It's basically common knowledge, what GP is saying. I clearly remember watching both what my dentist's and my GP's secretaries used to type in my data, and it was obviously a client running on a Windows box. In the case of my dentist, there's a whole Windows dental information suite that he runs, which shows him x-rays and everything. He has multiple rooms with dentist's chairs, and each contains an apparently-identical computer; he can view x-rays and records at any of them, so they are obviously networked. How likely is it that this network is separated from the Internet by anything more than a consumer-grade router? Not very.
How much of a threat really is this, relative to tapes left in cars overnight, or the sloppy (or malicious) use of thumb drives? My gut says, "not a huge one," but I don't really know.
Your boss is not going to make a special point of giving you recognition. You need to sell yourself. But you also need to know the time and place. Demanding recognition while in the company is not going to win you many friends.
In the end, your work gets recognized in two places:
1 - Your resume -- where you make yourself sound super-cool (without sounding like you're trying too hard to make yourself sound cool. It's an art.)
2 - A letter of recommendation.
For now, think of your work as earning you a good letter of recommendation.
The way to get "recognition" and "promotion" is to submit that resume and recommendation to another company, which hires you for a larger salary. But naturally,
1 - you don't jump ship until you have the next job lined up,
2 - you don't leave until you've been at your current job for a little while (in your case, I don't think you need to stay more than 6mo to a year, since it's very entry-level).
3 - when you do leave, you don't burn your bridges: You tell your boss and your coworkers how much of a pleasure it has been to work with them, even if you hate their guts.
And then, by leaving, you've gotten your raise and you've gotten your recognition.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Working for one company for your entire life is for suckers. You build a career by moving.
GP was clearly thinking about transportation. Cars, in particular, I'd bet. That's why we need easy ways to store and transmit energy.
Do the Japanese have cars that run on energy stored in superconducting loops? I can pretty safely say that the answer there is no.
Also, I'm sure that Japan imports oil. But if it consumes less than the US, perhaps it's because they live in pedestrian-friendly cities with mass transit (smart) and we live in sprawling strip-mall-and-highway wastelands?
Funny story: A friend of mine in college was Chinese-American, and her father had been a doctor in China when she was a very young child. One night, he came home from a meeting with a businessman, very drunk, and announced that he'd agreed to help the businessman to sell people's organs. His daughter told him this was terrible, but he was drunk and had already been persuaded. The next morning after he sobered up, however, he changed his mind, and was horrified by what he'd said the previous night. In the end, he didn't do it. But I'm sure the businessman found someone else to take his place.
All this said, I'll play devil's advocate: Capital punishment is wrong, but if you're going to do it you might as well save life where possible in the process. Neglecting differences in judicial rights (which are in fact important, but nevermind for now), I'd say that the Chinese "kill and use the organs" approach is more moral than the American "kill and waste the organs" policy. Of course, both are barbaric in comparison to the practice of civilized countries, which have realized that capital punishment is wrong.
You can't exactly use past wrongs to justify current ones.
That said, I agree that this thread has shown remarkably and disappointingly little sympathy for people with no involvement with Tibet besides living under the same government.
If a black man did something horrible to you or your family, you have my sympathies.
A member of my family was beaten to death by a black man in the street. It happened before I was born. Routine mugging gone awry. She spent the rest of her "life" in pain and a vegetative state. It was the woman who raised my mother.
I don't blame race. I blame human nature. Most people of any color are just vicious animals running on fear and greed and desperation.
But I like to think -- or, I hope -- that I am a man and not a beast. And I believe that to be this I need, constantly, to overcome the paranoia that would make me a fearful animal and not a man. I believe abject racism is just one more form of animal paranoia.
I do not believe in a utopia where race does not matter. I learned that again in college, and it was my saddest lesson. You see, racist Chinese people say the same things about white men that you say about blacks -- that they (we) are fetishists, perverts, rapists, deviants, and worse. I learned this the hard way when, for six months, I dated a nice and good-looking girl from Shanghai. People said nasty things, whispered snide comments -- particularly two kinds of people: (1) uneducated whites, and (2) racist Chinese people. My mind's eye saw the caricature of the racist white man -- sitting on his front porch, spitting tobacco, and saying, "Watch out! Them watermelon-eating niggers take our women!" morphing into a Chinese student who was pointing at me, and the "nigger" becoming a stereotyped "Westerner" with my face. She was a nice girl, and though we did not have enough in common to continue the relationship -- our value systems were moving rapidly apart, and it became more and more clear that we, in basic philosophy, wanted very different things -- we certainly did not deserve the kind of comments we received. It was insulting to me and dehumanizing to her: The assumption by her "own people" seemed to be that she could not possibly be appealing as a human being, that the only reason anyone could want to date her was that he were sick, that he were some kind of twisted pervert and that the only appealing quality she could possibly have was the ethnicity she happened to come from. She had warned me when we started that people would say these things, and I had replied naively that it didn't matter, but I guess in fact I had really thought it wouldn't happen enough that it could matter. I had to learn the hard way that this wasn't true. It was severely disillusioning.
I do not want to be like those people who spoke insults and acid. I do not believe in utopia, but I reject their petty tribalism, and I am a better man than they were.
Are you? Are you a better man? A thinking, reasoning being with thoughts as well as instincts? Or are you a beast yourself?
I'm not asking you to change your mind immediately. I'm not telling you to discard what you think just because people call it "racism:" having a name for an idea and saying "it's bad" doesn't by itself mean it's wrong. I'm just asking you to moderate your thoughts for a bit, to let the man overcome the beast. Because I think -- or hope -- that in time and with thoughtfulness, you will conclude differently than you do now -- and I don't think bitterness is a very good route to peace for society, or to happiness for yourself.
I am typically very critical of the CCP, but TacoCowboy speaks the truth. This isn't about the CCP. The quake is a human tragedy. Show some respect. Good people are dead.
Like you, I am particularly disturbed by Chinese nationalists. These rabid haters are ignorant, racist, and unthinking -- and their rants, most disturbingly, belie violent fantasies of Sino-"Western" war. I can think of particular Slashdot users who fit this description, who really do frighten me (though I won't name them here). But Taco Cowboy isn't one of them. if you look at some of his other posts (e.g., this one, or even the one you linked to), it's true that he does have a penchant for defending China, but not rabidly, and not without recognizing China's faults as well. He clearly has opinions, but they strike me as reasonable.
It's true; he's all over this thread. But he makes a point worth making. It's a little sad that he has to be making this point.
Besides, in fact I shouldn't have needed to write most of the above two paragraphs, because your post was really an ad-hominem argument. Does it really matter that it was Taco Cowboy in particular who wrote the sentences to which you were responding? They are either right or wrong on their own merits.
In this case, they were correct.
The quake was a tragedy. Sympathies to those affected.
I was going to point out something like that too, but you beat me to it. Still, I'll point out another angle:
It's true: Einstein didn't make much money for himself. In fact, the statue of him in Washington DC looks like a homeless man.
But "didn't create wealth?" I'd say that in the bigger picture, he did create wealth -- even under the narrow economic definition, "wealth = money." His theories have advanced technology and helped society to create a great deal more wealth: GPS for instance has obvious economic benefits, and depends on General Relativity (since the satellites orbit higher in Earth's gravitational well, the clocks at the heart of GPS run at different speeds. No Einstein, no General Relativity, no GPS.) I'm sure this isn't the only example, but it's the first to spring to mind.
Of course, you can also make the point that there is more to wealth than money. Artistic works represent cultural wealth, for instance; so does science. But others have made that point, so I won't spend more time on it.
That said, I'm not discounting your point: Great ideas that come from African geniuses will surely enrich the world, but they will most enrich those nations with the money to turn those ideas into profitable products. Even if the discoverer collects some sort of royalties, it will simply make him individually wealthy; it will not create industry in Africa.
But Hawking's search is still a good thing. It may not do much in the immediate term for Africa, but it's still good for humanity, and so, eventually, for Africa.
Does anybody actually take a look around the U.S.A.?
1. Bars have parking lots next to them. They get built in strip malls on highways with no public transportation. I always snicker: Drunk driving is illegal and for good reason, but let's face it: What the hell do you expect people to do? It's not like we have public transportation in this country, and, really, how realistic do you think this "designated driver" bullshit is? The fact is, most people drive drunk occasionally. It's dangerous and stupid, but if you're going to be drinking anywhere besides your next-door-neighbors' yard, it's not like the U.S. gives you many practical alternatives.
2. The drinking age is 21. Tell me who the hell starts drinking at 21. Nobody. Everyone breaks the law, and everybody knows it.
We've been engaging in doublethink on alcohol for so long that when facts stare us in the face we can't even see them. Social drinking is a requirement in American culture, but it is incompatible with the way Americans have built their laws, their suburbs, and their society.
I wish something would clear up this cognitive dissonance.
---
And more directly on-topic: It's obvious that MADD hasn't played the game. Once upon a time, the father of a friend of mine wrote Disney a very angry letter about the movie Dogma, which he said was anti-Catholic. Of course, he'd never even seen the film. MADD is doing the same thing here, I'm sure.
There needs to be some rule: Do a cursory fact check; then get outraged.
---
Basically, I just wish people would think more instead of relying on stupid emotional animal instinct. The fact is, MADD would prevent a hell of a lot more drunk-driving deaths by lobbying for convenient trolleys that run by the local pubs -- y'know, the way cities used to be built before this happened -- than they ever will by being angry, screaming, and vengeful. They should think about what they are actually achieving, instead of lashing out emotionally.
Understand that I'm no apologist for alcoholism. I know that's a popular position to take here on Slashdot, but I've seen far too much damage done by alcohol than to just ignore the harm. But you see, I'm practical. Alcohol isn't going away. People who want to drink, will. I will even have a beer on occasion. So let's try to at least make our society compatible with that.
The point I was making was not that you shouldn't go to college. In fact, my friend did -- and to an Ivy-League one at that.
The point I was making was about two other things.
The first was money. 'Narendra's' parents had given all the money that people normally assume you need to hoard to send you kids to college, away to charity. They had made a boatload of cash, and they had decided that it had left their lives empty and they had given it away. Isn't that a dramatic decision? And the point was that, even though they did that, 'Narendra' went to a top-tier school.
The second was philosophy. Neither 'Narendra' nor his parents were the cutthroat, soulless mechanisms you fear we must all become. They took an open-minded, curious, and interested attitude about life with them. And when they worked, what they achieved was recognizably better for it, because it had the spark of art in it.
Let me also emphasize that this is not some story about hippies thirty years ago. 'Narendra' graduated in 2007.
This is the saddest thing I have ever read in a long while. What kind of children can you raise with an attitude like that? Mechanical ones?
Let me tell you a story. It's about a friend of mine from college.
Before he was born, his parents were successful entrepreneurs. Neither had attended college, but that didn't matter: They owned a factory, and they made lots of money. They had a nice, big house, and they drove BMWs.
Then one day they decided their lives were meaningless as things stood. They sold the factory; they sold their house; they sold their cars. They kept just enough to buy a much smaller house down in New Mexico, and gave the rest away -- almost everything -- to charity.
Since then, they've worked a string of not-very-lucrative jobs, as much for the purpose of trying out different walks of life as getting a paycheck. They don't make much, but they don't spend much either, so they make ends meet.
Then my friend, their son, was born.
For them, it didn't change much, really. They didn't decide, "We need to make tons of money so we can send Narendra to college." They just kept on living; they raised him to appreciate life, and he did well on his own.
I use the name, 'Narendra,' but this is not his real name. However, it captures something true: Although he and his parents are Caucasian, his name was Sanskrit. That tells you something about their philosophy.
So what happened for 'Narendra?' He went to school, and when he wasn't in school he spent a lot of time outside learning about animals -- really, these were important, and interesting, things to him -- and generally cultivated an open-minded curiosity. Eventually, he reached his senior year in high school, and he approached his parents with an idea:
Narendra: "So, I was thinking about going to college."
Parents: "Hmm... ok. You know you don't have to, right? Are you sure?"
Narendra: "Yeah, I think do want to."
Parents: "Well, Ok! Sure. Where do you want to go?"
So, Narendra looked around, and picked a college, pretty much by looking at the brochure; he thought it looked nice. It was at pretty much the opposite corner of the country, in icy New Hampshire. That was half the appeal; he'd never lived someplace like that before.
And so, Narendra applied to an Ivy league college. And was admitted. And received as much financial aid as he needed.
I think there's something to learn from the story of my friend and his parents. He was an intelligent, open-minded person who consistently did well -- and he did it with a philosophy which always felt healthier than that of the stressing, striving, Type-A overachievers. He achieved, sure -- but it seemed to be because he thought it'd be a nice idea to.
Right now, I feel a little too much like a machine. But I hope that one day I can follow that example, at least a little bit. He succeeded by going along a completely path than the one you describe, and he seemed entirely better for it. Maybe you and I can both learn from him?
I have much the same perception as Yosho. I am under the impression that most 'geeks' do drink, like most anybody else (I have heard plenty of stories from Caltech!) Yet I also think, again agreeing with Yosho, that non-drinkers are more common among more intelligent people, and the decision not to drink is more respected.
It's not an issue I have investigated scientifically.
I'd be careful with "poll results" though. I've known at least one guy who would say things like "I don't really drink" when talking to a certain set of people, and then go get alcohol poisoning with another set of people. I think that many people try to present themselves -- perhaps unconsciously -- as more like the person they're talking to than they really are, and they use equivocating terms like "not really" to avoid feeling dishonest when they do. So I'd be careful in interpreting your numbers, if you've been counting, because the simple fact is that all the people you talked to were talking to you, and this affects their responses.
I think most people just follow the crowd. I drink hardly at all -- I had two drinks over my entire four years of college, have had fewer than a dozen drinks in my life, and have never been drunk -- and when I have dated girls who used to drink in line with their college peers (i.e., heavily), they adopted habits much more like mine, even though I didn't make a big deal about it. People just follow example. So if somebody is talking to you, there's an extent to which they'll attempt to mirror you, and follow yours.
Thanks. I really appreciate the amount of respect and appreciation I get from this site.
Actually, I think I'd assumed that you'd been borrowing heavily from another source in your summary, so I'm surprised to find you replying personally. I don't think I'd have been quite so undiplomatic if I'd realized I was commenting on a fellow slashdotter's summary, and not the cut-and-pasted writing of a staff writer at informit. I probably wouldn't have used quite so provocative a title as "Worst Summary Ever," for instance.
Let me say that there are some very good things about your summary. I'm serious here. First, you introduced Donald Knuth; that was good. A quick topic introduction is something easy to do yet too-often left out of Slashdot summaries; I appreciate that you took the time to include one. Your cross-references to other slashdot stories were also good, as was your link to a definition of 'literate programming.'
Donald Knuth is not "playing hardball." Nobody needs to call the interview "raw and uncut," or "unplugged."
Wow, where exactly did I (or CmdrTaco) use any of those phrases?
OK, you've got a fair point. I was projecting a bit. I see that, very often, the mainstream media spins what people say to make for a better story, and in the process get the public unfairly angry at someone who was simply misrepresented.
That said, I still do get a little bit of that taste from your summary -- of a tendency to sensationalize the unsensational to make for a better headline, without much concern for what it means to the people who are being represented. This is a mistake I make too sometimes, but I've gotten rather sensitive to it, and I think we should avoid it.
Calling something a "complete waste of time" is, in my book at least, "ripping" on something. I didn't "sully his good name," I posted what I found interesting.
See, that's what I thought was out of context. But some other posters have replied on this topic, so I won't repeat them.
You should also point out he has prostate cancer and I left that out. God, what horrible spin I used! You'd think I was talking about someone whose life wasn't at risk, the way I spun that summary!
I wasn't aware of that; that's really too bad. I'm not sure what your point is here, though. Although it's conceivable that you could have tastefully included a reference to Knuth's health problems, I think it's probably for the best that you left that out, as, I agree, it's not relevant.
Knuth is a well-respected figure who makes moderate, thoughtful statements.
I happen to disagree with his stances on multi-core chips and unit testing. I didn't find anything thoughtful about what he said and really wish he would have elaborated on why unit testing is a complete waste of time.
Again, I'll try to avoid repeating what other posters have said, but I'll say that that's not at all what I get from the interview. He was asked to comment on unit testing and multiple cores, but generally acknowledged that these were topics outside of his area of expertise, and said that he'd continue to focus on serial algorithms for combinatorial problems, as that's what he's good at.
From the summary, you'd think he was a trash-talking pro-wrestler.
Actually, after reading the article, I did find him to be a bit preachy. Apparently you and everyone else find him unquestionably correct in all his statements from that interview.
Preachy? He's a professor; it's almost his job. Even so, I didn't find him annoyingly so. He seemed pretty up-front about what topics he was expert on and what topics he wasn't -- and both of the topics you seem particularly interested in (multithreading and unit testing) were areas he explicit
That's a mischaracterization of literate programming.
The whole idea of literate programming is to basically write good technical documentation -- think (readable) academic CS papers -- that you can in effect execute. What many people do with Mathematica and Maple worksheets is effectively literate programming.
It has nothing to do with what language you use, and is certainly not about making your code more COBOL-esque.
Maybe think of it this way: Good documentation should accurately describe what your code does. In literate programming, the computer code is just the "comments" you add to your documentation so that the computer can execute it.
The summary sounds like it was written by the headline-producing monkeys at Fox, CNN -- or hell, at the Jerry Springer show. Donald Knuth is not "playing hardball." Nobody needs to call the interview "raw and uncut," or "unplugged."
The interview has almost nothing to do with unit testing and the little Knuth does have to say about the practice is hardly "ripping."
When will people stop sullying peoples' good names by sensationalizing everything they say?
Knuth is a well-respected figure who makes moderate, thoughtful statements. From the summary, you'd think he was a trash-talking pro-wrestler.
Slashdot Mirror
It's basically common knowledge, what GP is saying. I clearly remember watching both what my dentist's and my GP's secretaries used to type in my data, and it was obviously a client running on a Windows box. In the case of my dentist, there's a whole Windows dental information suite that he runs, which shows him x-rays and everything. He has multiple rooms with dentist's chairs, and each contains an apparently-identical computer; he can view x-rays and records at any of them, so they are obviously networked. How likely is it that this network is separated from the Internet by anything more than a consumer-grade router? Not very.
How much of a threat really is this, relative to tapes left in cars overnight, or the sloppy (or malicious) use of thumb drives? My gut says, "not a huge one," but I don't really know.
Your boss is not going to make a special point of giving you recognition. You need to sell yourself. But you also need to know the time and place. Demanding recognition while in the company is not going to win you many friends.
In the end, your work gets recognized in two places:
1 - Your resume -- where you make yourself sound super-cool (without sounding like you're trying too hard to make yourself sound cool. It's an art.)
2 - A letter of recommendation.
For now, think of your work as earning you a good letter of recommendation.
The way to get "recognition" and "promotion" is to submit that resume and recommendation to another company, which hires you for a larger salary. But naturally,
1 - you don't jump ship until you have the next job lined up,
2 - you don't leave until you've been at your current job for a little while (in your case, I don't think you need to stay more than 6mo to a year, since it's very entry-level).
3 - when you do leave, you don't burn your bridges: You tell your boss and your coworkers how much of a pleasure it has been to work with them, even if you hate their guts.
And then, by leaving, you've gotten your raise and you've gotten your recognition.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Working for one company for your entire life is for suckers. You build a career by moving.
Ummm...
GP was clearly thinking about transportation. Cars, in particular, I'd bet. That's why we need easy ways to store and transmit energy.
Do the Japanese have cars that run on energy stored in superconducting loops? I can pretty safely say that the answer there is no.
Also, I'm sure that Japan imports oil. But if it consumes less than the US, perhaps it's because they live in pedestrian-friendly cities with mass transit (smart) and we live in sprawling strip-mall-and-highway wastelands?
I think people do it for the life experience, and not as a long-term career move.
Actually, they're quite tasty as General Tso's...
*bump* *set* *spike*
Wow. Never thought I'd see that out in the open.
Funny story: A friend of mine in college was Chinese-American, and her father had been a doctor in China when she was a very young child. One night, he came home from a meeting with a businessman, very drunk, and announced that he'd agreed to help the businessman to sell people's organs. His daughter told him this was terrible, but he was drunk and had already been persuaded. The next morning after he sobered up, however, he changed his mind, and was horrified by what he'd said the previous night. In the end, he didn't do it. But I'm sure the businessman found someone else to take his place.
All this said, I'll play devil's advocate: Capital punishment is wrong, but if you're going to do it you might as well save life where possible in the process. Neglecting differences in judicial rights (which are in fact important, but nevermind for now), I'd say that the Chinese "kill and use the organs" approach is more moral than the American "kill and waste the organs" policy. Of course, both are barbaric in comparison to the practice of civilized countries, which have realized that capital punishment is wrong.
Indeed. I am sick of these kinds of arguments.
This post is off topic only insofar as all of the highly political responses in this thread are off topic.
You can't exactly use past wrongs to justify current ones.
That said, I agree that this thread has shown remarkably and disappointingly little sympathy for people with no involvement with Tibet besides living under the same government.
This is simply a human tragedy.
If a black man did something horrible to you or your family, you have my sympathies.
A member of my family was beaten to death by a black man in the street. It happened before I was born. Routine mugging gone awry. She spent the rest of her "life" in pain and a vegetative state. It was the woman who raised my mother.
I don't blame race. I blame human nature. Most people of any color are just vicious animals running on fear and greed and desperation.
But I like to think -- or, I hope -- that I am a man and not a beast. And I believe that to be this I need, constantly, to overcome the paranoia that would make me a fearful animal and not a man. I believe abject racism is just one more form of animal paranoia.
I do not believe in a utopia where race does not matter. I learned that again in college, and it was my saddest lesson. You see, racist Chinese people say the same things about white men that you say about blacks -- that they (we) are fetishists, perverts, rapists, deviants, and worse. I learned this the hard way when, for six months, I dated a nice and good-looking girl from Shanghai. People said nasty things, whispered snide comments -- particularly two kinds of people: (1) uneducated whites, and (2) racist Chinese people. My mind's eye saw the caricature of the racist white man -- sitting on his front porch, spitting tobacco, and saying, "Watch out! Them watermelon-eating niggers take our women!" morphing into a Chinese student who was pointing at me, and the "nigger" becoming a stereotyped "Westerner" with my face. She was a nice girl, and though we did not have enough in common to continue the relationship -- our value systems were moving rapidly apart, and it became more and more clear that we, in basic philosophy, wanted very different things -- we certainly did not deserve the kind of comments we received. It was insulting to me and dehumanizing to her: The assumption by her "own people" seemed to be that she could not possibly be appealing as a human being, that the only reason anyone could want to date her was that he were sick, that he were some kind of twisted pervert and that the only appealing quality she could possibly have was the ethnicity she happened to come from. She had warned me when we started that people would say these things, and I had replied naively that it didn't matter, but I guess in fact I had really thought it wouldn't happen enough that it could matter. I had to learn the hard way that this wasn't true. It was severely disillusioning.
I do not want to be like those people who spoke insults and acid. I do not believe in utopia, but I reject their petty tribalism, and I am a better man than they were.
Are you? Are you a better man? A thinking, reasoning being with thoughts as well as instincts? Or are you a beast yourself?
I'm not asking you to change your mind immediately. I'm not telling you to discard what you think just because people call it "racism:" having a name for an idea and saying "it's bad" doesn't by itself mean it's wrong. I'm just asking you to moderate your thoughts for a bit, to let the man overcome the beast. Because I think -- or hope -- that in time and with thoughtfulness, you will conclude differently than you do now -- and I don't think bitterness is a very good route to peace for society, or to happiness for yourself.
Cheers.
I am typically very critical of the CCP, but TacoCowboy speaks the truth. This isn't about the CCP. The quake is a human tragedy. Show some respect. Good people are dead.
Like you, I am particularly disturbed by Chinese nationalists. These rabid haters are ignorant, racist, and unthinking -- and their rants, most disturbingly, belie violent fantasies of Sino-"Western" war. I can think of particular Slashdot users who fit this description, who really do frighten me (though I won't name them here). But Taco Cowboy isn't one of them. if you look at some of his other posts (e.g., this one, or even the one you linked to), it's true that he does have a penchant for defending China, but not rabidly, and not without recognizing China's faults as well. He clearly has opinions, but they strike me as reasonable.
It's true; he's all over this thread. But he makes a point worth making. It's a little sad that he has to be making this point.
Besides, in fact I shouldn't have needed to write most of the above two paragraphs, because your post was really an ad-hominem argument. Does it really matter that it was Taco Cowboy in particular who wrote the sentences to which you were responding? They are either right or wrong on their own merits.
In this case, they were correct.
The quake was a tragedy. Sympathies to those affected.
Like 'Monkey,' I had to look up this 'Jenkem' stuff. It is apparently a hoax which has been debunked. See Monkey's link.
No reply to the rest of your post.
I was going to point out something like that too, but you beat me to it. Still, I'll point out another angle:
It's true: Einstein didn't make much money for himself. In fact, the statue of him in Washington DC looks like a homeless man.
But "didn't create wealth?" I'd say that in the bigger picture, he did create wealth -- even under the narrow economic definition, "wealth = money." His theories have advanced technology and helped society to create a great deal more wealth: GPS for instance has obvious economic benefits, and depends on General Relativity (since the satellites orbit higher in Earth's gravitational well, the clocks at the heart of GPS run at different speeds. No Einstein, no General Relativity, no GPS.) I'm sure this isn't the only example, but it's the first to spring to mind.
Of course, you can also make the point that there is more to wealth than money. Artistic works represent cultural wealth, for instance; so does science. But others have made that point, so I won't spend more time on it.
That said, I'm not discounting your point: Great ideas that come from African geniuses will surely enrich the world, but they will most enrich those nations with the money to turn those ideas into profitable products. Even if the discoverer collects some sort of royalties, it will simply make him individually wealthy; it will not create industry in Africa.
But Hawking's search is still a good thing. It may not do much in the immediate term for Africa, but it's still good for humanity, and so, eventually, for Africa.
Beware these thoughts!! You must doublethink, citizen!
Does anybody actually take a look around the U.S.A.?
1. Bars have parking lots next to them. They get built in strip malls on highways with no public transportation. I always snicker: Drunk driving is illegal and for good reason, but let's face it: What the hell do you expect people to do? It's not like we have public transportation in this country, and, really, how realistic do you think this "designated driver" bullshit is? The fact is, most people drive drunk occasionally. It's dangerous and stupid, but if you're going to be drinking anywhere besides your next-door-neighbors' yard, it's not like the U.S. gives you many practical alternatives.
2. The drinking age is 21. Tell me who the hell starts drinking at 21. Nobody. Everyone breaks the law, and everybody knows it.
We've been engaging in doublethink on alcohol for so long that when facts stare us in the face we can't even see them. Social drinking is a requirement in American culture, but it is incompatible with the way Americans have built their laws, their suburbs, and their society.
I wish something would clear up this cognitive dissonance.
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And more directly on-topic: It's obvious that MADD hasn't played the game. Once upon a time, the father of a friend of mine wrote Disney a very angry letter about the movie Dogma, which he said was anti-Catholic. Of course, he'd never even seen the film. MADD is doing the same thing here, I'm sure.
There needs to be some rule: Do a cursory fact check; then get outraged.
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Basically, I just wish people would think more instead of relying on stupid emotional animal instinct. The fact is, MADD would prevent a hell of a lot more drunk-driving deaths by lobbying for convenient trolleys that run by the local pubs -- y'know, the way cities used to be built before this happened -- than they ever will by being angry, screaming, and vengeful. They should think about what they are actually achieving, instead of lashing out emotionally.
Understand that I'm no apologist for alcoholism. I know that's a popular position to take here on Slashdot, but I've seen far too much damage done by alcohol than to just ignore the harm. But you see, I'm practical. Alcohol isn't going away. People who want to drink, will. I will even have a beer on occasion. So let's try to at least make our society compatible with that.
The point I was making was not that you shouldn't go to college. In fact, my friend did -- and to an Ivy-League one at that.
The point I was making was about two other things.
The first was money. 'Narendra's' parents had given all the money that people normally assume you need to hoard to send you kids to college, away to charity. They had made a boatload of cash, and they had decided that it had left their lives empty and they had given it away. Isn't that a dramatic decision? And the point was that, even though they did that, 'Narendra' went to a top-tier school.
The second was philosophy. Neither 'Narendra' nor his parents were the cutthroat, soulless mechanisms you fear we must all become. They took an open-minded, curious, and interested attitude about life with them. And when they worked, what they achieved was recognizably better for it, because it had the spark of art in it.
Let me also emphasize that this is not some story about hippies thirty years ago. 'Narendra' graduated in 2007.
So you're making films now? That's really cool. How's that going? How long have you been doing it for now?
This is the saddest thing I have ever read in a long while. What kind of children can you raise with an attitude like that? Mechanical ones?
Let me tell you a story. It's about a friend of mine from college.
Before he was born, his parents were successful entrepreneurs. Neither had attended college, but that didn't matter: They owned a factory, and they made lots of money. They had a nice, big house, and they drove BMWs.
Then one day they decided their lives were meaningless as things stood. They sold the factory; they sold their house; they sold their cars. They kept just enough to buy a much smaller house down in New Mexico, and gave the rest away -- almost everything -- to charity.
Since then, they've worked a string of not-very-lucrative jobs, as much for the purpose of trying out different walks of life as getting a paycheck. They don't make much, but they don't spend much either, so they make ends meet.
Then my friend, their son, was born.
For them, it didn't change much, really. They didn't decide, "We need to make tons of money so we can send Narendra to college." They just kept on living; they raised him to appreciate life, and he did well on his own.
I use the name, 'Narendra,' but this is not his real name. However, it captures something true: Although he and his parents are Caucasian, his name was Sanskrit. That tells you something about their philosophy.
So what happened for 'Narendra?' He went to school, and when he wasn't in school he spent a lot of time outside learning about animals -- really, these were important, and interesting, things to him -- and generally cultivated an open-minded curiosity. Eventually, he reached his senior year in high school, and he approached his parents with an idea:
Narendra: "So, I was thinking about going to college."
Parents: "Hmm... ok. You know you don't have to, right? Are you sure?"
Narendra: "Yeah, I think do want to."
Parents: "Well, Ok! Sure. Where do you want to go?"
So, Narendra looked around, and picked a college, pretty much by looking at the brochure; he thought it looked nice. It was at pretty much the opposite corner of the country, in icy New Hampshire. That was half the appeal; he'd never lived someplace like that before.
And so, Narendra applied to an Ivy league college. And was admitted. And received as much financial aid as he needed.
I think there's something to learn from the story of my friend and his parents. He was an intelligent, open-minded person who consistently did well -- and he did it with a philosophy which always felt healthier than that of the stressing, striving, Type-A overachievers. He achieved, sure -- but it seemed to be because he thought it'd be a nice idea to.
Right now, I feel a little too much like a machine. But I hope that one day I can follow that example, at least a little bit. He succeeded by going along a completely path than the one you describe, and he seemed entirely better for it. Maybe you and I can both learn from him?
I have much the same perception as Yosho. I am under the impression that most 'geeks' do drink, like most anybody else (I have heard plenty of stories from Caltech!) Yet I also think, again agreeing with Yosho, that non-drinkers are more common among more intelligent people, and the decision not to drink is more respected.
It's not an issue I have investigated scientifically.
I'd be careful with "poll results" though. I've known at least one guy who would say things like "I don't really drink" when talking to a certain set of people, and then go get alcohol poisoning with another set of people. I think that many people try to present themselves -- perhaps unconsciously -- as more like the person they're talking to than they really are, and they use equivocating terms like "not really" to avoid feeling dishonest when they do. So I'd be careful in interpreting your numbers, if you've been counting, because the simple fact is that all the people you talked to were talking to you, and this affects their responses.
I think most people just follow the crowd. I drink hardly at all -- I had two drinks over my entire four years of college, have had fewer than a dozen drinks in my life, and have never been drunk -- and when I have dated girls who used to drink in line with their college peers (i.e., heavily), they adopted habits much more like mine, even though I didn't make a big deal about it. People just follow example. So if somebody is talking to you, there's an extent to which they'll attempt to mirror you, and follow yours.
Parent is the best post in this thread.
But they won't be able to tell the donuts and the coffee mugs apart!! :-)
Dumb question, and possibly OT: What's the NHK?
Worst Summary Ever
Thanks. I really appreciate the amount of respect and appreciation I get from this site.
Actually, I think I'd assumed that you'd been borrowing heavily from another source in your summary, so I'm surprised to find you replying personally. I don't think I'd have been quite so undiplomatic if I'd realized I was commenting on a fellow slashdotter's summary, and not the cut-and-pasted writing of a staff writer at informit. I probably wouldn't have used quite so provocative a title as "Worst Summary Ever," for instance.
Let me say that there are some very good things about your summary. I'm serious here. First, you introduced Donald Knuth; that was good. A quick topic introduction is something easy to do yet too-often left out of Slashdot summaries; I appreciate that you took the time to include one. Your cross-references to other slashdot stories were also good, as was your link to a definition of 'literate programming.'
Donald Knuth is not "playing hardball." Nobody needs to call the interview "raw and uncut," or "unplugged."
Wow, where exactly did I (or CmdrTaco) use any of those phrases?
OK, you've got a fair point. I was projecting a bit. I see that, very often, the mainstream media spins what people say to make for a better story, and in the process get the public unfairly angry at someone who was simply misrepresented.
That said, I still do get a little bit of that taste from your summary -- of a tendency to sensationalize the unsensational to make for a better headline, without much concern for what it means to the people who are being represented. This is a mistake I make too sometimes, but I've gotten rather sensitive to it, and I think we should avoid it.
Calling something a "complete waste of time" is, in my book at least, "ripping" on something. I didn't "sully his good name," I posted what I found interesting.
See, that's what I thought was out of context. But some other posters have replied on this topic, so I won't repeat them.
You should also point out he has prostate cancer and I left that out. God, what horrible spin I used! You'd think I was talking about someone whose life wasn't at risk, the way I spun that summary!
I wasn't aware of that; that's really too bad. I'm not sure what your point is here, though. Although it's conceivable that you could have tastefully included a reference to Knuth's health problems, I think it's probably for the best that you left that out, as, I agree, it's not relevant.
Knuth is a well-respected figure who makes moderate, thoughtful statements.
I happen to disagree with his stances on multi-core chips and unit testing. I didn't find anything thoughtful about what he said and really wish he would have elaborated on why unit testing is a complete waste of time.
Again, I'll try to avoid repeating what other posters have said, but I'll say that that's not at all what I get from the interview. He was asked to comment on unit testing and multiple cores, but generally acknowledged that these were topics outside of his area of expertise, and said that he'd continue to focus on serial algorithms for combinatorial problems, as that's what he's good at.
From the summary, you'd think he was a trash-talking pro-wrestler.
Actually, after reading the article, I did find him to be a bit preachy. Apparently you and everyone else find him unquestionably correct in all his statements from that interview.
Preachy? He's a professor; it's almost his job. Even so, I didn't find him annoyingly so. He seemed pretty up-front about what topics he was expert on and what topics he wasn't -- and both of the topics you seem particularly interested in (multithreading and unit testing) were areas he explicit
That's a mischaracterization of literate programming.
The whole idea of literate programming is to basically write good technical documentation -- think (readable) academic CS papers -- that you can in effect execute. What many people do with Mathematica and Maple worksheets is effectively literate programming.
It has nothing to do with what language you use, and is certainly not about making your code more COBOL-esque.
Maybe think of it this way: Good documentation should accurately describe what your code does. In literate programming, the computer code is just the "comments" you add to your documentation so that the computer can execute it.
See this post, for instance.
The summary sounds like it was written by the headline-producing monkeys at Fox, CNN -- or hell, at the Jerry Springer show. Donald Knuth is not "playing hardball." Nobody needs to call the interview "raw and uncut," or "unplugged."
The interview has almost nothing to do with unit testing and the little Knuth does have to say about the practice is hardly "ripping."
When will people stop sullying peoples' good names by sensationalizing everything they say?
Knuth is a well-respected figure who makes moderate, thoughtful statements. From the summary, you'd think he was a trash-talking pro-wrestler.
(My mistake; I thought you were replying to dmomo.)