There is so much repetition on Slashdot. It's great when I read something that gives me a new viewpoint on something. Thanks for posting this. I think your view might be a useful model of a lot of technological progressions.
So, cars have had an amazing positive impact. If you think they can do more, that's a separate argument.
Accepted, more or less. I have a tendency to compare with what could be, rather than what has. Still, perhaps my main fault is not questioning TFS. I expect on reflection that people from a century ago probably would admire how clean our city streets were. TFS, however, implies that this is not so.
So fair enough on your post. Though I am quite happy to make that separate argument if anybody wants.;)
Ego might be basis greed, so maybe we agree, but I'd say it was Greed that messed up our "future." Look at the example in TFS - motor vehicles cleaning up our cities. Well the thing is they could have done a lot. Why hasn't this happened? Because instead of moving from some people having horse-drawn carriages or draft horses and wagons, we've moved to every person having a car. Am I arguing that only a few people should have cars? No, of course not. I'm arguing that there should be more public transport. Buses are much faster than horse and carriages, they carry many more people. We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up. The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do. That pattern has been seen again and again, resulting in increasingly pointless jobs as surplus labour attempts to justify an income. Am I arguing against progress? Of course not - I'm arguing that everybody should get some of the benefit of it so that they can direct their energies to something more profitable to all of us rather than becoming telemarketers.
Modern society should be directing its energies toward achieving better things and then we would see some of the promise of new technologies better realised. Instead, society directs much of its energy toward stopping progress by trying to keep as many people as possible as busy as possible whether that has a purpose or not.
No kidding, this guy sounds like a douche bag. I also sense some condescension in this one. Perhaps he's feeling inadequate, like all that outlandish shit in the past has earned him a unanimous silent treatment and everyone thinks he's off his fucking rocker so he comes here to reffirm his efforts and brag shamelessly. In fact, I have seen this very same style of gloating and request shit on MMORPG forums.
And people that gain satisfaction from anonymously judging people on the Internet and saying the "sense some condescension" fall into which category?:D
I know you're being funny (although this is the UK government), but if you can write the password on a post-it note, your disk isn't encrypted. Now you can fit the fingerprint of a decent password on a post-it note just fine.;)
After all, what better way to ensure that your people are immune from blackmail than to have the other side using false information...
It doesn't matter so much whether the information is false or true, what matters is if you have control of the means of communication. Just ask John Kerry about the Swift Boat Veterans. Baseless information can do great damage if you have the power to shout it loudly enough. Meanwhile, BAE systems bribed a Saudi Prince over US$1billion to direct his country to make various arms purchases and when the UK authorities began investigations, our own British government stepped in and order the investigation stopped. Corruption on a massive scale that dropped from the national press like a scab from a leper.
I think this post further down has one of the most insightful takes on why the information might be gathered. Not that I feel it fully excuses the gathering of the information and certainly doesn't excuse its loss. The RAF officers who gave this information to their employers had a simple choice - tell the truth about their more shameful behaviour or lie to cover it up. They chose wrong.
I'd better correct myself before someone else does. I referred to the employees of DynCorp as "US soldiers". Whilst there are plenty of incidents of misbehaviour on the part of any nation's soldiers (it's that odd double standard that is expected of people who are paid to kill, but not to beat people up or hurt women), the employees of DynCorp were not soldiers but service personnel, e.g. mechanics on helicopters (bad ones, apparently). Unfortunately they were still protected by the US government's refusal to allow the Bosnian government to prosecute US military forces (so they are de facto, US military) for breaches of Bosnia law while over there, and secondly, by the US governments own refusal to prosecute these people for rape, sex slave trafficking, etc. A very shameful situation.
A lot of the people hiring will have indulged in all these behaviours and wont condemn someone for them. Rather it will make them part of the club. Use of prostitutes in the armed forces? Goodness - that could never happen! With some groups, the person who never touched drugs, doesn't pick up prostitutes is the one that makes everyone else
uncomfortable. In Bosnia, the private military firm DynCorp was actually buying girls as forced prostitutes (and I do mean girls - some were fifteen. And this were US soldiers). Related, its one of the reasons women face a 'glass ceiling' in some areas, such as the upper military, high finance, etc. It's because the wealthy / powerful men who are accustomed to doing as they please feel uncomfortable saying: "hey lets all do some lines and pick up some hookers" when someone from "the other side" is amongst them.
So these are kids that don't like to waste their time on things they aren't learning anything of value from and have a great capacity to focus on things that they are learning from. And this is called a disorder? Sounds like society is the one at fault.
More information, please. What do you mean by "lacking the concept of a situation", in what way do your parents teach it to you and how did you teach yourself it? Am very curious.
I have a feeling I'm not going to like the answer, but what is "New Math"? Is this a US term? (Though having done a brief stint as a maths teacher in the UK, I'm not going to extol our own virtues too highly).
Ritalin certainly is. Or else it is something that is merely amphetimine with just a random molecule tweaked slightly so it can be (a) patented and (b) marketed as not giving speed to kids. The difference is that the GP said they wanted something more potent that could be turned on or off. Well no drug is an on/off switch - the human body is to complicated to be completely predictable - but at least with speed he can get a reliable, stronger and quick effect and he knows when he's on it and when he's not. Better to take something with a clear effect with a beginning and end on the occasions it is needed than take a watered down drip of the stuff for the rest of his life. That's just my take on it though. I don't think taking drugs is the answer in the vast majority of cases and I don't like them. Half the real problems come from not knowing what you're getting though. If you could pick up a tab and know exactly what dosage it was, things would be a lot better all round (except for drug companies and politicians who base their campaigns about the dangers of drugs).
Replying to my own post but... it would be remiss of me to simply answer your question by saying "speed" does that, without suggesting a healthier and more natural way to get the effect you want. I don't know how physically active you are but I can recommend both yoga and weight-training (I know the latter sounds really unlikely, stay with me...).
Now yoga really does help train the mind to focus. I know given what you've said about your concentration that if you haven't studied yoga you'll probably think your mind would be too resistant to sitting in some funny position and trying to empty itself. First thing I'd say is to recommend Ashtanga yoga. You're moving (sometimes quickly) through sequences of positions, not sitting still helplessly thinking about how you're not supposed to be thinking. In between trying to work out what position comes next, paying attention to your balance, trying to remember whether your breath is supposed to be going in or out right now and visualising and attending to the tension in different muscles, you will be far too occupied to be distracted. And this is all good practice because when you get good at yoga, you become good at other things. Honestly - try it and try it with a bit of determination and I think there's a good chance it will at least help to a degree you will be aware of and can benefit from. Weight training can also help for some of the same reasons that yoga can - a sustained physical task that requires concentration (if you do it right and do it hard). But yoga is my recommendation so long as its one of the active styles. Get a good DVD of some of the sequences, a decent book on the theory (I can recommend if you want) and give it a go. Less of a quick fix than speed and more of the "slow build" you said you didn't want. But good for your health and will quickly start to help. Good luck with whichever approach (if any) you take.
Worst case scenario is sex. (And this should trigger some +5 Funny's at my expense).
Don't worry, I'm not making fun - I'm just thinking that this is the only time I've ever heard a good threshold given for someone having ADD. As to this:
I just don't want something that takes a while to 'build up'. I more or less want to be able to say "this is a concentration day" pop a pill in the morning and concentrate at work, and on the weekends be able to do my own thing.
What you are asking for is speed, aka amphetimines. Your doctor wont give it to you, but get it and it will have the effect you're after. Don't take too much, use strictly for legitimate purposes only when necessary. Don't take it if you have a heart condition.;)
Am serious, btw. Try it and see what effect it has on your work. Just be sure to use it in moderation. My friend taught herself to play the saxophone on speed. Locked herself in her room for days, took lots of speed and pretty much just practiced from dawn to dusk. Okay, she was jabbering like a loon and lost what little fat she had on her to begin with, but wow, was she focused!
It also sounds like he was done a bit of a disservice at school. I also didn't have to work very much to learn until I reached university level. Consequently, University hit me hard as I spent far too much time partying and socialising not realising that I couldn't coast through most of my units anymore. If I had been pushed further at school, I might have had a less rocky first year. The same might be true of the GP that if higher standards had forced him to focus more as a child, that ability would have lasted into adulthood. I agree it doesn't sound much like ADD, but then most diagnosed ADD doesn't sound like ADD to me, just a conn to sell drugs to kids and something that over-concerned parents can hang their worries on.
Comments should be appropriate. A recent project of mine doesn't have comments at every control structure explaining what any competent programmers can see is going on. (And a competent programmer should see for themselves what is actually going on, not what the comments tell them is supposed to be going on, but that is another discussion).
However, several of the class files begin with a few paragraphs of explanation clarifying the naming convention I have used for variable and function names throughout (example, I use 'module' to refer to educational units in the external system and 'course' to refer to educational units in the internal system so that if you see a function called map_courses(...), you know what it's referring to). The comments also sometimes contain design notes to explain why I chose a particular solution, etc.
Bad comments are redundant or wrong / out of date. Good comments are a boon to people who inherit your code and need to hit the ground running.
Hey - those are really nice. I particularly like the clock, both because it works well and because the idea is nice. I'm very glad I bothered to read to the end of the comments today - I normally don't bother.
Goto's are a tool. They just happen to be a tool that has greater potential for misuse than most other control structures in programming. So if you know what you're doing, it's fine to use it. But most people don't know what they're doing, so goto's have become generally frowned upon. And justifiably so, because that greater potential for abuse is really greater. Goto's in compiled code (or if you're actually writing in assembler) are fine because compilers (or people who write in assembler), pretty much always know what they're doing. But the further from the metal you climb, the less this is true. No-one wants to debug code riddled with goto's and seldom is code in C or more modern languages well structured if it's written with goto's.
So maybe you don't get the "goto's" are bad because you really know what you're doing and see it as just a tool to be used correctly. Try thinking about lots of people using the tool badly, and you'll get it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Two. The one you know about, and the one you... don't.
Funny, I can't believe we made it five hours without someone making that joke.
Well, Heck. That's not new! The Council of Nicaea did that 1700 years ago!
There is so much repetition on Slashdot. It's great when I read something that gives me a new viewpoint on something. Thanks for posting this. I think your view might be a useful model of a lot of technological progressions.
Accepted, more or less. I have a tendency to compare with what could be, rather than what has. Still, perhaps my main fault is not questioning TFS. I expect on reflection that people from a century ago probably would admire how clean our city streets were. TFS, however, implies that this is not so.
;)
So fair enough on your post. Though I am quite happy to make that separate argument if anybody wants.
Ego might be basis greed, so maybe we agree, but I'd say it was Greed that messed up our "future." Look at the example in TFS - motor vehicles cleaning up our cities. Well the thing is they could have done a lot. Why hasn't this happened? Because instead of moving from some people having horse-drawn carriages or draft horses and wagons, we've moved to every person having a car. Am I arguing that only a few people should have cars? No, of course not. I'm arguing that there should be more public transport. Buses are much faster than horse and carriages, they carry many more people. We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up. The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do. That pattern has been seen again and again, resulting in increasingly pointless jobs as surplus labour attempts to justify an income. Am I arguing against progress? Of course not - I'm arguing that everybody should get some of the benefit of it so that they can direct their energies to something more profitable to all of us rather than becoming telemarketers.
Modern society should be directing its energies toward achieving better things and then we would see some of the promise of new technologies better realised. Instead, society directs much of its energy toward stopping progress by trying to keep as many people as possible as busy as possible whether that has a purpose or not.
Beowulf killed my mother, you insensitve clod!
And people that gain satisfaction from anonymously judging people on the Internet and saying the "sense some condescension" fall into which category? :D
I know you're being funny (although this is the UK government), but if you can write the password on a post-it note, your disk isn't encrypted. Now you can fit the fingerprint of a decent password on a post-it note just fine.
It doesn't matter so much whether the information is false or true, what matters is if you have control of the means of communication. Just ask John Kerry about the Swift Boat Veterans. Baseless information can do great damage if you have the power to shout it loudly enough. Meanwhile, BAE systems bribed a Saudi Prince over US$1billion to direct his country to make various arms purchases and when the UK authorities began investigations, our own British government stepped in and order the investigation stopped. Corruption on a massive scale that dropped from the national press like a scab from a leper.
I think this post further down has one of the most insightful takes on why the information might be gathered. Not that I feel it fully excuses the gathering of the information and certainly doesn't excuse its loss. The RAF officers who gave this information to their employers had a simple choice - tell the truth about their more shameful behaviour or lie to cover it up. They chose wrong.
I'd better correct myself before someone else does. I referred to the employees of DynCorp as "US soldiers". Whilst there are plenty of incidents of misbehaviour on the part of any nation's soldiers (it's that odd double standard that is expected of people who are paid to kill, but not to beat people up or hurt women), the employees of DynCorp were not soldiers but service personnel, e.g. mechanics on helicopters (bad ones, apparently). Unfortunately they were still protected by the US government's refusal to allow the Bosnian government to prosecute US military forces (so they are de facto, US military) for breaches of Bosnia law while over there, and secondly, by the US governments own refusal to prosecute these people for rape, sex slave trafficking, etc. A very shameful situation.
A lot of the people hiring will have indulged in all these behaviours and wont condemn someone for them. Rather it will make them part of the club. Use of prostitutes in the armed forces? Goodness - that could never happen! With some groups, the person who never touched drugs, doesn't pick up prostitutes is the one that makes everyone else uncomfortable. In Bosnia, the private military firm DynCorp was actually buying girls as forced prostitutes (and I do mean girls - some were fifteen. And this were US soldiers). Related, its one of the reasons women face a 'glass ceiling' in some areas, such as the upper military, high finance, etc. It's because the wealthy / powerful men who are accustomed to doing as they please feel uncomfortable saying: "hey lets all do some lines and pick up some hookers" when someone from "the other side" is amongst them.
So these are kids that don't like to waste their time on things they aren't learning anything of value from and have a great capacity to focus on things that they are learning from. And this is called a disorder? Sounds like society is the one at fault.
More information, please. What do you mean by "lacking the concept of a situation", in what way do your parents teach it to you and how did you teach yourself it? Am very curious.
Interesting. What's your immigration policy and do you need any computer programmers?
I have a feeling I'm not going to like the answer, but what is "New Math"? Is this a US term? (Though having done a brief stint as a maths teacher in the UK, I'm not going to extol our own virtues too highly).
Ritalin certainly is. Or else it is something that is merely amphetimine with just a random molecule tweaked slightly so it can be (a) patented and (b) marketed as not giving speed to kids. The difference is that the GP said they wanted something more potent that could be turned on or off. Well no drug is an on/off switch - the human body is to complicated to be completely predictable - but at least with speed he can get a reliable, stronger and quick effect and he knows when he's on it and when he's not. Better to take something with a clear effect with a beginning and end on the occasions it is needed than take a watered down drip of the stuff for the rest of his life. That's just my take on it though. I don't think taking drugs is the answer in the vast majority of cases and I don't like them. Half the real problems come from not knowing what you're getting though. If you could pick up a tab and know exactly what dosage it was, things would be a lot better all round (except for drug companies and politicians who base their campaigns about the dangers of drugs).
Replying to my own post but... it would be remiss of me to simply answer your question by saying "speed" does that, without suggesting a healthier and more natural way to get the effect you want. I don't know how physically active you are but I can recommend both yoga and weight-training (I know the latter sounds really unlikely, stay with me...).
Now yoga really does help train the mind to focus. I know given what you've said about your concentration that if you haven't studied yoga you'll probably think your mind would be too resistant to sitting in some funny position and trying to empty itself. First thing I'd say is to recommend Ashtanga yoga. You're moving (sometimes quickly) through sequences of positions, not sitting still helplessly thinking about how you're not supposed to be thinking. In between trying to work out what position comes next, paying attention to your balance, trying to remember whether your breath is supposed to be going in or out right now and visualising and attending to the tension in different muscles, you will be far too occupied to be distracted. And this is all good practice because when you get good at yoga, you become good at other things. Honestly - try it and try it with a bit of determination and I think there's a good chance it will at least help to a degree you will be aware of and can benefit from. Weight training can also help for some of the same reasons that yoga can - a sustained physical task that requires concentration (if you do it right and do it hard). But yoga is my recommendation so long as its one of the active styles. Get a good DVD of some of the sequences, a decent book on the theory (I can recommend if you want) and give it a go. Less of a quick fix than speed and more of the "slow build" you said you didn't want. But good for your health and will quickly start to help. Good luck with whichever approach (if any) you take.
Don't worry, I'm not making fun - I'm just thinking that this is the only time I've ever heard a good threshold given for someone having ADD. As to this:
What you are asking for is speed, aka amphetimines. Your doctor wont give it to you, but get it and it will have the effect you're after. Don't take too much, use strictly for legitimate purposes only when necessary. Don't take it if you have a heart condition. ;)
Am serious, btw. Try it and see what effect it has on your work. Just be sure to use it in moderation. My friend taught herself to play the saxophone on speed. Locked herself in her room for days, took lots of speed and pretty much just practiced from dawn to dusk. Okay, she was jabbering like a loon and lost what little fat she had on her to begin with, but wow, was she focused!
It also sounds like he was done a bit of a disservice at school. I also didn't have to work very much to learn until I reached university level. Consequently, University hit me hard as I spent far too much time partying and socialising not realising that I couldn't coast through most of my units anymore. If I had been pushed further at school, I might have had a less rocky first year. The same might be true of the GP that if higher standards had forced him to focus more as a child, that ability would have lasted into adulthood. I agree it doesn't sound much like ADD, but then most diagnosed ADD doesn't sound like ADD to me, just a conn to sell drugs to kids and something that over-concerned parents can hang their worries on.
Not just easier, but more profitable too. Never forget the second motive.
Comments should be appropriate. A recent project of mine doesn't have comments at every control structure explaining what any competent programmers can see is going on. (And a competent programmer should see for themselves what is actually going on, not what the comments tell them is supposed to be going on, but that is another discussion).
However, several of the class files begin with a few paragraphs of explanation clarifying the naming convention I have used for variable and function names throughout (example, I use 'module' to refer to educational units in the external system and 'course' to refer to educational units in the internal system so that if you see a function called map_courses(...), you know what it's referring to). The comments also sometimes contain design notes to explain why I chose a particular solution, etc.
Bad comments are redundant or wrong / out of date. Good comments are a boon to people who inherit your code and need to hit the ground running.
Hey - those are really nice. I particularly like the clock, both because it works well and because the idea is nice. I'm very glad I bothered to read to the end of the comments today - I normally don't bother.
Goto's are a tool. They just happen to be a tool that has greater potential for misuse than most other control structures in programming. So if you know what you're doing, it's fine to use it. But most people don't know what they're doing, so goto's have become generally frowned upon. And justifiably so, because that greater potential for abuse is really greater. Goto's in compiled code (or if you're actually writing in assembler) are fine because compilers (or people who write in assembler), pretty much always know what they're doing. But the further from the metal you climb, the less this is true. No-one wants to debug code riddled with goto's and seldom is code in C or more modern languages well structured if it's written with goto's.
So maybe you don't get the "goto's" are bad because you really know what you're doing and see it as just a tool to be used correctly. Try thinking about lots of people using the tool badly, and you'll get it.
Hello? Ritalin?
The parents are giving the drugs to the kids, these days.