Me thinks that if you were truely censored I wouldn't be reading your post.
Not to defend the hysterical cries of censorship that are all over the place, but one can be censored without being constantly censored. Being allowed to speak once doesn't justify not being allowed to speak another time.
("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls")
This raises so many questions: can one piss on the walls while speaking another language, was it thought to be an intrinsic part of speaking Flemish that one would piss on the walls, were the two only related in that both were forbidden? Could one piss on the floor? Were French people as recently as 50 years ago so frequently pissing on public buildings that there had to be rules against it?
Oh, I agree that cursing makes you sound like an imbecile. Well, most of the time. I actually quite enjoy and admire an inventive curser; it demonstrates facility with a language as well as imagination and creativity.
I actually had more in mind of German being the best language to curse at non-German speaking people. Maybe it is just me, but it is a harsh sounding language, which lends itself well to cursing. And for some reason, I like the idea of cursing people in a language they don't understand. It just seems more satisfying somehow.
I don't speak (or read) German, but I wish I did. That sentence sounds angry and dirty, and I don't even know what it means! Gotta be the best language in the world for cursing.
However, the Govt. didn't want to pay that anymore on their contracts, and came up with that little fun exempt situation for us.
As an interesting side note to weird exemptions, I was recently reviewing labor regulations in NC, and discovered something I thought was interesting. All of the regulations concerning overtime, vacation, and compensation have the same two exclusions: doctors and teachers. A pretty obvious example of the state having a nice little double standard for itself.
I recently read an article about a self-made millionaire, who had earned somewhere around $15 million with his concrete business, that cleared around $100 million winning the lottery. He said in the article that with that kind of money and publicity, he went from a wealthy private individual to a public figure. The spotlight on his personal life destroyed his marriage, an ugly kidnapping attempt drove his daughter away from him, and some other bad things happened that were tangentially related to the lottery win. This of course was all his side, but I can easily imagine that life actually becomes much MORE complicated with ridiculous sums of money.
Just to throw in my two cents, I think Steven Brust's Taltos series remained quite strong up until the end (if his last one was in fact the end). His various "spin-offs" from that series are also all very good.
I think an example that supports your point is Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series. The first 5 were quite good. He then proceeded to stumble around in the next 2 or 3 books, trying to drag out the original story line with an obvious lack of direction. Around the same time he was writing these rather terrible extensions to a successful series, he also managed to begin a couple of other good series, D'Shai and Keepers of the Hidden Way. It is a clear example of an excellent writer doing well with fresh material, while churning out crap trying to milk his old, stale stuff.
No, not at all, and I don't see why it would be construed as such.
I'm not saying you were trolling, but you brought up illegal downloading (when no one else had), then proceeded to rant against it. This is a fairly classic straw man technique; that's why your post could be construed as trolling. Of course, it can also occur when someone makes a post based on an unstated, or weakly stated, assumption concerning a controversial topic; in this case, that the only alternative dada could have would be illegal.
Really, it tends to be complete garbage to say that a particular advance would not have happened if whoever did it hadn't been there. Once the foundations are in place things become pretty much inevitable, and being remembered for starting something is just a matter of out-competing everyone else and/or getting things working two weeks before the next guy.
Not that I'm suggesting we should all thank Microsoft for bringing us the internet, but I have a couple of issues with this statement. First, while it is true that a lot of advances in retrospect seemed inevitable, there have been leaps made by geniuses who were well ahead of their times. Maybe everyone else would have eventually caught up, and the same advance would have happened two generations later, but it is impossible to say. I mean, how many advances have we missed b/c that one genius who was capable of making the breakthrough didn't and everyone else moved on in a different direction? There is no way of knowing.
Secondly, even if it is inevitable that a particular breakthrough occur, saying "someone else would have done it if FOO didn't" seems dismissive of FOO's accomplishment. "Someone else" didn't do it, FOO did. It was unquestionably inevitable that if, say, the Cardinals had not won the World Series, someone else would have. Yet it is still a significant accomplishment for them that they did.
But you're right that a lot of times the guy that gets the credit is simply the one that beat everyone else to the finish line; sometimes, it is the guy that marketed himself best after getting beat to that finish line. But I don't think it is true at all that this is always the case.
Do people really only tend to like a handful of songs from an album?
Actually, most of the people I know that complain about this are buying CDs b/c they contain the MTV VJ pick of the week (or whatever). Then, when they hear other completely comparable songs that have not been heavily marketed at them, they recognize that the music sucks. But they still like that one song b/c of the marketing.
Of course, some bands really are just one hit wonders. They make one good song that is worthwhile, and the rest is garbage.
How is "Campaign Finance Reform" not an end-around of the 1st Amendment?
Well, how is Campaign Finance Reform an end-around of the 1st Amendment? I've never understood the argument that $ == speech. They quite obviously are not equivalent in day-to-day life, they are treated quite differently in most other areas of law, why are they suddenly the same when it comes to politics?
I agree. I want my government spying on foreign nationals they think might be a threat of some sort. Of course, I would also want my government to actively prevent other countries from surveilling me and my fellow citizens. If I were German, I'd be pretty unhappy that my government was apparently okay with allowing the Americans to monitor me if they pleased.
Evil is not really the opposite of good. Evil implies a larger distance from the middle than good does. I certainly wouldn't suggest your morality is fucked up, but if you referred to donating $1 to charity as saintly or selfless, I would definitely question your perspective.
Although, another poster said that evil has become a watered down term, so maybe my antiquated understanding of our language is the problem, not other people's perspectives.
Just to add a little bit more smoke to this particular topic, there is some debate amongst religious philosophers as to what "omnipotent" really means. All-powerful is most commonly interpreted to mean "able to do anything". A somewhat more nuanced interpretation is "able to do anything that is possible". Instead of "possessing all power", it becomes "possessing all power that exists". A subtle difference, but very important for many debates. By denying God the power to perform a logical paradox, which would seem to be impossible and thus not available to the limited form of omnipotence, his choices and thus his supposed actions or inactions change drastically.
Real-life one night stands or relationships that live no longer than a couple of weeks have little credibility.
And there you have the biggest difference (IMHO, YMMV, yada yada). While a deep meaningful relationship is, well, deep and meaningful no matter how it comes about or is expressed, shallow flings are WAY more fun in real life.
Thus you see issues with keys that aren't referenced/restricted, incorrect keys getting inserted because the ID exists in the referenced table, nulls that shouldn't be allowed, transactions that aren't closed in transactions, multiple rows for the same secondary key when it should be unique, data accesses that shouldn't be allowed, etc.... A better solution would be to take the same tack that computer languages and compilers have been taking: Make a mistake impossible as early in the process as possible.
The problem with that is most things that are a problem are only a problem for a particular design. So I as the architect need to explicitly "tell" the DBMS that I want unique secondary keys. If I do so correctly, most DBMSes will correctly enforce that restriction. But if I don't explicitly make that a restriction, then presumably it is because my design either allows for or even requires non-unique values on that secondary column . The same with NULLs, incorrect data accesses, etc. How should the DBMS know that something is a mistake unless I tell it that in this particular design, this is a mistake?
The problem is it is impossible to get completely beyond our own very subjective experience of the mind (except, as you say, with the org. chem. which currently does little to explain most human emotions/motivations). Most of us have most things in us, but experience them to much different degrees and in different combinations.
I think Freud is a wonderful example of the problems inherent in psychology. Freud was a genius, and very accurately diagnosed a host of human mental tendencies. Of course, they were all his tendencies, and don't necessarily translate well to 95% of the population b/c Freud was quite abnormal. But the things that he found to be powerfully motivating for himself are there in most of us, just toned down to a degree that make them irrelevant when it comes to any practical self-analysis. I mean, sure, there was a point in my life when I fixated on what went in my mouth and out my butt. However, those experiences are no longer relevant to my emotional processes b/c they have been eclipsed by other experiences that are so much more significant than the minuscule impact oral/anal fixations have on me at this point.
Can you share that insight? I don't understand why the cop couldn't have said "Sorry, didn't see your tag." in front of the crowd. What did he fear would happen?
Again, I think it's a lot of B.S. but I think the Ninja myth is to Japan what the Cowboy myth is to the U.S. or what the King Arthur myth is to England.
And just like the cowboy myth, and probably Arthurian legend, there is some historical basis for the ninja legend as well. I have studied (in an informal manner) feudal Japanese samurai culture, and run across some material related to ninja. Ninja basically began as traditional samurai that operated outside the code of Bushido in order to defeat their enemy. One almost certainly apocryphal story I ran across related the origin of "ninja" as follows: It was considered a great honor for a samurai in an army attacking a city to be the first one across the city walls. In order to be able to claim the honor of being the first across the walls when battle began, a couple of bright lads got the idea to sneak into the city the night before! It became a short step from there to sneaking inside a city before battle to plant units that would spring up behind a city's defenses, assassinate enemy leaders before battle began, etc. Eventually, a few groups or even clans became willing to hire themselves out to perform such "dishonorable" actions, which naturally became more sophisticated as the "ninjas" gained experience in this type of warfare. But just like any other criminal organization, they didn't exactly advertise; this secrecy is probably what began the myth of the ninja, which was then exaggerated by the clans themselves as a form of PR. But I don't think there is any real consensus on the origin, or even exact role, of the ninja in Japanese society. The very nature of the myth itself makes it difficult to disprove. "The fact that you know nothing about this secret society of invisible assassins merely proves how good they really were!"
Not many... I don't think I own any made in the U.S. But I always look at tags, and there is very little choice.
Textiles is one of the industries that has pretty much been entirely off-shored. My dad works for a textile manufacturer, and even though his small company is still afloat (and I believe they actually made a profit the last two years!), he says that they have to purchase their fibers from China. The last domestic supplier they had finally went out of business a year or so ago. As have almost all of the US textile industry businesses. In fact, his company has only managed to remain afloat by growing vertically. They don't just spin and dye yarn, they now manufacture and sell dyes and assemble some final products to sell directly to retail outlets.
I think you make an important point that is seldom stressed:/. wields quite a bit of power in terms of internet outcry. That's why we see so many troll articles; interested parties know that submitting their spin to/. will give their viewpoint a wide audience. That's why its important that we, as a community, take the time to investigate claims and discuss them based on fact (yeah yeah, I know). If we behaved more responsibly as a community, rather than jumping on every rabid bandwagon that comes our way, I think we would see a marked decrease in the amount of crap press releases being posted as "news for nerds". If people with an ax to grind needed to be sure that posting to/. wouldn't expose their lies, instead of just taking for granted the blog will be a group masturbation fest over FUD that affirms our deepest fears, they would think twice (maybe) before posting the more paranoid delusions that we see here.
It really is our internet; we have no one to blame for what it is other than ourselves.
I have not done a study, but I am pretty sure that things such as strength, height and weight are normally distributed across the population. I wouldn't go around impugning others' methodologies if you found a torus shaped distribution of these characteristics in your sample.
You know, if you truly want to support Bush to this crowd, maybe you should try be a bit less straw-like in your support. That kind of thing typically irritates intelligent people. Since a sib has pointed out another instance, I'll limit myself to this:
Jason postedWould you like the next administration to have unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping capabilities?
you responded
Yes, the next administration should have "unsupervised" warrant-less wiretapping capabilities of our foreign adversaries.
Pretty subtle, except that this debate is based around the fact that Americans (as represented by the EFF) are suing ATT/Verizon. Not foreign adversaries. Americans. That's the crux of the issue. American citizens claim that they have been monitored by the US government without due process being followed. If true, that is almost certainly illegal & unconstitutional, despite the Administration's claims of privilege or national security. If it is not, I feel that Congress needs to address whatever legal loophole allows such actions. Others have stated they feel the same. You have avoided voicing your opinion on the matter, choosing instead to weigh in on an orthogonal issue. Which is no more relevant to the discussion at hand than my pizza topping preferences.
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Me thinks that if you were truely censored I wouldn't be reading your post.
Not to defend the hysterical cries of censorship that are all over the place, but one can be censored without being constantly censored. Being allowed to speak once doesn't justify not being allowed to speak another time.
("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls")
This raises so many questions: can one piss on the walls while speaking another language, was it thought to be an intrinsic part of speaking Flemish that one would piss on the walls, were the two only related in that both were forbidden? Could one piss on the floor? Were French people as recently as 50 years ago so frequently pissing on public buildings that there had to be rules against it?
Oh, I agree that cursing makes you sound like an imbecile. Well, most of the time. I actually quite enjoy and admire an inventive curser; it demonstrates facility with a language as well as imagination and creativity.
I actually had more in mind of German being the best language to curse at non-German speaking people. Maybe it is just me, but it is a harsh sounding language, which lends itself well to cursing. And for some reason, I like the idea of cursing people in a language they don't understand. It just seems more satisfying somehow.
Thanks for the Deutsch lesson.
Vielleicht ein Deutsch Muttersprachler.
I don't speak (or read) German, but I wish I did. That sentence sounds angry and dirty, and I don't even know what it means! Gotta be the best language in the world for cursing.
Did you notice the unusual number of high-school aged kids (judging by their networks' names) that are on Bill's friends list? I find that...odd.
However, the Govt. didn't want to pay that anymore on their contracts, and came up with that little fun exempt situation for us.
As an interesting side note to weird exemptions, I was recently reviewing labor regulations in NC, and discovered something I thought was interesting. All of the regulations concerning overtime, vacation, and compensation have the same two exclusions: doctors and teachers. A pretty obvious example of the state having a nice little double standard for itself.
I recently read an article about a self-made millionaire, who had earned somewhere around $15 million with his concrete business, that cleared around $100 million winning the lottery. He said in the article that with that kind of money and publicity, he went from a wealthy private individual to a public figure. The spotlight on his personal life destroyed his marriage, an ugly kidnapping attempt drove his daughter away from him, and some other bad things happened that were tangentially related to the lottery win. This of course was all his side, but I can easily imagine that life actually becomes much MORE complicated with ridiculous sums of money.
Just to throw in my two cents, I think Steven Brust's Taltos series remained quite strong up until the end (if his last one was in fact the end). His various "spin-offs" from that series are also all very good.
I think an example that supports your point is Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series. The first 5 were quite good. He then proceeded to stumble around in the next 2 or 3 books, trying to drag out the original story line with an obvious lack of direction. Around the same time he was writing these rather terrible extensions to a successful series, he also managed to begin a couple of other good series, D'Shai and Keepers of the Hidden Way. It is a clear example of an excellent writer doing well with fresh material, while churning out crap trying to milk his old, stale stuff.
No, not at all, and I don't see why it would be construed as such.
I'm not saying you were trolling, but you brought up illegal downloading (when no one else had), then proceeded to rant against it. This is a fairly classic straw man technique; that's why your post could be construed as trolling. Of course, it can also occur when someone makes a post based on an unstated, or weakly stated, assumption concerning a controversial topic; in this case, that the only alternative dada could have would be illegal.
Really, it tends to be complete garbage to say that a particular advance would not have happened if whoever did it hadn't been there. Once the foundations are in place things become pretty much inevitable, and being remembered for starting something is just a matter of out-competing everyone else and/or getting things working two weeks before the next guy.
Not that I'm suggesting we should all thank Microsoft for bringing us the internet, but I have a couple of issues with this statement. First, while it is true that a lot of advances in retrospect seemed inevitable, there have been leaps made by geniuses who were well ahead of their times. Maybe everyone else would have eventually caught up, and the same advance would have happened two generations later, but it is impossible to say. I mean, how many advances have we missed b/c that one genius who was capable of making the breakthrough didn't and everyone else moved on in a different direction? There is no way of knowing.
Secondly, even if it is inevitable that a particular breakthrough occur, saying "someone else would have done it if FOO didn't" seems dismissive of FOO's accomplishment. "Someone else" didn't do it, FOO did. It was unquestionably inevitable that if, say, the Cardinals had not won the World Series, someone else would have. Yet it is still a significant accomplishment for them that they did.
But you're right that a lot of times the guy that gets the credit is simply the one that beat everyone else to the finish line; sometimes, it is the guy that marketed himself best after getting beat to that finish line. But I don't think it is true at all that this is always the case.
"New law catches terrorists does"
In his old age, Yoda's grammar worse and worse has gotten.
What's wrong with that sentence? A new law was passed that enabled police to capture female deer intent on destroying America...
Do people really only tend to like a handful of songs from an album?
Actually, most of the people I know that complain about this are buying CDs b/c they contain the MTV VJ pick of the week (or whatever). Then, when they hear other completely comparable songs that have not been heavily marketed at them, they recognize that the music sucks. But they still like that one song b/c of the marketing.
Of course, some bands really are just one hit wonders. They make one good song that is worthwhile, and the rest is garbage.
How is "Campaign Finance Reform" not an end-around of the 1st Amendment?
Well, how is Campaign Finance Reform an end-around of the 1st Amendment? I've never understood the argument that $ == speech. They quite obviously are not equivalent in day-to-day life, they are treated quite differently in most other areas of law, why are they suddenly the same when it comes to politics?
I agree. I want my government spying on foreign nationals they think might be a threat of some sort. Of course, I would also want my government to actively prevent other countries from surveilling me and my fellow citizens. If I were German, I'd be pretty unhappy that my government was apparently okay with allowing the Americans to monitor me if they pleased.
Evil is not really the opposite of good. Evil implies a larger distance from the middle than good does. I certainly wouldn't suggest your morality is fucked up, but if you referred to donating $1 to charity as saintly or selfless, I would definitely question your perspective.
Although, another poster said that evil has become a watered down term, so maybe my antiquated understanding of our language is the problem, not other people's perspectives.
Just to add a little bit more smoke to this particular topic, there is some debate amongst religious philosophers as to what "omnipotent" really means. All-powerful is most commonly interpreted to mean "able to do anything". A somewhat more nuanced interpretation is "able to do anything that is possible". Instead of "possessing all power", it becomes "possessing all power that exists". A subtle difference, but very important for many debates. By denying God the power to perform a logical paradox, which would seem to be impossible and thus not available to the limited form of omnipotence, his choices and thus his supposed actions or inactions change drastically.
Real-life one night stands or relationships that live no longer than a couple of weeks have little credibility.
And there you have the biggest difference (IMHO, YMMV, yada yada). While a deep meaningful relationship is, well, deep and meaningful no matter how it comes about or is expressed, shallow flings are WAY more fun in real life.
Thus you see issues with keys that aren't referenced/restricted, incorrect keys getting inserted because the ID exists in the referenced table, nulls that shouldn't be allowed, transactions that aren't closed in transactions, multiple rows for the same secondary key when it should be unique, data accesses that shouldn't be allowed, etc. ... A better solution would be to take the same tack that computer languages and compilers have been taking: Make a mistake impossible as early in the process as possible.
The problem with that is most things that are a problem are only a problem for a particular design. So I as the architect need to explicitly "tell" the DBMS that I want unique secondary keys. If I do so correctly, most DBMSes will correctly enforce that restriction. But if I don't explicitly make that a restriction, then presumably it is because my design either allows for or even requires non-unique values on that secondary column . The same with NULLs, incorrect data accesses, etc. How should the DBMS know that something is a mistake unless I tell it that in this particular design, this is a mistake?
The problem is it is impossible to get completely beyond our own very subjective experience of the mind (except, as you say, with the org. chem. which currently does little to explain most human emotions/motivations). Most of us have most things in us, but experience them to much different degrees and in different combinations.
I think Freud is a wonderful example of the problems inherent in psychology. Freud was a genius, and very accurately diagnosed a host of human mental tendencies. Of course, they were all his tendencies, and don't necessarily translate well to 95% of the population b/c Freud was quite abnormal. But the things that he found to be powerfully motivating for himself are there in most of us, just toned down to a degree that make them irrelevant when it comes to any practical self-analysis. I mean, sure, there was a point in my life when I fixated on what went in my mouth and out my butt. However, those experiences are no longer relevant to my emotional processes b/c they have been eclipsed by other experiences that are so much more significant than the minuscule impact oral/anal fixations have on me at this point.
Can you share that insight? I don't understand why the cop couldn't have said "Sorry, didn't see your tag." in front of the crowd. What did he fear would happen?
Again, I think it's a lot of B.S. but I think the Ninja myth is to Japan what the Cowboy myth is to the U.S. or what the King Arthur myth is to England.
And just like the cowboy myth, and probably Arthurian legend, there is some historical basis for the ninja legend as well. I have studied (in an informal manner) feudal Japanese samurai culture, and run across some material related to ninja. Ninja basically began as traditional samurai that operated outside the code of Bushido in order to defeat their enemy. One almost certainly apocryphal story I ran across related the origin of "ninja" as follows:
It was considered a great honor for a samurai in an army attacking a city to be the first one across the city walls. In order to be able to claim the honor of being the first across the walls when battle began, a couple of bright lads got the idea to sneak into the city the night before! It became a short step from there to sneaking inside a city before battle to plant units that would spring up behind a city's defenses, assassinate enemy leaders before battle began, etc. Eventually, a few groups or even clans became willing to hire themselves out to perform such "dishonorable" actions, which naturally became more sophisticated as the "ninjas" gained experience in this type of warfare. But just like any other criminal organization, they didn't exactly advertise; this secrecy is probably what began the myth of the ninja, which was then exaggerated by the clans themselves as a form of PR. But I don't think there is any real consensus on the origin, or even exact role, of the ninja in Japanese society. The very nature of the myth itself makes it difficult to disprove. "The fact that you know nothing about this secret society of invisible assassins merely proves how good they really were!"
Not many... I don't think I own any made in the U.S. But I always look at tags, and there is very little choice.
Textiles is one of the industries that has pretty much been entirely off-shored. My dad works for a textile manufacturer, and even though his small company is still afloat (and I believe they actually made a profit the last two years!), he says that they have to purchase their fibers from China. The last domestic supplier they had finally went out of business a year or so ago. As have almost all of the US textile industry businesses. In fact, his company has only managed to remain afloat by growing vertically. They don't just spin and dye yarn, they now manufacture and sell dyes and assemble some final products to sell directly to retail outlets.
(Remember, we are not your personal army.)
/. wields quite a bit of power in terms of internet outcry. That's why we see so many troll articles; interested parties know that submitting their spin to /. will give their viewpoint a wide audience. That's why its important that we, as a community, take the time to investigate claims and discuss them based on fact (yeah yeah, I know). If we behaved more responsibly as a community, rather than jumping on every rabid bandwagon that comes our way, I think we would see a marked decrease in the amount of crap press releases being posted as "news for nerds". If people with an ax to grind needed to be sure that posting to /. wouldn't expose their lies, instead of just taking for granted the blog will be a group masturbation fest over FUD that affirms our deepest fears, they would think twice (maybe) before posting the more paranoid delusions that we see here.
I think you make an important point that is seldom stressed:
It really is our internet; we have no one to blame for what it is other than ourselves.
I have not done a study, but I am pretty sure that things such as strength, height and weight are normally distributed across the population. I wouldn't go around impugning others' methodologies if you found a torus shaped distribution of these characteristics in your sample.
You know, if you truly want to support Bush to this crowd, maybe you should try be a bit less straw-like in your support. That kind of thing typically irritates intelligent people. Since a sib has pointed out another instance, I'll limit myself to this:
Jason posted Would you like the next administration to have unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping capabilities?
you responded Yes, the next administration should have "unsupervised" warrant-less wiretapping capabilities of our foreign adversaries.
Pretty subtle, except that this debate is based around the fact that Americans (as represented by the EFF) are suing ATT/Verizon. Not foreign adversaries. Americans. That's the crux of the issue. American citizens claim that they have been monitored by the US government without due process being followed. If true, that is almost certainly illegal & unconstitutional, despite the Administration's claims of privilege or national security. If it is not, I feel that Congress needs to address whatever legal loophole allows such actions. Others have stated they feel the same. You have avoided voicing your opinion on the matter, choosing instead to weigh in on an orthogonal issue. Which is no more relevant to the discussion at hand than my pizza topping preferences.