If you want to really find out if your own argument is valid, then breaking it down mathematically is one approach.
It's discouraging that you don't even know (or, perhaps, care) about this distinction...but the word you were reaching for is "logically". When you argue (in the philosophical sense), then you employ logic. It may be poor logic...but that's the tool you should grab, not the tire iron.
Your argument might have turned out better if you had not actually started out by arguing; it may sound strange, but you might have found it helpful to agree with your opponents. When you compose an argument, the very first thing you should do is to imagine an intelligent opponent who actually holds the position you are trying to refute. No matter how wrong-headed you think he is, ask yourself why a smart person might hold such an opinion; think of the best possible argument this person might advance. Then, and only then, should you begin your own disputation. (You might even surprise yourself at this stage, and change your mind!) Always begin by understanding your opponent's best possible argument; this puts you in the best position to refute him. It's also the honest thing to do.
As for your formulation of the anti-smoking argument, I attained MEGO (My Eyes Glazed Over) at step 1. It's pretty obvious that if the only reason we have for prohibiting under-age smoking is that it's harmful, then the argument leads to a blanket prohibtion. Perhaps proposition 1 might have been something like, "Young people should be given special consideration and protection by the state." Number 2 might be, "This special status extends even to protecting them from the consequences of their own actions by prohibiting them from doing things that will hurt them".
The Turk thing is interesting (but why is it Turkish?)—the notion of getting paid to argue has great appeal to me. However, I think I'm worth more than a buck per argument.
The "old codger" probably needs to learn how to use a web browser. My state has similar stupid laws about pseudoephedrine, so I've just been ordering the stuff in hundred tablet lots from Canada. (No, I'm not breaking a law--the law says it's illegal to sell Sudafed to people without requiring ID and signature, it saysnothing about buying the stuff.)
As far as I can tell, the net effect of this law has been to export yet more U.S. jobs abroad, as Mexican drug cartels take up the slack left by the demise of the domestic meth cottage industry...
And how about those poor bureacrats who have to deal with the public? I used to work as an adjudicator for a state unemployment office. Basically, I got to interview claimants, and make a determination on whether they were eligible for benefits or not. This job had all the normal drawbacks of being a faceless bureaucrat (dull job, low low pay, no respect), plus the disadvantage of having to deal directly and personally with the public. I had lots of bad encounters, but the worst was the ex-schoolteacher who wouldn't sign a statement that he was "able to work, available for work, and actively seeking work". That was the precondition for receiving unemployment checks--that is, you just had to say that it was so. It seems this guy had a "thing" about signing his name--he flatly refused to sign the document. He had a lot of other "issues", too...so many that he was very scary.
After he left, I had a problem: I wanted to pay this guy, because I did not want him to be mad at me. However, I had the duty of making and documenting a finding that he was "able, etc." so that I could justify sending him his checks every two weeks. I finally decided to send him a letter that thanked him for coming in, and said that, based on our conversation, I was assuming that he was "able, etc.". Then I submitted his claim for payment.
Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, he was waiting for me out in the parking lot, started screaming at me, took a couple of swings at me (missed cause I ducked) and chased me to my car (I was faster, but the car door was never the same after his flying karate kick).
It seems the mail was slow that week—he got his check the day after. Unfortunately, for reasons to be revealed below, he was not able to cash it.
I filed a complaint and the guy was duly arrested. However, that night I was worried about whether he was out on bail yet or not. You see, all official correspondence—like my letter to the guy—was signed with my real name, so I needed to know whether I should sleep in a chair holding the shotgun, or with the shotgun under the bed). When I called the clerk at the jail he told me not to worry. They had wanted to release him on his "own recognizance"...but he had refused to sign the necessary papers. The guy spent 3 months in jail waiting for his trial, because he wouldn't sign for his own release. The judge let him off "for time served"...but I'm not totally sure he ever managed to let them release him.
None of the examples given in the article embody my ideal electronic ink application; none of these devices would come even close to getting me to give up paper books. I think Neal Stephenson had it right in his novel Diamond Age: an e-book should look and act just like a paper book—with some additional benefits, of course. The format could be anything between a small, thin, pocket-size paperback or something like an unabridged desk dictionary. There would be maybe a hundred pages or so in the ebook I'd carry around with me; they would look and feel pretty much like real paper, except that they'd be smudge and spill-resistant. And the ebook would be networked.
Your personal ebook could contain anything you want it to. You'd probably have a section devoted to email, another to newspaper articles—and both could be updated continually. There'd be a special "input" section—maybe inside one of the covers—that would allow you to write and send emails, make notes to yourself, or do any of a wide variety of computational tasks for which you'd use a laptop today. You could use a stylus, but a "keyboard" printed on the first page would be my choice for input. You'd need power for the networking and computational tasks, of course, but the text on the epages wouldn't disappear if your batteries went dead.
And of course, your ebook could contain books. Any book you want could be downloaded to a section of the ebook. You could read the book as you would a normal paper book, but the ebook pages would "refresh" as you read them. Say you download a novel. You'd get maybe the first 50 pages. By the time you got to the last page, the previous 49 would be replaced by pages 51-99 of the novel. Of course, if you wanted to have the whole novel at once, so you can riffle back and forth between the chapters, you'd have to buy the large format ebook--maybe one with 500 or even 1,000 pages. (That's not the way I'd go, though.)
I don't know how realistic my requirements are, but I do know that this is what it would take for me to abandon paper books. I have a feeling that I'll be reading paper for a long time to come.
Seriously the only thing that happens when Microsoft products try to guess what you are thinking is annoyance.
No, no, you don't understand the concept here. What you are reporting as "annoyance" is, in fact, a state of enlightened bliss. Our EEG says so. It also says you love Vista, and have a desire to be abase yourself before the Supreme Overlord, Bill Gates.
But basic mathematics requires a lot of rote work. It can be a joy to know that you've learned everything that was used to get mankind to the moon, a tremendous joy in fact, but it takes work.
You're almost certainly right, so I guess the reason math and I never got along was that I have little tolerance for rote work. I became aware of my aversion to all things mathematical at a tender age: in third grade. How well I remember the despair that would engulf me every morning when I entered the classroom, seeing the two huge blackboards entirely covered with arithmetic problems. (For those of you you who are too young to have ever seen one, blackboards are like whiteboards, but sort of dark gray and you write on them with sticks of compressed diatomaceous earth.) During the course of the day, I would have to copy those problems onto my notebook paper and solve every single one of them. Solving arithmetic problems was a horrible sort of tedium that I would put off as long as I possibly could.
My teacher had formulated a rule to encourage us to finish our arithmetic problems early: if you weren't done with them by the time afternoon recess rolled around, you didn't get recess--you had to stay inside to do your arithmetic. For a year, I never got afternoon recess. To me, it was simply less aversive to put off doing arithmetic and accept never seeing the afternoon sun, than to do those long division problems one instant sooner than I absolutely had to.
It wasn't that I couldn't do them, it was just that I hated doing them. I knew how to do arithmetic in principle; what was the point of performing the same dumb operations over and over and over again? Sure, I was lousy at it. For one thing, I didn't seem to have the ability to arrange columns of numbers in a straight line; my columns were pathetic, broken things that writhed all over the page in grotesque pain, merged with one another and perversely twisted about whenever I added them up so that I would get a different result every time. I really didn't (and still don't) think that practice would improve this condition.
Algebra and trig were just extensions of the same phenomenon. Algebra was actually pretty simple, but of course I kept making arithmetic mistakes. Trig was a bunch of arcana for which I could see no conceivable use whatever. Again, trig was rote work: I was supposed to memorize these odd terms and formulas, and then I would pass the course. But why? What was this stuff good for? I know that engineers used it for something or other, but I had no intentions of ever becoming an engineer. Basically, I couldn't motivate myself to put effort into something in which I had no intrinsic interest, and for which I could see no possible use. So I developed my ability to sleep while remaining upright to world-class level. (An ability that has proved very useful in business meetings.) Things would have gone ill with my academic career, had I not been accepted to U.C. Berkeley "by examination" (i.e., high SAT scores...mostly on the verbal part of the test). Ah, such a joyous day when I dropped that course, never again to set foot in a math class.
Am I proud of this, am I happy about it? Not really. I've felt all my life that I missed something important; I feel guilty not only about understanding so little about math, but about not understanding why it's supposed to be so interesting. In the dark nights of my soul, I fear that I wasn't paying attention during the one minute that some math teacher explained why mathematics was not only important, but also beautiful. Or perhaps I missed the class in which my third grade teacher explained something fundamental that would have made math accessible to me.
It was a good day when I realized that I could write computer problems to solve simple calculations ("Hey! It gets the same answer every time! Yowza!") Oddly enough, I don't mind doing math (the sort within my capabilities) if I can use i
Hmm. Looked up the parent just because of your comment. Doesn't make even a tiny bit of sense (and the journal it links to doesn't either). Perhaps it's just that my train of thought derails every time it runs over the phrase "sins... done much larger". There's a bright flash, and I not only forget what I read a few moments before, but incur anterograde amnesia—I forget what I'm about to read. So the question arises, are you a sockpuppet for this guy who posts mentally disruptive crap? Why did you draw my attention to him? And why am I wasting my time posting this? Damn...I forget...name...
It is true that there was a period of increasing frugality at HP just before C. Fiorina's advent, but that was truly due to economic conditions, and HP was handling the crisis in its traditional way: instead of laying off employees, HP was saving money in other ways. After all, this was the company that once temporarily cut everyone's salary by about 15% instead of having layoffs. (The reductions were restored when times got better.)
It was only under C.F.'s reign that layoffs were first introduced. However, I do not believe that the reasons for these layoffs were primarily economic—they were moral and political. HP had a well-skilled cadre of professionals with high self esteem; these people thought they mattered. C.F. perceived this as a problem; thus, she proceeded to show the technical staff of HP that they were a disposable commodity by decimating them. I use this word in the old, Roman sense: to instill a proper fear of management, to restore discipline to the level desired by the commanders, you kill a tenth of the men at random. This has a most salutory effect on the survivors.
I worked at HP during this time. Like many, I had been an employee of a company that was bought by HP. At first, the change seemed to be benign—HP was not quite as good a place to work as my old one had been, but it was still pretty decent. That changed with the advent of C.F. It's hard to describe the feeling of helpless despair that became prevalent in my workplace as wave after wave of layoffs swept through it like a series of plagues. The first couple were justified as "getting rid of the deadwood", and you were supposed to feel good that you were not classed among the victims. With successive layoffs, the reasons became progressively thinner, until they achieved total transparency. One layoff was actually announced by management as being "random"; we were supposed think that this meant "fair".
As any student of Josef Stalin's methods knows, the best terror is random terror. If people do not know how to behave to avoid being struck down by the Centurion's truncheon, they become paralyzed by fear. They become docile, easily managed victims that have no self-esteem, make no demands, and are neurotically eager to obey their masters. They become perfect corporate employees.
This was not a phenomenon isolated to HP; HP merely furnishes a particularly egregious example of how the corporations dealt with a perceived threat to their sovereignty that emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century—the rise of a new intelligentsia, composed of technically savvy "knowledge workers" who acquired a sense of empowerment through their understanding of how the new computer and communications technologies worked. This "geek" intelligentsia thought of itself as autonomous, as being outside the old paradigm of boss and peon. But the essence of corporatism is control; consequently, the corporations moved to suppress the intelligentsia using a variety of methods, both subtle and (as in HP's case) not so subtle. Today, their victory seems complete.
Lest I be accused of digression from the topic at hand...I wonder if C.F. had to take a 25% pay cut at her new job, compared to her HP salary, as did I?
Sir, I believe you are trivializing this breakthrough concept. In actuality, "cloud computing" involves a direct high-bandwith fiber optic connection to Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this new concept is that it supports greatly simplified Power Point presentations—all you need is a really fuzzy picture of just about anything. Then you sketch a little stick figure labeled "user" and draw arrows connecting him to the fuzz. Finally, you add a single bullet item: "Profit".
I'm getting tired of the "Please upgrade to version 7" warnings anyway.
Obviously, you've been wise enough not to do this. That's a good thing, because in addition to more bloat, V7 of Reader also enables all your Adobe applications (like PhotoShop and FrameMaker) to call home. Both at work and at home, those two apps started trying to contact the Adobe mothership every time they started. (I believe this is due to a new "feature" Adobe calls "Adobe Online".)
At first I backed out V7 and tried Foxit. It's pretty good, but I quickly found some inconveniences. I wound up reinstalling an old version of Adobe Reader I had lying around, and it hasn't given me any problems.
Like most discussions in this venue, my posting was both brief an perfunctory. Primarily, I was reacting against the notion that high-tech gadgetry wins wars. That's not true, it was never true, and it never will be true. A more serious discussion of this issue would require a more thoughtful venue, and begin with clarification of certain terms and premises, such as:
What is our objective?
Who is our enemy?
What is the moral justification for this war?
Is this a war?
Though I in no way impugn the courage of our soldiers, I hold their present employment to be both materially counterproductive and morally repugnant. For that I blame the politicians. However, because winning battles in no way equates to winning wars, and because the material and the moral planes of war cannot be valued in isolation, I maintain that we are getting our butts kicked...and yes, even when we win the battles.
...He carries chocolate for crying children. He picks up the language, and shops in the local stores. If we are going to act like we are liberating a country, we have to act like we did when we liberated Europe from the Nazis. Did we carpet bomb Paris?
Can't resist that one...we may not have carpet bombed Paris, but the rest of France suffered much more at the hands of U.S. air forces than at the hands of the Germans. In fact, pretty much everyone took a dislike to our air power—including the U.S. Army's own A.A. batteries, which often deliberately fired on U.S. planes because they were just as likely to bomb them as were the Luftwaffe.
By the way, how would you react if foreign soldiers gave chocolate to your kids?
In any case, the whole WWII comparison is adequately addressed by my sig:
There seems to be something that many people here are overlooking. Regardless of whether or not relatively primitive technology can defeat all this high-tech equipment is irrelevant because the United States is actually testing it on a real battlefield.
I'm sorry, but you lost me here. We are testing equipment on a battlefield, and we are getting our butts kicked. And this is a good thing. Yes...I did overlook that.
It's a unique opportunity that few other military powers have had access too. It's one thing to predict your weapon will do something, but even live fire exercises are no substitute for actual combat applications. And I'm not just talking about equipment here. Certainly they're getting a ton of experience in tactics, especially urban warfare.
The individual soldiers are certainly learning how to stay alive, but the Pentagon never learns a damn thing. When the next war rolls around, we will be sending a totally different batch of newmeats into the field, commanded by the same unimaginative careerists as last time. How, exactly, is this progress?
Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the US government doesn't enter into wars every few years to keep the whole military machine nice and lubricated.
If you think we are possessed of a well-lubricated military machine, then you haven't been paying attention.
True. Plus, the effort spent on R&D, and the down-time required to re-tool factories was another penalty paid due to the German penchant for innovation. But let's face it, there is no way the Germans could have matched the production capacity of the United States and the numbers of the Soviet Union, no matter what they did. If you have enough of it, quantity beats quality every time.
...will be a machine, which may or may not be controlled by a techie in an air-conditioned office.
No, he will be a guy in "civilian" clothes, with maybe a few magazine pouches clipped to his belt, carrying an AK variant. When the Pentagon's soldiers come hunting, he will not be there. When they aren't expecting trouble, he will suddenly appear to cause them grief. He will deliver his bombs in old Toyotas, instead of planes so expensive that only a handful of them can purchased in any given year by "the world's only remaining superpower". This "soldier of the future" will observe the tactics of his enemies, and will think of cheap ways to thwart them. He will devote most of his waking thoughts to new ways of shorteinging the lives of his technological "superiors"—or perhaps of just making them miserable. Perhaps most importantly, he will keep fighting until he dies, and he is certain that his sons and his sons' sons will keep fighting because his belief in the moral superiority of his cause is unshakeable.
Oh, that's not what you were talking about? You wanted to talk about the gee-whiz high-tech "soldier of the future" because he's the one with the cool toys? Oh, sorry—my mistake. I thought the "soldier of the future" was the one who was going to m> win.
It wouldn't surprise me if some treaty some where disallowed this thing on the battlefield, but not at home...
That has been the case for some time: there are weapons and munitions that are prohibited from use in warfare that are used by U.S. police against civilians as a matter of course. A prime example is hollow-point bullets. To this day, our military forces are issued "ball" pistol and rifle ammunition, because anything else is prohibited by international conventions dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. The rationale for this convention was that "Dum Dum" and other modified projectiles caused excessively grievous wounds, and thus contributed to making war more horrible than it had to be. (The British had accused the Boers of using such bullets, but really, the Boers were just good at hitting Brits at extreme range, where any ordinary bullet begins to yaw and pretty much tear things up at impact.)
This prohibition has no legal force against civilian police departments--or, for that matter, any civilians--and nearly all U.S. police use variations of hollow-point expanding bullet designs in their pistols. Actually, I don't blame them--if use of lethal force is justified, then use of the most effective ammunition available is also justified.
As for tear gas (CS or otherwise), I'm sure that an international ban won't prohibit police from using it against civilians. The issue becomes more clouded when it's military forces exercising police functions--such as riot control in occupied countries.
By the way, I wouldn't consider the use of CS tear gas in Vietnam to be "non-lethal"--if you throw a bunch of such gas grenades down into a bunker or tunnel, and then shoot the enemy soldiers as they emerge, that's about as lethal as lethal gets.
Venture beat is investigating it, turns out the it is a hoax.
I.T. is a hoax? I always thought so. Why does the fact that the kid is a cute front make "it" a hoax? There's no truth to the assertion that venture capital was handed out? Capital was obtained under false pretenses? (Surely the decisive criterion for the V.C.s was not that a cute kid was involved.) Somebody is investigating, but we already know "it" is a hoax? Then why bother with an investigation?
Sheesh...I'm in a mean mood today...I wish there was a -1 "complete nonsense" mod rating.
...you do realize the light direction is from below in the first one, don't you? Those are just craters, not bubbles. The 'stains' could still be holes or caves I guess, but bubbles?
You're absolutely right about the craters--it took me a few minutes to adjust my brain to see this picture correctly. At first, I thought the "inky stains" were on top of high spots in the terrain, but when I analyzed the way the light was falling on this scene, I realized I was falling victim to the familiar illusion where depressions in the ground (e.g. craters) can look as though they are raised.
From the position of the "stains" in the craters, are we perhaps simply looking at bare rock where sunlight cooked off the the white stuff? The stains do seem to be located in those portions of the craters that are receiving the greatest illumination. (By the way, is this water ice we're looking at, or frozen methane, or what?)
I did read the article (and several others), and it's quite clear that mounting these nukes on the B52s' weapons pods was a mistake--consequently, the nukes simply escaped from whatever controls that were supposed to govern them.
Were the nuclear warheads scheduled for disposal? Then it makes no sense to say that the B52 flight was part of the disposal operation. After all, the warheads weren't supposed to be in the bombs. Were the empty bombs supposed to be disposed of? I wasn't aware than unarmed bombs required special disposal; if they do (residual radioactivity?), then they should have been packed into a transport jet, not mounted in a bomber's weapons pods.
I fail to see how the entire "disposal" issue has any relevance to the incident. The crucial point is that the ground crews who mounted the weapons did not know they were handling nukes, and the pilots who were flying the planes did not know the nature of their armament. So it is with some urgency that I ask, what the hell did everyone think they were doing?
Batteries will continue to periodically blow up as long as we use them, it's the inherent result of creating devices with so much energy density.
Forgive my skepticism, but I am underwhelmed by your reasoning that power density = explosions. I've got a couple of pounds of smokeless gunpowder stored in my garage (in containers that meet standard industry safety specs, and in a metal cabinet with no back); the poweder wouldn't be there if I thought there was a reasonable chance that it would spontaneously explode. Yet there's quite a bit of energy concentrated there, no? How about the fuel tank in you car? Gasoline is pretty energetic, but fuel tanks explosions are pretty much confined to the environs of Hollywood.
I can think of much better uses. For example, people I don't like would be replaced by piles of steaming manure (can't have them just disappear, or I'd be forever tripping over them). My boss would look like Goofy. All the chicks would not only look great, but they wouldn't have any clothes. And because the goggles would hide my eyeballs, they couldn't tell whether I was looking them in the eyes when I talk to them or not. Yes! Definite progress.
First off, I wouldn't turn off cookies for this crowd; I'd set the Mozilla default to keep cookies for the current session only. That way, they won't have web sites admonishing them to turn on cookies, but the cookies get wiped when your users close the browser.
As for "Javascript is the devil"...that's a religious slogan if I ever heard one. Besides, everyone knows ActiveX is the devil.
And there you have the whole of Microsoft's formula for success: to win, they just have to wait. Victory is inevitable. It doesn't matter if a new MS product release is crap; eventually, people will not only buy it, but it will be the only software of that type they will buy. In a universe dominated by Microsoft, crap becomes a de facto standard over time.
Windows is, of course, the paradigm if this strategy. When it was first released (3.11), it was crap--even if you didn't compare it to the best commercial GUI OS of the time, MacOS. People complained, they ridiculed it--yet a lot of them bought it. Microsoft knew 3.11 was a dog, but they didn't worry about it; they knew they had all the time in the world to make it work. In effect, Windows 3.11 was a "placeholder": it was a promise that, some day, Microsoft would deliver a functional operating system with a GUI. You see, they had no real competition: Apple had willingly walled itself off into a closed-hardware ghetto, and it took too much expertise to run any flavor of Unix (especially if you wanted any GUI at all).
People kept right on laughing--and buying--through Windows 95, ME (shudder), and 98. See, if you owned a business, you just got the MS OS of the day plonked onto whatever PCs you bought from Dell or whatever vendor you bought your hardware from. Nobody asked you, "Would you like OS X, Y, or Z with that order?", because there were no alternatives. If you were a normal computer user, it was the same story--you bought whatever came pre-loaded on the box. Microsoft just accepted that a relatively small number of people would buy Macs, and an even smaller number of individuals would get some Unix variant to put on their Intel box.
In technical shops, things were different for a while. Techies wanted Unix; they liked the fact that it was easily configurable and scriptable, and offered by far a better programming environment. So in the early to mid 90s, Unix ruled the technical work-place. But then the managers of those companies started to notice that their peers who worked in more business-oriented companies had toys that they did not. Managers of Unix-oriented companies started to clamor for spreadsheets, Microsoft Word and Power Point. How can you run a company without Power Point? So they went out and bought PCs for themselves. For a while, they were happy...until they noticed that their PCs wouldn't talk to their underlings' Unix boxes. Well, what was that all about? That had to change; so the managers commanded their underlings to throw out their Unix systems and buy PCs like civilized people. As a result, there are now more than a few ex-Unix gurus working at WalMart.
All this time, dark clouds kept gathering around Seattle, and a pulsing red glow was seen...whoops, wrong story. What I meant to write was that with Windows 2000, MS finally delivered what they had promised with 3.11: a stable and functional OS with a decent GUI. The problem was that success is something of an embarrassment in the software world. Once you've built a robust product, there's not usually any reason to build it again. Yet, continued revenue demands that you keep selling new product--people won't pay much for software that hasn't changed in 10 years. Luckily, everyone had gotten accustomed to new operating systems coming out of MS every few years, so MS kept right on reinventing the wheel ("this year's model is much rounder!"). XP was crap at first, but was actually slightly better than Windows 2K once Service Pack 2 had come out. I expect that this pattern will probably continue with Vista: eventually, MS will squash enough of the new bugs they created with their new OS, and the chip-makers will convince everyone they neeed a quad-core CPU, so Vista will even run without noticeably bogging down the average PC.
The really interesting question is how long Microsoft can keep this up. When will the public begin asking the obvious question: "Why doesn't
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It's discouraging that you don't even know (or, perhaps, care) about this distinction...but the word you were reaching for is "logically". When you argue (in the philosophical sense), then you employ logic. It may be poor logic...but that's the tool you should grab, not the tire iron.
Your argument might have turned out better if you had not actually started out by arguing; it may sound strange, but you might have found it helpful to agree with your opponents. When you compose an argument, the very first thing you should do is to imagine an intelligent opponent who actually holds the position you are trying to refute. No matter how wrong-headed you think he is, ask yourself why a smart person might hold such an opinion; think of the best possible argument this person might advance. Then, and only then, should you begin your own disputation. (You might even surprise yourself at this stage, and change your mind!) Always begin by understanding your opponent's best possible argument; this puts you in the best position to refute him. It's also the honest thing to do.
As for your formulation of the anti-smoking argument, I attained MEGO (My Eyes Glazed Over) at step 1. It's pretty obvious that if the only reason we have for prohibiting under-age smoking is that it's harmful, then the argument leads to a blanket prohibtion. Perhaps proposition 1 might have been something like, "Young people should be given special consideration and protection by the state." Number 2 might be, "This special status extends even to protecting them from the consequences of their own actions by prohibiting them from doing things that will hurt them".
The Turk thing is interesting (but why is it Turkish?)—the notion of getting paid to argue has great appeal to me. However, I think I'm worth more than a buck per argument.
The "old codger" probably needs to learn how to use a web browser. My state has similar stupid laws about pseudoephedrine, so I've just been ordering the stuff in hundred tablet lots from Canada. (No, I'm not breaking a law--the law says it's illegal to sell Sudafed to people without requiring ID and signature, it saysnothing about buying the stuff.)
As far as I can tell, the net effect of this law has been to export yet more U.S. jobs abroad, as Mexican drug cartels take up the slack left by the demise of the domestic meth cottage industry...
And how about those poor bureacrats who have to deal with the public? I used to work as an adjudicator for a state unemployment office. Basically, I got to interview claimants, and make a determination on whether they were eligible for benefits or not. This job had all the normal drawbacks of being a faceless bureaucrat (dull job, low low pay, no respect), plus the disadvantage of having to deal directly and personally with the public. I had lots of bad encounters, but the worst was the ex-schoolteacher who wouldn't sign a statement that he was "able to work, available for work, and actively seeking work". That was the precondition for receiving unemployment checks--that is, you just had to say that it was so. It seems this guy had a "thing" about signing his name--he flatly refused to sign the document. He had a lot of other "issues", too...so many that he was very scary.
After he left, I had a problem: I wanted to pay this guy, because I did not want him to be mad at me. However, I had the duty of making and documenting a finding that he was "able, etc." so that I could justify sending him his checks every two weeks. I finally decided to send him a letter that thanked him for coming in, and said that, based on our conversation, I was assuming that he was "able, etc.". Then I submitted his claim for payment.
Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, he was waiting for me out in the parking lot, started screaming at me, took a couple of swings at me (missed cause I ducked) and chased me to my car (I was faster, but the car door was never the same after his flying karate kick). It seems the mail was slow that week—he got his check the day after. Unfortunately, for reasons to be revealed below, he was not able to cash it.
I filed a complaint and the guy was duly arrested. However, that night I was worried about whether he was out on bail yet or not. You see, all official correspondence—like my letter to the guy—was signed with my real name, so I needed to know whether I should sleep in a chair holding the shotgun, or with the shotgun under the bed). When I called the clerk at the jail he told me not to worry. They had wanted to release him on his "own recognizance"...but he had refused to sign the necessary papers. The guy spent 3 months in jail waiting for his trial, because he wouldn't sign for his own release. The judge let him off "for time served"...but I'm not totally sure he ever managed to let them release him.
None of the examples given in the article embody my ideal electronic ink application; none of these devices would come even close to getting me to give up paper books. I think Neal Stephenson had it right in his novel Diamond Age: an e-book should look and act just like a paper book—with some additional benefits, of course. The format could be anything between a small, thin, pocket-size paperback or something like an unabridged desk dictionary. There would be maybe a hundred pages or so in the ebook I'd carry around with me; they would look and feel pretty much like real paper, except that they'd be smudge and spill-resistant. And the ebook would be networked.
Your personal ebook could contain anything you want it to. You'd probably have a section devoted to email, another to newspaper articles—and both could be updated continually. There'd be a special "input" section—maybe inside one of the covers—that would allow you to write and send emails, make notes to yourself, or do any of a wide variety of computational tasks for which you'd use a laptop today. You could use a stylus, but a "keyboard" printed on the first page would be my choice for input. You'd need power for the networking and computational tasks, of course, but the text on the epages wouldn't disappear if your batteries went dead.
And of course, your ebook could contain books. Any book you want could be downloaded to a section of the ebook. You could read the book as you would a normal paper book, but the ebook pages would "refresh" as you read them. Say you download a novel. You'd get maybe the first 50 pages. By the time you got to the last page, the previous 49 would be replaced by pages 51-99 of the novel. Of course, if you wanted to have the whole novel at once, so you can riffle back and forth between the chapters, you'd have to buy the large format ebook--maybe one with 500 or even 1,000 pages. (That's not the way I'd go, though.)
I don't know how realistic my requirements are, but I do know that this is what it would take for me to abandon paper books. I have a feeling that I'll be reading paper for a long time to come.
No, no, you don't understand the concept here. What you are reporting as "annoyance" is, in fact, a state of enlightened bliss. Our EEG says so. It also says you love Vista, and have a desire to be abase yourself before the Supreme Overlord, Bill Gates.
You're almost certainly right, so I guess the reason math and I never got along was that I have little tolerance for rote work. I became aware of my aversion to all things mathematical at a tender age: in third grade. How well I remember the despair that would engulf me every morning when I entered the classroom, seeing the two huge blackboards entirely covered with arithmetic problems. (For those of you you who are too young to have ever seen one, blackboards are like whiteboards, but sort of dark gray and you write on them with sticks of compressed diatomaceous earth.) During the course of the day, I would have to copy those problems onto my notebook paper and solve every single one of them. Solving arithmetic problems was a horrible sort of tedium that I would put off as long as I possibly could.
My teacher had formulated a rule to encourage us to finish our arithmetic problems early: if you weren't done with them by the time afternoon recess rolled around, you didn't get recess--you had to stay inside to do your arithmetic. For a year, I never got afternoon recess. To me, it was simply less aversive to put off doing arithmetic and accept never seeing the afternoon sun, than to do those long division problems one instant sooner than I absolutely had to.
It wasn't that I couldn't do them, it was just that I hated doing them. I knew how to do arithmetic in principle; what was the point of performing the same dumb operations over and over and over again? Sure, I was lousy at it. For one thing, I didn't seem to have the ability to arrange columns of numbers in a straight line; my columns were pathetic, broken things that writhed all over the page in grotesque pain, merged with one another and perversely twisted about whenever I added them up so that I would get a different result every time. I really didn't (and still don't) think that practice would improve this condition.
Algebra and trig were just extensions of the same phenomenon. Algebra was actually pretty simple, but of course I kept making arithmetic mistakes. Trig was a bunch of arcana for which I could see no conceivable use whatever. Again, trig was rote work: I was supposed to memorize these odd terms and formulas, and then I would pass the course. But why? What was this stuff good for? I know that engineers used it for something or other, but I had no intentions of ever becoming an engineer. Basically, I couldn't motivate myself to put effort into something in which I had no intrinsic interest, and for which I could see no possible use. So I developed my ability to sleep while remaining upright to world-class level. (An ability that has proved very useful in business meetings.) Things would have gone ill with my academic career, had I not been accepted to U.C. Berkeley "by examination" (i.e., high SAT scores...mostly on the verbal part of the test). Ah, such a joyous day when I dropped that course, never again to set foot in a math class.
Am I proud of this, am I happy about it? Not really. I've felt all my life that I missed something important; I feel guilty not only about understanding so little about math, but about not understanding why it's supposed to be so interesting. In the dark nights of my soul, I fear that I wasn't paying attention during the one minute that some math teacher explained why mathematics was not only important, but also beautiful. Or perhaps I missed the class in which my third grade teacher explained something fundamental that would have made math accessible to me.
It was a good day when I realized that I could write computer problems to solve simple calculations ("Hey! It gets the same answer every time! Yowza!") Oddly enough, I don't mind doing math (the sort within my capabilities) if I can use i
Hmm. Looked up the parent just because of your comment. Doesn't make even a tiny bit of sense (and the journal it links to doesn't either). Perhaps it's just that my train of thought derails every time it runs over the phrase "sins ... done much larger". There's a bright flash, and I not only forget what I read a few moments before, but incur anterograde amnesia—I forget what I'm about to read. So the question arises, are you a sockpuppet for this guy who posts mentally disruptive crap? Why did you draw my attention to him? And why am I wasting my time posting this? Damn...I forget...name...
It is true that there was a period of increasing frugality at HP just before C. Fiorina's advent, but that was truly due to economic conditions, and HP was handling the crisis in its traditional way: instead of laying off employees, HP was saving money in other ways. After all, this was the company that once temporarily cut everyone's salary by about 15% instead of having layoffs. (The reductions were restored when times got better.)
It was only under C.F.'s reign that layoffs were first introduced. However, I do not believe that the reasons for these layoffs were primarily economic—they were moral and political. HP had a well-skilled cadre of professionals with high self esteem; these people thought they mattered. C.F. perceived this as a problem; thus, she proceeded to show the technical staff of HP that they were a disposable commodity by decimating them. I use this word in the old, Roman sense: to instill a proper fear of management, to restore discipline to the level desired by the commanders, you kill a tenth of the men at random. This has a most salutory effect on the survivors.
I worked at HP during this time. Like many, I had been an employee of a company that was bought by HP. At first, the change seemed to be benign—HP was not quite as good a place to work as my old one had been, but it was still pretty decent. That changed with the advent of C.F. It's hard to describe the feeling of helpless despair that became prevalent in my workplace as wave after wave of layoffs swept through it like a series of plagues. The first couple were justified as "getting rid of the deadwood", and you were supposed to feel good that you were not classed among the victims. With successive layoffs, the reasons became progressively thinner, until they achieved total transparency. One layoff was actually announced by management as being "random"; we were supposed think that this meant "fair".
As any student of Josef Stalin's methods knows, the best terror is random terror. If people do not know how to behave to avoid being struck down by the Centurion's truncheon, they become paralyzed by fear. They become docile, easily managed victims that have no self-esteem, make no demands, and are neurotically eager to obey their masters. They become perfect corporate employees.
This was not a phenomenon isolated to HP; HP merely furnishes a particularly egregious example of how the corporations dealt with a perceived threat to their sovereignty that emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century—the rise of a new intelligentsia, composed of technically savvy "knowledge workers" who acquired a sense of empowerment through their understanding of how the new computer and communications technologies worked. This "geek" intelligentsia thought of itself as autonomous, as being outside the old paradigm of boss and peon. But the essence of corporatism is control; consequently, the corporations moved to suppress the intelligentsia using a variety of methods, both subtle and (as in HP's case) not so subtle. Today, their victory seems complete.
Lest I be accused of digression from the topic at hand...I wonder if C.F. had to take a 25% pay cut at her new job, compared to her HP salary, as did I?
Sir, I believe you are trivializing this breakthrough concept. In actuality, "cloud computing" involves a direct high-bandwith fiber optic connection to Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this new concept is that it supports greatly simplified Power Point presentations—all you need is a really fuzzy picture of just about anything. Then you sketch a little stick figure labeled "user" and draw arrows connecting him to the fuzz. Finally, you add a single bullet item: "Profit".
Obviously, you've been wise enough not to do this. That's a good thing, because in addition to more bloat, V7 of Reader also enables all your Adobe applications (like PhotoShop and FrameMaker) to call home. Both at work and at home, those two apps started trying to contact the Adobe mothership every time they started. (I believe this is due to a new "feature" Adobe calls "Adobe Online".)
At first I backed out V7 and tried Foxit. It's pretty good, but I quickly found some inconveniences. I wound up reinstalling an old version of Adobe Reader I had lying around, and it hasn't given me any problems.
Like most discussions in this venue, my posting was both brief an perfunctory. Primarily, I was reacting against the notion that high-tech gadgetry wins wars. That's not true, it was never true, and it never will be true. A more serious discussion of this issue would require a more thoughtful venue, and begin with clarification of certain terms and premises, such as:
Though I in no way impugn the courage of our soldiers, I hold their present employment to be both materially counterproductive and morally repugnant. For that I blame the politicians. However, because winning battles in no way equates to winning wars, and because the material and the moral planes of war cannot be valued in isolation, I maintain that we are getting our butts kicked...and yes, even when we win the battles.
Can't resist that one...we may not have carpet bombed Paris, but the rest of France suffered much more at the hands of U.S. air forces than at the hands of the Germans. In fact, pretty much everyone took a dislike to our air power—including the U.S. Army's own A.A. batteries, which often deliberately fired on U.S. planes because they were just as likely to bomb them as were the Luftwaffe.
By the way, how would you react if foreign soldiers gave chocolate to your kids?
In any case, the whole WWII comparison is adequately addressed by my sig:
Ah, I see you are One Of Us. The secret recognition code is "1648".
I'm sorry, but you lost me here. We are testing equipment on a battlefield, and we are getting our butts kicked. And this is a good thing. Yes...I did overlook that.
The individual soldiers are certainly learning how to stay alive, but the Pentagon never learns a damn thing. When the next war rolls around, we will be sending a totally different batch of newmeats into the field, commanded by the same unimaginative careerists as last time. How, exactly, is this progress?
If you think we are possessed of a well-lubricated military machine, then you haven't been paying attention.
True. Plus, the effort spent on R&D, and the down-time required to re-tool factories was another penalty paid due to the German penchant for innovation. But let's face it, there is no way the Germans could have matched the production capacity of the United States and the numbers of the Soviet Union, no matter what they did. If you have enough of it, quantity beats quality every time.
No, he will be a guy in "civilian" clothes, with maybe a few magazine pouches clipped to his belt, carrying an AK variant. When the Pentagon's soldiers come hunting, he will not be there. When they aren't expecting trouble, he will suddenly appear to cause them grief. He will deliver his bombs in old Toyotas, instead of planes so expensive that only a handful of them can purchased in any given year by "the world's only remaining superpower". This "soldier of the future" will observe the tactics of his enemies, and will think of cheap ways to thwart them. He will devote most of his waking thoughts to new ways of shorteinging the lives of his technological "superiors"—or perhaps of just making them miserable. Perhaps most importantly, he will keep fighting until he dies, and he is certain that his sons and his sons' sons will keep fighting because his belief in the moral superiority of his cause is unshakeable.
Oh, that's not what you were talking about? You wanted to talk about the gee-whiz high-tech "soldier of the future" because he's the one with the cool toys? Oh, sorry—my mistake. I thought the "soldier of the future" was the one who was going to m> win .
That has been the case for some time: there are weapons and munitions that are prohibited from use in warfare that are used by U.S. police against civilians as a matter of course. A prime example is hollow-point bullets. To this day, our military forces are issued "ball" pistol and rifle ammunition, because anything else is prohibited by international conventions dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. The rationale for this convention was that "Dum Dum" and other modified projectiles caused excessively grievous wounds, and thus contributed to making war more horrible than it had to be. (The British had accused the Boers of using such bullets, but really, the Boers were just good at hitting Brits at extreme range, where any ordinary bullet begins to yaw and pretty much tear things up at impact.)
This prohibition has no legal force against civilian police departments--or, for that matter, any civilians--and nearly all U.S. police use variations of hollow-point expanding bullet designs in their pistols. Actually, I don't blame them--if use of lethal force is justified, then use of the most effective ammunition available is also justified.
As for tear gas (CS or otherwise), I'm sure that an international ban won't prohibit police from using it against civilians. The issue becomes more clouded when it's military forces exercising police functions--such as riot control in occupied countries.
By the way, I wouldn't consider the use of CS tear gas in Vietnam to be "non-lethal"--if you throw a bunch of such gas grenades down into a bunker or tunnel, and then shoot the enemy soldiers as they emerge, that's about as lethal as lethal gets.
I.T. is a hoax? I always thought so. Why does the fact that the kid is a cute front make "it" a hoax? There's no truth to the assertion that venture capital was handed out? Capital was obtained under false pretenses? (Surely the decisive criterion for the V.C.s was not that a cute kid was involved.) Somebody is investigating, but we already know "it" is a hoax? Then why bother with an investigation?
Sheesh...I'm in a mean mood today...I wish there was a -1 "complete nonsense" mod rating.
You're absolutely right about the craters--it took me a few minutes to adjust my brain to see this picture correctly. At first, I thought the "inky stains" were on top of high spots in the terrain, but when I analyzed the way the light was falling on this scene, I realized I was falling victim to the familiar illusion where depressions in the ground (e.g. craters) can look as though they are raised.
From the position of the "stains" in the craters, are we perhaps simply looking at bare rock where sunlight cooked off the the white stuff? The stains do seem to be located in those portions of the craters that are receiving the greatest illumination. (By the way, is this water ice we're looking at, or frozen methane, or what?)
I did read the article (and several others), and it's quite clear that mounting these nukes on the B52s' weapons pods was a mistake--consequently, the nukes simply escaped from whatever controls that were supposed to govern them.
Were the nuclear warheads scheduled for disposal? Then it makes no sense to say that the B52 flight was part of the disposal operation. After all, the warheads weren't supposed to be in the bombs. Were the empty bombs supposed to be disposed of? I wasn't aware than unarmed bombs required special disposal; if they do (residual radioactivity?), then they should have been packed into a transport jet, not mounted in a bomber's weapons pods.
I fail to see how the entire "disposal" issue has any relevance to the incident. The crucial point is that the ground crews who mounted the weapons did not know they were handling nukes, and the pilots who were flying the planes did not know the nature of their armament. So it is with some urgency that I ask, what the hell did everyone think they were doing?
Forgive my skepticism, but I am underwhelmed by your reasoning that power density = explosions. I've got a couple of pounds of smokeless gunpowder stored in my garage (in containers that meet standard industry safety specs, and in a metal cabinet with no back); the poweder wouldn't be there if I thought there was a reasonable chance that it would spontaneously explode. Yet there's quite a bit of energy concentrated there, no? How about the fuel tank in you car? Gasoline is pretty energetic, but fuel tanks explosions are pretty much confined to the environs of Hollywood.
I can think of much better uses. For example, people I don't like would be replaced by piles of steaming manure (can't have them just disappear, or I'd be forever tripping over them). My boss would look like Goofy. All the chicks would not only look great, but they wouldn't have any clothes. And because the goggles would hide my eyeballs, they couldn't tell whether I was looking them in the eyes when I talk to them or not. Yes! Definite progress.
First off, I wouldn't turn off cookies for this crowd; I'd set the Mozilla default to keep cookies for the current session only. That way, they won't have web sites admonishing them to turn on cookies, but the cookies get wiped when your users close the browser.
As for "Javascript is the devil"...that's a religious slogan if I ever heard one. Besides, everyone knows ActiveX is the devil.
Great Caesar's ghost! I'm Superman!
And there you have the whole of Microsoft's formula for success: to win, they just have to wait. Victory is inevitable. It doesn't matter if a new MS product release is crap; eventually, people will not only buy it, but it will be the only software of that type they will buy. In a universe dominated by Microsoft, crap becomes a de facto standard over time.
Windows is, of course, the paradigm if this strategy. When it was first released (3.11), it was crap--even if you didn't compare it to the best commercial GUI OS of the time, MacOS. People complained, they ridiculed it--yet a lot of them bought it. Microsoft knew 3.11 was a dog, but they didn't worry about it; they knew they had all the time in the world to make it work. In effect, Windows 3.11 was a "placeholder": it was a promise that, some day, Microsoft would deliver a functional operating system with a GUI. You see, they had no real competition: Apple had willingly walled itself off into a closed-hardware ghetto, and it took too much expertise to run any flavor of Unix (especially if you wanted any GUI at all).
People kept right on laughing--and buying--through Windows 95, ME (shudder), and 98. See, if you owned a business, you just got the MS OS of the day plonked onto whatever PCs you bought from Dell or whatever vendor you bought your hardware from. Nobody asked you, "Would you like OS X, Y, or Z with that order?", because there were no alternatives. If you were a normal computer user, it was the same story--you bought whatever came pre-loaded on the box. Microsoft just accepted that a relatively small number of people would buy Macs, and an even smaller number of individuals would get some Unix variant to put on their Intel box.
In technical shops, things were different for a while. Techies wanted Unix; they liked the fact that it was easily configurable and scriptable, and offered by far a better programming environment. So in the early to mid 90s, Unix ruled the technical work-place. But then the managers of those companies started to notice that their peers who worked in more business-oriented companies had toys that they did not. Managers of Unix-oriented companies started to clamor for spreadsheets, Microsoft Word and Power Point. How can you run a company without Power Point? So they went out and bought PCs for themselves. For a while, they were happy...until they noticed that their PCs wouldn't talk to their underlings' Unix boxes. Well, what was that all about? That had to change; so the managers commanded their underlings to throw out their Unix systems and buy PCs like civilized people. As a result, there are now more than a few ex-Unix gurus working at WalMart.
All this time, dark clouds kept gathering around Seattle, and a pulsing red glow was seen...whoops, wrong story. What I meant to write was that with Windows 2000, MS finally delivered what they had promised with 3.11: a stable and functional OS with a decent GUI. The problem was that success is something of an embarrassment in the software world. Once you've built a robust product, there's not usually any reason to build it again. Yet, continued revenue demands that you keep selling new product--people won't pay much for software that hasn't changed in 10 years. Luckily, everyone had gotten accustomed to new operating systems coming out of MS every few years, so MS kept right on reinventing the wheel ("this year's model is much rounder!"). XP was crap at first, but was actually slightly better than Windows 2K once Service Pack 2 had come out. I expect that this pattern will probably continue with Vista: eventually, MS will squash enough of the new bugs they created with their new OS, and the chip-makers will convince everyone they neeed a quad-core CPU, so Vista will even run without noticeably bogging down the average PC.
The really interesting question is how long Microsoft can keep this up. When will the public begin asking the obvious question: "Why doesn't