling is not the onerous task you seem to think it is. The result, just as predictably, is a much lower impact on the planet when it comes to the load of refuse that must be carted off somewhere and buried.
Look up the word "unsustainable".
Look, I am all for alternative transportation and dedicated bike lanes, but this is just stupid. Near the top of the list of stupid ideas, in fact, is the idea of cyclists (too many of whom already have a badly skewed sense of entitlement when it comes to roadways) "creating" their own lanes and expecting everyone else to respect them.
Revenues are falling because people buy/use less gas. (debatable, but let's just say...)
Roadway maintenance and other costs are going up.
Fine. Raise the gas tax to the point where revenue is adequate. Econo-car drivers still get a break, gas-hog drivers don't. So what's the problem?
I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who can't figure out what a DOS-compatible OS is good for...
No more puzzled than I am about why it is that the ability to grasp sarcasm is so elusive to so many slashdotters, not to mention why moderators would find such dimness (in an AC, no less) "insightful".
(shakes head)
It is a truly baffling statement to make that appears to have absolutely no understanding of how things work in politics, and government. And, how that ignorant statement got modded +5, Insightful, just amazes me.
There be ditto-heads, even here, my friend, and it would appear that at least a few of them would rather spend mod points than engage in a discussion where their "facts" are so likely to be laid asunder.
And can it run Linux?
Get off my lawn, #864176.
I am, almost certainly, older than you think, and your assumption that I am unaware of things like the "Alien and Sedition Acts", and other assorted attempts to step on The Constitution, is badly off the mark. But we are talking about issues which, as a nation, we are facing today, so arguing that something bad was done last century, or the one before that, or the one before that, has what relevance, exactly? It was wrong then, and it is just as wrong now, perhaps even more so for the willful ignorance of history that had to have been a part of Cheney's war on our rights, I mean "war on terror".
Yeah, because burning through fossil fuel like there will never be a shortage of it has worked out so well for our economy so far, let's keep acting like ass-hats and not look for a better way to do things.
Sorry, but I call bullshit right back at you. The whole mess our country finds itself in, with this any number of other threats to our Constitutional protections still ongoing, is a direct result of the over-reaching of neo-con ideologues like Cheney and the hand-picked to team of "reliable" lawyers who drafted the various rationales intended to support the sundering of those protections. The fact that the various agencies are still operating under heretofore unconscionable guidelines is exactly the kind of thing cooler heads tried to warn us about as far back as 2001. Not being able to "put the genie back in the bottle" is a weak metaphor when one considers the damage that has been done.
If you want a real eye-opener, read Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals". It is a very well researched and scholarly summary of the horrible things that have been done to your rights as an American citizen, and it will make it chillingly clear to you, how and why that damage will be a very, very long time in being undone, if it ever is.
Perhaps we need a blog czar. That would be change I can believe in.
We don't more government "interference" ruining things for our corporate friends. Don't you know that the "free market" will magically take care of everything?
I'd love to jump on the Republican-bashing bandwagon, but to be honest, there a good many Democratic legislators who, having taken large campaign contributions from health care vendors and insurers, are perfectly willing to sabotage any meaningful reform of our health care system. I'd love to believe otherwise, but I fear that what we are likely to get will be worse than useless when it comes to solving the staggering economic and social problem that is the health care compensation system in this country.
At least the Bozeman city officials had some idea about "how them internets work". When their bad judgement was pointed out to them, they took the right path instead of digging in their heels and making complete asses of themselves
Quite right, and in a country such as the U.S., where there is only a fast-diminishing distinction between corporate will and government will, what will be allowed to see and hear, not to mention speak and write, may well become subject to the fiat of a body or bodies quite apart from "the people". Consider the fact that, by many measures, the telecom lobby is the most powerful in Washington. Now consider that the telecoms do indeed hold the Internet's infrastructure in their hands. Now consider that for a just a bit longer, and then tell me that the Internet is safe from censorship.
There are volunteer fire departments that are indeed 100% private, and which survive on donations or "subscriptions", but those are extremely rare. So rare are they, that I would bet money that the parent is mistaken about the exact nature of his local VFD. But that's neither here nor there. The "efficiency" of a fire department is a slippery term indeed. If nothing burns in my community with an assessed valuation of 650 million dollars, is my fire department more efficient than the one that let 100 million dollars of property burn in a city with an assessed valuation of 6.5 billion? You get the idea. More to the point, simply comparing budgets is folly. I know of a few VFD's that despite extremely limited budgets, have an exemplary level of readiness and expertise. Their apparatus may be a decade or two old, and it might not shine like some, but it is well maintained and is wielded with the highest proficiency by a well trained group of dedicated men and women. Looking a little deeper, you notice that the crews' safety gear, turnouts, helmets, gloves, etc., is markedly newer in appearance. The hoses, nozzles, SCBA's, and hand tools obviously receive a disproportionate amount of attention (and probably funds). Down the road might be another volunteer department. None of their vehicles are more than 10 years old. Their immaculate paint and extensive gold leaf work are kept spotless and shiny. And the crew are a bunch of undisciplined laggards, who spend more time applying wax, playing pool and drinking beer than they do training with and maintaining the tools that will actually stand between them and the flame. Which department do you want protecting you? Does it matter where their funds come from?
Somehow, I rather doubt that your supermarket checkout queue queries were couched in terms that came anywhere close to illuminating the full consequences of taking the "club card" deal. If they had been, I'm certain that the responses would have been substantially different. The sad fact is that people often are stupid, like when they decline to (or are simply unable to) exercise enough discretion to read and understand the terms of some legal agreement they're about to enter into. It is not that they don't care about their privacy, it is that they are ignorant of the consequences, and are deliberately kept so by those exploiting their ignorance.
Bullshit.
People do care about privacy. Your example is lame in that it excuses (ignores) the deliberately obfuscated consequences of "agreeing" to the terms attached to the club card "deal". If the supermarket told their customers, right up front, something like "...and in addition to using it for our own marketing purposes, we will be selling the information we collect about you and your shopping habits to as many takers as we can scare up, and there are plenty of them.", I'd hazard that far fewer customers would take the "deal". And let's not even waste time discussing those companies that have no compunction at all when it comes to reserving the right to "...change the terms of this agreement at any time..." in the way-fine print of the agreement.
Why assume gunmen?
Do you know how long it takes to drop 15 mortar rounds in tube?
Do you have any idea how hard a mortar team in an alley would be to spot from 500 feet?
And since that alley might be half a mile from the stadium, do you know how long getting cops over there would take?
Like I said, this is a pointless technology.
On the assumption of gunmen, we agree. There are other, probably more effective means to accomplish the terrorists goal. As for the mortars...
One tube and crew? If not, how many? Answer... yes, I do.
Spotting the source of mortar fire? The technology to do that, while the first round is still on it's way up, has been around for quite some time. So let's see, about 5 seconds sounds about right.
Why do you assume that "sending the cops" is the only possible response?
I, for one, have nothing against "free markets". Alas, there is no such thing. Ever. Unrestrained, every market will devolve into fascism of some form, where the "civil authority" (often nothing more than the gang with the most power) exists to enforce the dominant players' monopoly.
As for Constitution, please, spare me. I live in the buckle of the Bible belt. Every day I hear fake Libertarians piss on the Constitution and the principles it stands for. Their hypocrisy appears to be unbounded, so you'll pardon me if I don't trust them when it comes to "providing a level playing field" for commerce.
But the original point of the article is about teaching people who are mathematicians (not programmers) FORTRAN or a newer language such as Python. These aren't people who, most probably, won't be coding for a living. Although knowing how a code a little will come in handy. To that extent it's more like the fact that most homeowner own a hammer and know how to use it, but don't have a need to buy a nail gun and learn how to use that. (admittedly buying a nail gun for a homeowner is really about how much FUN it is to have a nail gun handy all the time!)
On a side note : How many of those roofers and framers learned to use a nail gun before a hammer?
Most roofers and framers learned to use a nail gun first, and many, if not most, will never learn to use a hammer at any level that could be called proficient in the real-world "production" environment of housebuilding. Remember, we're talking mastery of the tools at a level that allows "efficiency". That's a plateau that is far lower for the nail gun.
Same goes for programming skills. Python, for example, is far easier to master at that level (efficient production) than FORTRAN, for most tasks. Yes, there are those tasks for which FORTRAN is the right tool for the job (number crunching), but such a case is a very rare exception. So if "knowing how to code a little" is a good thing, spending x hours of the undergraduate's time teaching him a more utilitarian tool is the better expenditure of time, is it not? And BTW, let's dispense with the "but it doesn't teach good programming practice". We're not talking about BASIC here. There are a number of candidates that would fit the bill. Hell, I'd suggest that PERL is a far better choice than FORTRAN.
Errrmmm..., you haven't built many houses, have you? If you had, you'd know that nail guns are far more efficient for most fastening tasks. Even the fastest old-school framer or roofer with a hammer can't come close to keeping up with a worker armed with a nailer. Yes, there are tasks where the nailer won't do the job; because it's to big to fit into the work area, or because the work demands a level of precision that the nailer can't provide. Both cases represent a tiny fraction of the set. So to, I guess, is the case for data processing tools.
You are confusing communism with some form (several, actually) of government. A common mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
Seriously. I have no doubt that Jeff has the chops and the "perspective" that has definitely been "missing". I watched the eyes of Richard Clarke and his entourage glaze over at a "town hall" meeting with the "President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board" (or whatever they called it then) in Portland about 8 or 9 years ago, as some very smart security folks told them what was coming and what needed to be done. Honestly, I don't know if they just couldn't grasp the issues or if they were more interested in political play, but the message was quite plain; "the government" was going to be no help in securing things. Political inertia being what it is, I doubt that much as changed, the current administration's well-meaning efforts notwithstanding. Jeff is in for a frustrating ride, I fear.
I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
And that will be their undoing. Never mind the fact that, at the price point in place before electronic distribution became reasonable the dentist would never have purchased all those songs (thus putting the lie to all the "lost revenue" bullshit), the record companies, if they had had any fucking vision at all, would have seen that this was a money making opportunity and built it (Napster) first, along with a pricing model and payment scheme that leveraged the almost zero distribution costs. Instead, they have tried to protect their buggy-whip industry to through litigation.
Yes, the mice are going to win.
Netherland: 19% sales tax on luxuries, 6% on bare necessities. Income tax 30-50% (but with a lot of deductibles).
And yet, by many measures, the average citizen there has a better standard of living than the average U.S. citizen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2007.2F2008_report
Yeah? Well..., they're still dirty socialists.
When employed by DoJ they don't care about the RIAA the govenment is paying them so they do what the government wants and if the govenment doesnt care they use their own views. .
(chuckles...) My, what a charmingly innocent view. Influence is a commodity in our system of government. It is bought, sold, and traded. To even speculate that there might be an issue, especially one which has reached the DoJ and/or SCOTUS, has not attracted a market for "caring" individuals is depressingly naive.