Amen to that. Brakes are ALWAYS stronger than the engine, unless they're defective, which is unlikely in a new vehicle. And this is exactly what Our Hero found out later, when he panicked at the tollbooth and REALLY stomped hard on the fucker.
Jesus, now I know why they call this "news for nerds." I don't care who's drunk and who isn't, that isn't the point.
The point, in case you missed it, is that it's simply wrong to believe accident statistics that lump everyone together. Not everyone drives drunk. Not everyone drives poorly. Not everyone is 80 years old and can't see. Not everyone travels at unreasonable speeds on secondary roads. Etcetera.
So when you take all that into account, how dangerous is it *really* to drive rather than to fly, FOR YOU PERSONALLY? There isn't a clear answer to that question.
So I don't care how many teenagers wrap themselves and their passengers around trees on a Saturday night. And I don't care who's drunk and who isn't. All I know is, I'm not, so the "statistics" can't possibly apply to me.
So when the airlines -- and yes, you better believe it, it's the airlines -- trot out "statistics" like it's safer to fly than drive, I don't believe them. Neither should you.
It's certainly true that one spends more time driving to a destination than flying. That part of your argument is solid.
But then you apply the same statistical reasoning that is in dispute.
I'm sure you'd agree that I would be many times more likely to die driving if I drove drunk. But I never drive drunk. So the "6,300" number simply doesn't apply to me.
Yes, but the problem with those statistics is that they obscure the truth. If:
1) You are over 25; 2) OR you are not male; 3) AND you travel mostly on divided highways as opposed to secondary roads; 4) AND you travel in the daytime or early evening, rather than late at night when drunk people are driving; 5) AND you yourself are not drinking or smoking or pill popping or talking on the phone or otherwise not paying attention; 6) AND you're actually wearing your seat belt; 7) AND the car you're driving has good brakes (preferably anti-lock brakes); 8) AND it has good tires; 9) AND it's not some junker with bad shocks and loose steering; 10) AND you're driving in decent conditions, not when it's snowing or icing up
THEN what is the probability of dying in a car crash? It's basically the chance of being hit by or running into a random nut. Which is very very low.
If on the other hand you are under 25, driving too fast with your friends, out late at night and drunk/driving with drunks, cruising secondary roads, not wearing your seat belt, driving an old junker with crappy brakes and shitty tires, then I guess you'd be safer strapped to an airline seat.
Which is why statistics suck. Throw all the above variables into a multiple regression, then show me airplanes are "safer," and I'll believe. It won't happen, because the airlines would never fund such a study. Drunk teenagers keep the road death statistics high, and the airlines in business.
You know what, none of that link stuff worries me one bit. Links are bound to be irrelevant/stupid/broken unless someone really cares about them and monitors them manually.
No, the big worry for me is PATENTS. What the hell are they patenting? What is the Big Idea here that deserves a patent? This is scary stuff. What, do we have to find prior art for every stupid idea someone decides to patent? The answer is "yes." We are all out of business if we let this continue. Support the EFF! Kill this stupidity now before we are all out of work.
I built a bot for Paradise Poker 3 years ago. It did rather well on the free tables (playing 7 card stud). And, it was easy to screen-scrape the cards by modifying the.bmp files that install with the app. So the grandparent post is wrong about the difficulty of that. Didn't have to reverse-engineer anything. The "dealer dialog" is good enough to grok the rest of the play, again through screen-scraping.
The bot owed its success to the fact that it remembered all the cards that were discarded (which in online stud often go by so fast it is very difficult to see). It then played about a million hands from the current position with a Monte Carlo simulation, taking into account all the discards and all the possible outcomes, to establish a base win probability.
Armed with a few heuristics on when to fold early, the bot did quite well.
Obviously it would be defeated by anyone who
a) knew he was playing against a bot b) was a decent poker player
But that's not the point, is it? My plan was to improve the bot to start making judgments about particular players, put it in a corner, and then auto-haunt the low stakes tables 24 x 7, but then I got busy and put the project aside.
I claim a bot of this type could make money. Not tons, but enough to make it worthwhile.
Right, but one has to feel sorry for the marketing drone who has to interview a bunch of nerds and figure out what the hell they've built. I've seen a lot worse than "synchronicity."
Part of the blame is ours. Oftimes we don't take the time to educate the marketing people properly, and then we're "surprised" at the nonsense they generate. And, how many times have we code-named the new product something silly and funny, and then the marketing people have to come up with the "real" name? Talk about pass the buck.
The answer is to get the technoids closer to the customer, and the marketing drones closer to the technoids. It is possible to "dumb it down" for a non-technical person -- really, it is. And there's plenty of technical bs out there along with the marketing bs. If I have to read another technology white paper that begins and ends with "we use J2EE" I think I'll puke. Let's feed the marketing folks some legitimate material, and maybe they'll be able to produce something that makes sense.
[chuckle] Right. Of course, the patent system _is_ out of hand. This is just another example. As others have pointed out, badness is badness whether we agree with the ultimate objective or not. A patent on hashing file contents? Oh, please. Next we'll patent checksums and CRC's.
For example, you either believe in freedom or you do not. If you do, then you support the right of unreasonable people to air their views, just as you support the right of reasonable people to air theirs.
Similarly, you either think patenting software is reasonable, or you do not. As Andrew "Dice" Clay might say, "There's no middle ground."
And, right, I vastly over-simplified. But it helped to drill down and find common ground, which I think we did.
For example, I think we can agree that, for whatever reason, inner city students start out way behind their suburban counterparts. Where we differ is in what remedial action to take, if any.
I think we could also agree that taking _no_ action is tantamount to taking _some_ action, since without any action at all, suburban families (like mine) will continue to game the system, and their kids will start out ahead of the inner city kids, and get farther and farther ahead over time.
I think we'd also agree (definitionally) that Equal Opportunity is basically a social experiment wherein we take a group of disadvantaged students (in the case of education) and we assume that "had they had better opportunity" their test scores "would have been equivalent" to higher-scoring privileged students. By admitting these disadvantaged students into colleges preferentially, the hope (misguided or not) is that they can be shoe-horned into the middle class, and that this then becomes self-perpetuating.
The further hope of Equal Opportunity is that by providing minorities and women with a better chance to achieve positions of power, inequities on class or gender or race lines that still exist can be erased or minimized.
Your position, roughly, appears to be that government is not to be trusted, and that encouraging government intervention at this level is so dangerous to personal freedom that no such experiment can be condoned. You have plenty of company in the Libertarian camp, and I'm fond of the argument myself.
My position, roughly, is that personal freedom is threatened more by the social instability that is likely to occur if our society continues to splinter along class/race lines, than by remedial programs like Equal Opportunity, which actually have a chance of reversing the process.
Hmmm. Maybe you prefer the National Review? Both MJ and NR are extremist publications, but in order to be informed, one must read both.
But let's follow your NJ State Trooper reasoning a bit further, shall we? It is a matter of record that more than 25% of young black men between the ages of 18 and 23 are behind bars at this moment (I forget the exact age range, but it is something like that). Based on this, we "know" that the chances are 1 in 4 that if we arrest a young black man, he'll "probably be guilty of something."
Does that then mean that we should instruct our police to routinely arrest and question young black men, at random? I'm picturing downtown Manhattan on a busy Monday morning, say at the intersection of 34th and 7th, with a line of cops pulling over every black guy they see for questioning. Doesn't sound quite so reasonable to you, now, does it?
I would also point out that drug traffickers are probably reasonably intelligent business people, and every courier lost to the New Jersey State Police represents lost profit. I would have to be a pretty dumb drug trafficker indeed not to realize that maybe I should send a few clean-cut white guys (or middle-aged women) in Toyota Camrys up the New Jersey Turnpike instead of six dudes in a pink Deuce-and-a-Quarter with Florida plates. I mean, duh.
But, if I'm a CLEVER drug trafficker, then I must OCCASIONALLY send some obvious vehicle, manned by black guys, armed with a minor shipment, to make the NJ troopers happy. This will keep the heat off the 18-wheeler in the next lane that's stuffed to the rafters with Acapulco Gold. Elementary game theory.
Finally, let's play a little statistical game. If I'm "sure" that every fourth young black guy is a criminal, and I start arresting young black guys at random, chances are I'll find minor violations of law all over the place, same as if I stopped every single white preppie Yale undergraduate on a Friday night. There will be weed, pills, underage drinkers, people driving without licenses or expired licenses, people with false ID's, etc., etc. And if the New Haven police started pulling white Yalies over at random, do you think there wouldn't be some major political pressure on them to lay off? Naaawwwww. THAT would never happen. Daddy and Mumsie would "support our local police" 100%, wouldn't they?
Why don't we just lock up every black guy we see? We'd all be a lot safer. For that matter, how about anyone who looks Arabic? After all, he might blow up a building. Better deport him, or put him in an internment camp. For that matter, how about all these shifty-looking South Americans and Mexicans? I'm sure they're responsible for all the crime around here, I watch "Cops". There aren't any white criminals at all, near as I can tell.
My God, wake up to what you're saying here.
All I'm saying is that as long as Daddy and Mumsie are 99% white (Daddy and Mumsie being the people in positions of power), there will be inequity. To address inequity requires effort. Cream doesn't just magically rise to the top, it's mostly put there, by people who manipulate the system for the advantage of their own class (like me, sending my children to fine colleges, making sure they take Kaplan courses to raise their SAT's and so on).
You write well, so clearly you're not dumb. But your response is a speech, not an argument. Reminds me of Barney Frank on a radio talk show a few years ago -- the host went on and on, like you, eloquently and vaguely, about a proposed bill. Frank cut in, "Excuse me. There's a bill on the floor of the House. You have three choices: Yes, No, Abstain. You need to take a position. What's your position?"
So let's get very specific, and we'll be able to understand one another better. Let's take a straightforward example of institutionalized racism, the public schools. Let's avoid arguments (for the next few paragraphs, anyway) about whether this institutionalized racism still exists, by setting the way-back machine to 1962.
Now, do you accept the proposition that the "separate but equal" basis on which public schools were organized in 1962 was not working? That black schools were hopelessly underfunded in comparison to their white counterparts? If you don't, I give up, because that's a matter of record/fact that was proven over and over again in courts all over the country at the time.
So let's assume that you are on board so far. Now, let's drill down on how you feel about the various actions that were taken by Kennedy, Johnson, the courts, etc., to try to rectify the situation (busing, National Guard intervention in Alabama, and so on).
If you are/were opposed to those actions, what (if anything) would you have done instead?
If you aren't/weren't opposed to those actions, do you think the problem has been solved?
Assuming you think the problem's been solved (it hasn't been, but let's stipulate for the purposes of argument that it has been), let's address the final question. It's an undisputed fact that inner-city (mostly black) students score lower on standardized achievement tests than suburban (mostly white) students. How do you account for this disparity?
There are only three answers:
1) Black kids are [pick one: dumber, less motivated, unsupported at home] and would score lower on test scores regardless of school quality. 2) Poor people, irrespective of their race, tend to live in the inner city, and poor people are likely to be dumber in general than rich people who tend to live in the suburbs. By the inexorable law of The Bell Curve, poor people's kids will be dumber than rich people's kids, which means that inner city kids will never score as well as suburban kids. 3) Inner city schools aren't as good as the suburban schools.
Position (1) is the pure racist view. Black kids are different, dumber, whatever, we give up.
Position (2) is the pure classist/caste view. If you're poor, you're stupid, and so are your kids, we give up.
If you take position (3), then I will ask, as Mr. Frank might ask, what you think we ought to do about the situation. By continuing our current path, clearly we encourage the rich to get richer and the poor to become poorer. Is that the outcome you want?
In fact, I suspect it is. Libertarians or closet Libertarians like you are supremacists, deep down inside. Laissez-faire capitalism results inevitably in monopoly and stagnation, which is just fine with you -- you're already on top of the pyramid.
Ah, I thought so. You're just a little twerp who has no clue what happened a mere 35 years ago. And the idea of the "big, bad state" righting some serious wrongs has your dick all bent out of shape.
Well, Mr. Libertarian, some things require a "state." Like interstate highways. National defense. Bridges. Social Security. Medicaid. Health care (the rest of the world has realized this, the US hasn't quite yet).
Get used to it. The good of the few must occasionally be subordinated to the good of the many. Do you understand how close we came to race wars in the United States in the 60's? Do you? Do you realize how close the United States came to class war in the 1930's, before Roosevelt saved our dumb asses?
No, you don't. Instead, you prefer to live in an ivory tower Ayn Rand world that has never and never will exist.
Just a question -- how old are you? Because if you're my age, you remember a very different time, a time when black people (I refuse to say "Afro-American") couldn't buy a break virtually anywhere.
And if you (or anyone else reading this) are white, and you think there isn't still residual prejudice, and it doesn't still really suck to be black in America, then just ask your friendly New Jersey State Trooper why he didn't pull your lilly-white ass over for speeding, and why instead he stopped the black guy next to you who was doing the speed limit.
Oh, we should be color-blind, sex-blind, ethnic-blind, religious-blind, and so forth. Sure, I agree, in theory -- if it were possible. Remember "No Irish need apply?" No? Neither do I, but that wasn't so long ago either. Black people actually PREFER outright prejudice to people who profess to be color-blind, but actually aren't. At least the cards are on the table, and you know where you stand. It's getting followed around the store that's so exasperating.
And, seriously, what do you think Joe Lieberman's chances at the Presidency were, being Jewish? Be honest.
Buy a clue, look around you, open your eyes. Things are getting better, but there's a lot of room for improvement still. If we can get more women and people of color into positions of authority at the expense of a few disappointed white guys, I say it's a good thing, and it will continue to be a good thing until there's much more progress in that area than there's been to date.
Hmmm, tell that to the Sikorsky FAA safety inspector who lived below me in Seymour, Connecticut. He was always being called at oh-dark-hundred to fly out to some oil-rig crash site to find out what failed THIS time. Typically a transmission component, by the way.
I will never, ever get on one of those death machines, I don't care what the situation is. It's bad enough flying fixed-wing aircraft -- which, by the way, if they aren't jets, have fantastic glide ratios typically, and can land in cornfields, on highways, or anyplace else there's level ground.
Anybody remember Chip Whitmore, WEEI Boston? Jane Dornacker, WNBC New York? Chip was last seen in the WEEI copter, upside down, accelerating at 32 ft/sec/sec. Jane was last seen in the East River.
Hey, whether they fess up to their original sins or not, we won. But I bet the reason we won is all the negative reviews that suddenly landed on Amazon, not a bunch of geeks mouthing off on/. The reviews hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. A lesson to be learned, perhaps...
Parent has it right. Most automation efforts fail because the test writers can't keep up with the code changes, and not many organizations can pay QA people what you need to pay them if you expect them to be programmers (which is what they need to be to use a decent automation tool). Plus, one refactoring of the code base, or redesign of the UI without any refactoring of the underlying code, and the testers have to throw out weeks of work. Very frustrating.
Even in the best case, automation scripts go out of date very quickly. And, running old scripts over and over again seldom finds any bugs. Usually nobody is touching the old functions anyway, so regression testing is largely pointless (take a lude, of course there are exceptions).
I think the most promising idea on improving reliability I've seen in recent years is the XP approach. At least there are usually four eyes on the code, and at least some effort is being put into writing unit test routines up front.
I think the least promising approach to reliability is taken by OO types who build so many accessors that you can't understand what the hell is really going on. It's "correctness through obfuscation." Reminds me of the idiots who rename all the registers when programming in assembly.
OK, best case: the systems are locked down, the servers are *ix or *ux, and things are running swimmingly. Unfortunately the PHB's notice that you don't seem to be doing much, so they fire your ass and hire some Romanians to administer the system for $5/hour (the current going rate for Eastern European IT resources, by the way -- this is not a joke).
OK, worst case: you messed up, left some service running that you shouldn't have, or you forgot the 1,345,678'th BIND patch that came out this afternoon at 4:59 just after you left early for once to go on the only hot date you've managed to score in the last two months. So they fire your ass and hire some Romanians to administer the system for $5/hour.
OK, middle case: you didn't mess up, but some bonehead hooked up his Typhoid Mary laptop to the network after spending all night unprotected on his home DSL line, and every PC in the place ends up being owned by some spotty teenager in Liverpool, who uses them to conduct a DDOS attack against some government site, and now there are guys in black suits and skinny ties and sunglasses heading toward your cubicle and then you get a call on some cell phone that some FEDEX guy just dropped off and... no, wait a minute, sorry, got carried away. Anyway, they fire you for that, too.
You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Because the ACLU supports the rights of KKK members (and anyone else) to demonstrate, do you therefore not support the ACLU? What political party, anywhere, has a platform each of whose individual planks you wholeheartedly support?
It will never happen. The best you can hope for in life is to support organizations whose views MOSTLY correspond to yours. Unless, that is, you want to be all by yourself. What's that old joke? I think it's from MAD magazine, mid 60's -- one Frenchman is a restaurant owner, two Frenchman is a political party (apologies to the French).
Bien soir.
(I think the joke finishes, "three Frenchmen is a love triangle," in case anyone cares).
I would second that analysis. The problem is a deeper one, though -- the focus of American (public) companies on quarterly profits. God help the DEC executive who had let those numbers slip while trying to build a new business on, say, PC's, a market that DEC approached half-heartedly to say the least. Instead, they clung to their VAXes, kept Wall Street happy, and the Alpha was too late to save them.
The other phenomenon is that big companies get very badly bloated with wacky little sub-units that seem to just bumble on and on without purpose. Groups existed within DEC that, logically, should have long since been disbanded. Why was DEC still making disk drives and tape drives? How come the VT100 terminal group was still busy producing new firmware for a dying technology? How come getting UNIX to run on the VAX was like pulling teeth, you had to go to third parties to get a decent networked version? What the hell was going on? (And you VMS lovers can kiss my ass. Where's VMS now? Right. So shut up.)
One of the problems is that when you make your own stuff, you tend to hide all kinds of ugliness in overhead numbers, and you get sloppy over time. I don't have any basis for this speculation, but I'll bet that Sun's manufacturing cost was WAY under DEC's. DEC got fat and happy early, and paid the price. Sun got fat and happy during the boom, and now they're paying the price.
I walked into a company in February 2001 and ripped out every single Sun server and replaced them with Intel/Linux boxes. We probably shitcanned, I don't know, 20 or 30 servers. The Intel boxes were easily 3-4x faster. Couldn't give the Suns away, the price had dropped to basically zero. Everybody knew they were overpriced dogs. Everybody except Sun, I guess. For years, Sun had to compete with its own used equipment that was flooding the market from failed dot-coms, along with much cheaper and better Intel boxes. It's a miracle they're alive at all.
So now Sun tries to reinvent itself, and I hope they do. At least they've realized their predicament while there's still some cash in the bank, unlike the DECies, who just rolled over and sold out before the sky fell in on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. Brakes are ALWAYS stronger than the engine, unless they're defective, which is unlikely in a new vehicle. And this is exactly what Our Hero found out later, when he panicked at the tollbooth and REALLY stomped hard on the fucker.
So I buy the story. The guy just panicked.
Jesus, now I know why they call this "news for nerds." I don't care who's drunk and who isn't, that isn't the point.
The point, in case you missed it, is that it's simply wrong to believe accident statistics that lump everyone together. Not everyone drives drunk. Not everyone drives poorly. Not everyone is 80 years old and can't see. Not everyone travels at unreasonable speeds on secondary roads. Etcetera.
So when you take all that into account, how dangerous is it *really* to drive rather than to fly, FOR YOU PERSONALLY? There isn't a clear answer to that question.
So I don't care how many teenagers wrap themselves and their passengers around trees on a Saturday night. And I don't care who's drunk and who isn't. All I know is, I'm not, so the "statistics" can't possibly apply to me.
So when the airlines -- and yes, you better believe it, it's the airlines -- trot out "statistics" like it's safer to fly than drive, I don't believe them. Neither should you.
It's certainly true that one spends more time driving to a destination than flying. That part of your argument is solid.
But then you apply the same statistical reasoning that is in dispute.
I'm sure you'd agree that I would be many times more likely to die driving if I drove drunk. But I never drive drunk. So the "6,300" number simply doesn't apply to me.
Yes, but the problem with those statistics is that they obscure the truth. If:
1) You are over 25;
2) OR you are not male;
3) AND you travel mostly on divided highways as opposed to secondary roads;
4) AND you travel in the daytime or early evening, rather than late at night when drunk people are driving;
5) AND you yourself are not drinking or smoking or pill popping or talking on the phone or otherwise not paying attention;
6) AND you're actually wearing your seat belt;
7) AND the car you're driving has good brakes (preferably anti-lock brakes);
8) AND it has good tires;
9) AND it's not some junker with bad shocks and loose steering;
10) AND you're driving in decent conditions, not when it's snowing or icing up
THEN what is the probability of dying in a car crash? It's basically the chance of being hit by or running into a random nut. Which is very very low.
If on the other hand you are under 25, driving too fast with your friends, out late at night and drunk/driving with drunks, cruising secondary roads, not wearing your seat belt, driving an old junker with crappy brakes and shitty tires, then I guess you'd be safer strapped to an airline seat.
Which is why statistics suck. Throw all the above variables into a multiple regression, then show me airplanes are "safer," and I'll believe. It won't happen, because the airlines would never fund such a study. Drunk teenagers keep the road death statistics high, and the airlines in business.
How about not sharing your house with a member of another species? Just a thought.
You know what, none of that link stuff worries me one bit. Links are bound to be irrelevant/stupid/broken unless someone really cares about them and monitors them manually.
No, the big worry for me is PATENTS. What the hell are they patenting? What is the Big Idea here that deserves a patent? This is scary stuff. What, do we have to find prior art for every stupid idea someone decides to patent? The answer is "yes." We are all out of business if we let this continue. Support the EFF! Kill this stupidity now before we are all out of work.
I built a bot for Paradise Poker 3 years ago. It did rather well on the free tables (playing 7 card stud). And, it was easy to screen-scrape the cards by modifying the .bmp files that install with the app. So the grandparent post is wrong about the difficulty of that. Didn't have to reverse-engineer anything. The "dealer dialog" is good enough to grok the rest of the play, again through screen-scraping.
The bot owed its success to the fact that it remembered all the cards that were discarded (which in online stud often go by so fast it is very difficult to see). It then played about a million hands from the current position with a Monte Carlo simulation, taking into account all the discards and all the possible outcomes, to establish a base win probability.
Armed with a few heuristics on when to fold early, the bot did quite well.
Obviously it would be defeated by anyone who
a) knew he was playing against a bot
b) was a decent poker player
But that's not the point, is it? My plan was to improve the bot to start making judgments about particular players, put it in a corner, and then auto-haunt the low stakes tables 24 x 7, but then I got busy and put the project aside.
I claim a bot of this type could make money. Not tons, but enough to make it worthwhile.
Possession of an M.D. does not make one rich
In the United States, yes it does. Richer than 99% of ordinary Americans, that is.
Right, but one has to feel sorry for the marketing drone who has to interview a bunch of nerds and figure out what the hell they've built. I've seen a lot worse than "synchronicity."
Part of the blame is ours. Oftimes we don't take the time to educate the marketing people properly, and then we're "surprised" at the nonsense they generate. And, how many times have we code-named the new product something silly and funny, and then the marketing people have to come up with the "real" name? Talk about pass the buck.
The answer is to get the technoids closer to the customer, and the marketing drones closer to the technoids. It is possible to "dumb it down" for a non-technical person -- really, it is. And there's plenty of technical bs out there along with the marketing bs. If I have to read another technology white paper that begins and ends with "we use J2EE" I think I'll puke. Let's feed the marketing folks some legitimate material, and maybe they'll be able to produce something that makes sense.
[chuckle] Right. Of course, the patent system _is_ out of hand. This is just another example. As others have pointed out, badness is badness whether we agree with the ultimate objective or not. A patent on hashing file contents? Oh, please. Next we'll patent checksums and CRC's.
For example, you either believe in freedom or you do not. If you do, then you support the right of unreasonable people to air their views, just as you support the right of reasonable people to air theirs.
Similarly, you either think patenting software is reasonable, or you do not. As Andrew "Dice" Clay might say, "There's no middle ground."
Right, nobody will ever see this, but who cares.
And, right, I vastly over-simplified. But it helped to drill down and find common ground, which I think we did.
For example, I think we can agree that, for whatever reason, inner city students start out way behind their suburban counterparts. Where we differ is in what remedial action to take, if any.
I think we could also agree that taking _no_ action is tantamount to taking _some_ action, since without any action at all, suburban families (like mine) will continue to game the system, and their kids will start out ahead of the inner city kids, and get farther and farther ahead over time.
I think we'd also agree (definitionally) that Equal Opportunity is basically a social experiment wherein we take a group of disadvantaged students (in the case of education) and we assume that "had they had better opportunity" their test scores "would have been equivalent" to higher-scoring privileged students. By admitting these disadvantaged students into colleges preferentially, the hope (misguided or not) is that they can be shoe-horned into the middle class, and that this then becomes self-perpetuating.
The further hope of Equal Opportunity is that by providing minorities and women with a better chance to achieve positions of power, inequities on class or gender or race lines that still exist can be erased or minimized.
Your position, roughly, appears to be that government is not to be trusted, and that encouraging government intervention at this level is so dangerous to personal freedom that no such experiment can be condoned. You have plenty of company in the Libertarian camp, and I'm fond of the argument myself.
My position, roughly, is that personal freedom is threatened more by the social instability that is likely to occur if our society continues to splinter along class/race lines, than by remedial programs like Equal Opportunity, which actually have a chance of reversing the process.
We can agree to disagree at this point, I think.
Hmmm. Maybe you prefer the National Review? Both MJ and NR are extremist publications, but in order to be informed, one must read both.
But let's follow your NJ State Trooper reasoning a bit further, shall we? It is a matter of record that more than 25% of young black men between the ages of 18 and 23 are behind bars at this moment (I forget the exact age range, but it is something like that). Based on this, we "know" that the chances are 1 in 4 that if we arrest a young black man, he'll "probably be guilty of something."
Does that then mean that we should instruct our police to routinely arrest and question young black men, at random? I'm picturing downtown Manhattan on a busy Monday morning, say at the intersection of 34th and 7th, with a line of cops pulling over every black guy they see for questioning. Doesn't sound quite so reasonable to you, now, does it?
I would also point out that drug traffickers are probably reasonably intelligent business people, and every courier lost to the New Jersey State Police represents lost profit. I would have to be a pretty dumb drug trafficker indeed not to realize that maybe I should send a few clean-cut white guys (or middle-aged women) in Toyota Camrys up the New Jersey Turnpike instead of six dudes in a pink Deuce-and-a-Quarter with Florida plates. I mean, duh.
But, if I'm a CLEVER drug trafficker, then I must OCCASIONALLY send some obvious vehicle, manned by black guys, armed with a minor shipment, to make the NJ troopers happy. This will keep the heat off the 18-wheeler in the next lane that's stuffed to the rafters with Acapulco Gold. Elementary game theory.
Finally, let's play a little statistical game. If I'm "sure" that every fourth young black guy is a criminal, and I start arresting young black guys at random, chances are I'll find minor violations of law all over the place, same as if I stopped every single white preppie Yale undergraduate on a Friday night. There will be weed, pills, underage drinkers, people driving without licenses or expired licenses, people with false ID's, etc., etc. And if the New Haven police started pulling white Yalies over at random, do you think there wouldn't be some major political pressure on them to lay off? Naaawwwww. THAT would never happen. Daddy and Mumsie would "support our local police" 100%, wouldn't they?
Why don't we just lock up every black guy we see? We'd all be a lot safer. For that matter, how about anyone who looks Arabic? After all, he might blow up a building. Better deport him, or put him in an internment camp. For that matter, how about all these shifty-looking South Americans and Mexicans? I'm sure they're responsible for all the crime around here, I watch "Cops". There aren't any white criminals at all, near as I can tell.
My God, wake up to what you're saying here.
All I'm saying is that as long as Daddy and Mumsie are 99% white (Daddy and Mumsie being the people in positions of power), there will be inequity. To address inequity requires effort. Cream doesn't just magically rise to the top, it's mostly put there, by people who manipulate the system for the advantage of their own class (like me, sending my children to fine colleges, making sure they take Kaplan courses to raise their SAT's and so on).
You write well, so clearly you're not dumb. But your response is a speech, not an argument. Reminds me of Barney Frank on a radio talk show a few years ago -- the host went on and on, like you, eloquently and vaguely, about a proposed bill. Frank cut in, "Excuse me. There's a bill on the floor of the House. You have three choices: Yes, No, Abstain. You need to take a position. What's your position?"
So let's get very specific, and we'll be able to understand one another better. Let's take a straightforward example of institutionalized racism, the public schools. Let's avoid arguments (for the next few paragraphs, anyway) about whether this institutionalized racism still exists, by setting the way-back machine to 1962.
Now, do you accept the proposition that the "separate but equal" basis on which public schools were organized in 1962 was not working? That black schools were hopelessly underfunded in comparison to their white counterparts? If you don't, I give up, because that's a matter of record/fact that was proven over and over again in courts all over the country at the time.
So let's assume that you are on board so far. Now, let's drill down on how you feel about the various actions that were taken by Kennedy, Johnson, the courts, etc., to try to rectify the situation (busing, National Guard intervention in Alabama, and so on).
If you are/were opposed to those actions, what (if anything) would you have done instead?
If you aren't/weren't opposed to those actions, do you think the problem has been solved?
Assuming you think the problem's been solved (it hasn't been, but let's stipulate for the purposes of argument that it has been), let's address the final question. It's an undisputed fact that inner-city (mostly black) students score lower on standardized achievement tests than suburban (mostly white) students. How do you account for this disparity?
There are only three answers:
1) Black kids are [pick one: dumber, less motivated, unsupported at home] and would score lower on test scores regardless of school quality.
2) Poor people, irrespective of their race, tend to live in the inner city, and poor people are likely to be dumber in general than rich people who tend to live in the suburbs. By the inexorable law of The Bell Curve, poor people's kids will be dumber than rich people's kids, which means that inner city kids will never score as well as suburban kids.
3) Inner city schools aren't as good as the suburban schools.
Position (1) is the pure racist view. Black kids are different, dumber, whatever, we give up.
Position (2) is the pure classist/caste view. If you're poor, you're stupid, and so are your kids, we give up.
If you take position (3), then I will ask, as Mr. Frank might ask, what you think we ought to do about the situation. By continuing our current path, clearly we encourage the rich to get richer and the poor to become poorer. Is that the outcome you want?
In fact, I suspect it is. Libertarians or closet Libertarians like you are supremacists, deep down inside. Laissez-faire capitalism results inevitably in monopoly and stagnation, which is just fine with you -- you're already on top of the pyramid.
Ah, I thought so. You're just a little twerp who has no clue what happened a mere 35 years ago. And the idea of the "big, bad state" righting some serious wrongs has your dick all bent out of shape.
Well, Mr. Libertarian, some things require a "state." Like interstate highways. National defense. Bridges. Social Security. Medicaid. Health care (the rest of the world has realized this, the US hasn't quite yet).
Get used to it. The good of the few must occasionally be subordinated to the good of the many. Do you understand how close we came to race wars in the United States in the 60's? Do you? Do you realize how close the United States came to class war in the 1930's, before Roosevelt saved our dumb asses?
No, you don't. Instead, you prefer to live in an ivory tower Ayn Rand world that has never and never will exist.
Just a question -- how old are you? Because if you're my age, you remember a very different time, a time when black people (I refuse to say "Afro-American") couldn't buy a break virtually anywhere.
And if you (or anyone else reading this) are white, and you think there isn't still residual prejudice, and it doesn't still really suck to be black in America, then just ask your friendly New Jersey State Trooper why he didn't pull your lilly-white ass over for speeding, and why instead he stopped the black guy next to you who was doing the speed limit.
Oh, we should be color-blind, sex-blind, ethnic-blind, religious-blind, and so forth. Sure, I agree, in theory -- if it were possible. Remember "No Irish need apply?" No? Neither do I, but that wasn't so long ago either. Black people actually PREFER outright prejudice to people who profess to be color-blind, but actually aren't. At least the cards are on the table, and you know where you stand. It's getting followed around the store that's so exasperating.
And, seriously, what do you think Joe Lieberman's chances at the Presidency were, being Jewish? Be honest.
Buy a clue, look around you, open your eyes. Things are getting better, but there's a lot of room for improvement still. If we can get more women and people of color into positions of authority at the expense of a few disappointed white guys, I say it's a good thing, and it will continue to be a good thing until there's much more progress in that area than there's been to date.
Hmmm, tell that to the Sikorsky FAA safety inspector who lived below me in Seymour, Connecticut. He was always being called at oh-dark-hundred to fly out to some oil-rig crash site to find out what failed THIS time. Typically a transmission component, by the way.
I will never, ever get on one of those death machines, I don't care what the situation is. It's bad enough flying fixed-wing aircraft -- which, by the way, if they aren't jets, have fantastic glide ratios typically, and can land in cornfields, on highways, or anyplace else there's level ground.
Anybody remember Chip Whitmore, WEEI Boston? Jane Dornacker, WNBC New York? Chip was last seen in the WEEI copter, upside down, accelerating at 32 ft/sec/sec. Jane was last seen in the East River.
Hey, whether they fess up to their original sins or not, we won. But I bet the reason we won is all the negative reviews that suddenly landed on Amazon, not a bunch of geeks mouthing off on /. The reviews hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. A lesson to be learned, perhaps...
Parent has it right. Most automation efforts fail because the test writers can't keep up with the code changes, and not many organizations can pay QA people what you need to pay them if you expect them to be programmers (which is what they need to be to use a decent automation tool). Plus, one refactoring of the code base, or redesign of the UI without any refactoring of the underlying code, and the testers have to throw out weeks of work. Very frustrating.
Even in the best case, automation scripts go out of date very quickly. And, running old scripts over and over again seldom finds any bugs. Usually nobody is touching the old functions anyway, so regression testing is largely pointless (take a lude, of course there are exceptions).
I think the most promising idea on improving reliability I've seen in recent years is the XP approach. At least there are usually four eyes on the code, and at least some effort is being put into writing unit test routines up front.
I think the least promising approach to reliability is taken by OO types who build so many accessors that you can't understand what the hell is really going on. It's "correctness through obfuscation." Reminds me of the idiots who rename all the registers when programming in assembly.
OK, best case: the systems are locked down, the servers are *ix or *ux, and things are running swimmingly. Unfortunately the PHB's notice that you don't seem to be doing much, so they fire your ass and hire some Romanians to administer the system for $5/hour (the current going rate for Eastern European IT resources, by the way -- this is not a joke).
OK, worst case: you messed up, left some service running that you shouldn't have, or you forgot the 1,345,678'th BIND patch that came out this afternoon at 4:59 just after you left early for once to go on the only hot date you've managed to score in the last two months. So they fire your ass and hire some Romanians to administer the system for $5/hour.
OK, middle case: you didn't mess up, but some bonehead hooked up his Typhoid Mary laptop to the network after spending all night unprotected on his home DSL line, and every PC in the place ends up being owned by some spotty teenager in Liverpool, who uses them to conduct a DDOS attack against some government site, and now there are guys in black suits and skinny ties and sunglasses heading toward your cubicle and then you get a call on some cell phone that some FEDEX guy just dropped off and... no, wait a minute, sorry, got carried away. Anyway, they fire you for that, too.
You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Because the ACLU supports the rights of KKK members (and anyone else) to demonstrate, do you therefore not support the ACLU? What political party, anywhere, has a platform each of whose individual planks you wholeheartedly support?
It will never happen. The best you can hope for in life is to support organizations whose views MOSTLY correspond to yours. Unless, that is, you want to be all by yourself. What's that old joke? I think it's from MAD magazine, mid 60's -- one Frenchman is a restaurant owner, two Frenchman is a political party (apologies to the French).
Bien soir.
(I think the joke finishes, "three Frenchmen is a love triangle," in case anyone cares).
That's why the plant in your bedroom is a "begonia."
I would second that analysis. The problem is a deeper one, though -- the focus of American (public) companies on quarterly profits. God help the DEC executive who had let those numbers slip while trying to build a new business on, say, PC's, a market that DEC approached half-heartedly to say the least. Instead, they clung to their VAXes, kept Wall Street happy, and the Alpha was too late to save them.
The other phenomenon is that big companies get very badly bloated with wacky little sub-units that seem to just bumble on and on without purpose. Groups existed within DEC that, logically, should have long since been disbanded. Why was DEC still making disk drives and tape drives? How come the VT100 terminal group was still busy producing new firmware for a dying technology? How come getting UNIX to run on the VAX was like pulling teeth, you had to go to third parties to get a decent networked version? What the hell was going on? (And you VMS lovers can kiss my ass. Where's VMS now? Right. So shut up.)
One of the problems is that when you make your own stuff, you tend to hide all kinds of ugliness in overhead numbers, and you get sloppy over time. I don't have any basis for this speculation, but I'll bet that Sun's manufacturing cost was WAY under DEC's. DEC got fat and happy early, and paid the price. Sun got fat and happy during the boom, and now they're paying the price.
I walked into a company in February 2001 and ripped out every single Sun server and replaced them with Intel/Linux boxes. We probably shitcanned, I don't know, 20 or 30 servers. The Intel boxes were easily 3-4x faster. Couldn't give the Suns away, the price had dropped to basically zero. Everybody knew they were overpriced dogs. Everybody except Sun, I guess. For years, Sun had to compete with its own used equipment that was flooding the market from failed dot-coms, along with much cheaper and better Intel boxes. It's a miracle they're alive at all.
So now Sun tries to reinvent itself, and I hope they do. At least they've realized their predicament while there's still some cash in the bank, unlike the DECies, who just rolled over and sold out before the sky fell in on them.
"Parsec" is a measure of distance, not time. So if this is a quote, it's a stupid one. If you made it up, consider yourself corrected.
I feel better now, thank you.
Amen, brother. This is extremely disappointing.
Both are very thoughtful posts, so the messed-up formatting was indeed very puzzling.