When you claim that WP is a community-driven encyclopedia
He claimed it is a community-written encyclopedia. There's a difference.
it is immoral to overrule the community.
Which community? The few dozen active people or the ten thousands of contributors?
And you are free to fork Wikipedia and make one that defers to the community more. And forking Free projects certainly works; EGCS is the most notable example. X.org is the second. If the community (as opposed to a few vocal whiners) wants changes, they will leave and go elsewhere if it offers them something better.
He didn't have to pretend that WP is a democracy, but he did
He did not. He claimed it was run by consensus. He was calld "benevolent dictator" often and "god-king" occasionally, in the early days of the project.
IMHO this is part of what's wrong with Wikipedia. They claim to be open to all and to have a community, deciding many things by consensus.
Except when Jimbo, or another well-known admin overrules everyone else.
So? I keep seeing this argument repeated and I don't know why it matters. Did Jimbo Wales have the moral responsibility to turn over the reins to the community when he started the encyclopedia? And did you do anything towards starting a community-edited encyclopedia?
I will not be installing Vista unless/until this Fascistic
You're the type of person to call this Fascistic [sic] -- the heck does Vista have to do with Mussolini? -- and yet you say you would install Vista under some circumstances? Go and get Linux or a *BSD instead.
After I was done I got a call from him asking if he could have his old keyboard back because the keys on the new one weren't the same. I looked at the old one and compared it to mine (the same type he had).
A call. Meaning you weren't there. So you spent effort to go back, compare keyboards, and complain.
If you had said "Certainly; I'll drop the old keyboard by when I go by your department" / "I'll send it by interdepartmental mail" / "Come pick it up from my office", you wouldn't have had to spend any actual effort and would've made the user happy.
There's a reason he's called the user. He's the one using it. You're paid to support him, not to decide what he likes.
As other people have said but not as clearly, grandparent was talking about MIT's particular setup.
You do need to register your MAC to get a public IP address over DHCP, because they do keep track of who has which IP (legal and administrative reasons).
"IST" was a typo for IS&T = Information Services and Technology, the network-running people at MIT.
-geofft.mit.edu (18.242.0.29).
18.242.*.* is my dorm. That's 65536 IP addresses for under 400 residents.
then making it easier to apply for a grant just gives the people who have to evaluate grant applications way more work having to evaluate more frivilous grant requests.
Suppose the government says that anyone applying for a grant must not have had sex for the past month. This has the same effect, of making it more difficult to submit grant applications for many - but not all - researchers.
But do you really want sexually-deprived people taking your tax money in preference to sexually-active people? No, mainly because this has nothing to do with what research they're doing and what the usefulness is.
Same with Windows. What does using Windows have to do with getting a grant?
He's the head of the organization and he's "infallible".
Only when he speaks with official authority (ex cathedra, etc.) regarding points of doctrine. If you see him on the street and he says "It's going to be a nice day today," that doesn't mean he had a revelation from God to that effect.
What he says goes, or he can boot you from the church.
Yeah right. Then why were there up to three "popes" at once in the early 1300s? Simple, because the Pope decided to boot people from the church, but the people said no and booted the Pope instead.
Either way, this means that all these bad people are operating with his implicit approval.
How does that follow from infalliblity? You're saying that every bad person who's been baptized Catholic has the implicit approval of the Pope.
Based on your logic, no leader should ever be held accountable for the actions of his subordinates, unless specifcally ordered by him. I don't see how a person with any sort of decent moral compass can subscribe to such a view. Even if he can't stop something from happening, he's still responsible for taking adequate steps to enure it doesn't happen again.
Not if the leader isn't responsible for the appointment of the subordinates and has no real power to get rid of them or replace them. To take an extreme analogy, it's like saying "It's your fault you have a cold; you're the one with lungs." I didn't choose my lungs and I have no alternative. More to the point, it's like blaming the editor-in-chief of the New York Times for Jayson Blair's misreporting. How dare he not thoroughly fact-check every single article published? How dare he let a single person be hired without personally conducting a background check?
And as far as the "cover-up" charge, the quotes read more to me like the Vatican saying, "We've handled crime in our own ranks for over a thousand years, when there was no government strong enough to handle it. We've fought for the 'benefit of the clergy' for centuries so that we could try priests in canon courts, not civil. We can punish corrupt priests ourselves. And, being Christian, we know that they'll get a hell of a lot of punishment [sorry] sooner or later, so we might as well excommunicate them quietly and, without raising a scene, work with local authorities to move the corrupt priests away from children. Because the Catholic church is greatly falling in influence right now, and it's worth not rendering these criminals to the civil authorities, in exchange for ensuring that people don't think that this corruption is symptomatic of the Church, and by extension Christianity, and therefore turn away from the faith. It would be giving Satan an even greater foothold if he not only corrupts priests but also makes the Church repulsive for a large number of souls."
I don't agree with all of it, but it's defensible.
I, and MANY individuals who are not Christians, aren't convinced that it's a man made problem that is fixable by cutting down on fossil fuel consumption in the US (although I'm also very interested in looking for cleaner safer fuel sources).
And I, and MANY individuals who are Christians, are convinced that we have done a lot to upset the earth's balance over the last century or so, and that we could have avoided most if not all of this problem if we didn't burn so many fossil fuels.
So yeah, your belief in Christ has absolutely nothing to do with your belief in global warming.
You may have lost the job because you failed to ask what kind of code the manager wanted, not because you failed to read his mind or guess his intent.
Indeed. I read the GP's two questions as more devious versions of "Design Bill Gates' bathroom", where the correct answer is "What does Bill Gates want in his bathroom?" followed by making it even cooler than what he wants.
If you're asked to code something that has more than a trivial amount of design in it, you should ask how it needs to be designed. Not having a proper design is a larger failure than having a bug in your code, because a bug normally takes a one-line fix but a design problem takes an entire rewrite.
And if you're too arrogant to ask about the design requirements (or, alternately, too weak to accept a reasonably accurate answer and then start coding) then you don't deserve the job.
He emailed us and asked why he hadn't gotten the position. We made the mistake of politely explaining what our issues with him were. He used that explanation to kick off some sort of lawsuit against our company.
I wonder if you could've nicely asked him to sign a simple right-to-sue waiver or something? Analogous to an NDA?
I mean, there are valid reasons to hate the Roman Catholic Church (I don't subscribe to them -- I attend Catholic services -- but I can certainly understand them and I certainly think the Catholic Church is still doing quite a few things wrong). But the Pope personally? Do you really think he has that much power? There's a culture of powerful subordinates that are going to respect him as their spiritual father but not as their boss, and I'd blame them for the misdoings of the Vatican, not Mr. Ratzinger as a person.
I'm at MIT, and we have reasonably good (and free, of course) WiFi coverage essentially everywhere indoors on campus. So it's reasonable to use Skype, after overclocking the phone from 200 to 240 MHz (otherwise the de/compression runs too slowly and the audio gets choppy). In fact, there are spots in buildings where the cell phone signal is almost too weak to even connect, but Skype works fine.
But it'll be about as cool as wiping a Mac disk and installing Linux: a little more customization at the expense of quite a bit of coolness.
I'm running Skype, as well as a lot of other apps, on a Windows Mobile smartphone with WiFi that cost about $150. It works pretty well. I can't see the motivation to switch to the iPhone unless I switch to Cingular and get the entire benefit of the device.
So I'm assuming you got these files from an old hard drive.
Can you not boot up off that hard drive, launch iTunes, click "log in", and see what the default username is?
And seriously, how many e-mail addresses does she have that she can't try them all in the recovery field? (I've done this more than once for my Apple ID, because I only use it for the Apple Store, and I've only bought things maybe three times in the last 6 years.)
I contend that the correct response to this statement would have been involuntary entry to an organ donation programme.
I contend that you are as immoral as the radio hosts. Or worse, since they were countering terrorists (who kill people) and you were only countering a consumer (who aids capitalism).
Nope. The appeal to authority fallacy is when you say "This is from a well-known source, so it must be true," or "This is from an unknown source, so it must be false." Saying "This is from a crap source, so it's crap" is not a fallacy.
More precisely, what he's saying is "This is from an unreviewed and biased source, whereas the other is from a peer-reviewed and unbiased source, so we should not give them anywhere near equal weight." atheism.about.com is about as valid a website for these discussions as www.jackchick.com. Both have agendas, both are unreviewed, and both are going to ignore evidence when it's convenient.
OK, I can agree with that. I didn't see that you were suggesting that pay raises should come out of the budget.
But perhaps your town should vote to decrease school budgets, then, and at the voter level decide that the money should go solely to teacher salaries. The voters should pay for it - the voters are paying for all the money the school has, anyway, and if the school's mishandling the money, the voters should cease to trust the school system with their money, and make the budgeting decisions themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
When you claim that WP is a community-driven encyclopedia
He claimed it is a community-written encyclopedia. There's a difference.
it is immoral to overrule the community.
Which community? The few dozen active people or the ten thousands of contributors?
And you are free to fork Wikipedia and make one that defers to the community more. And forking Free projects certainly works; EGCS is the most notable example. X.org is the second. If the community (as opposed to a few vocal whiners) wants changes, they will leave and go elsewhere if it offers them something better.
He didn't have to pretend that WP is a democracy, but he did
He did not. He claimed it was run by consensus. He was calld "benevolent dictator" often and "god-king" occasionally, in the early days of the project.
So? I keep seeing this argument repeated and I don't know why it matters. Did Jimbo Wales have the moral responsibility to turn over the reins to the community when he started the encyclopedia? And did you do anything towards starting a community-edited encyclopedia?
I will not be installing Vista unless/until this Fascistic
You're the type of person to call this Fascistic [sic] -- the heck does Vista have to do with Mussolini? -- and yet you say you would install Vista under some circumstances? Go and get Linux or a *BSD instead.
After I was done I got a call from him asking if he could have his old keyboard back because the keys on the new one weren't the same. I looked at the old one and compared it to mine (the same type he had).
A call. Meaning you weren't there. So you spent effort to go back, compare keyboards, and complain.
If you had said "Certainly; I'll drop the old keyboard by when I go by your department" / "I'll send it by interdepartmental mail" / "Come pick it up from my office", you wouldn't have had to spend any actual effort and would've made the user happy.
There's a reason he's called the user. He's the one using it. You're paid to support him, not to decide what he likes.
As other people have said but not as clearly, grandparent was talking about MIT's particular setup.
You do need to register your MAC to get a public IP address over DHCP, because they do keep track of who has which IP (legal and administrative reasons).
"IST" was a typo for IS&T = Information Services and Technology, the network-running people at MIT.
-geofft.mit.edu (18.242.0.29).
18.242.*.* is my dorm. That's 65536 IP addresses for under 400 residents.
Hm, nevermind, saw your other comment.
you don't really have an illiteracy problem there?
I think you misread the summary. He said highest literacy rate, not highest illiteracy rate. Kerala is essentially 100% literate.
I didn't know you could get paid for writing comments on Slashdot! Sign me up!
Oh, and while you're at it, you might want to look up a little-known provision about ex post facto application of laws.
then making it easier to apply for a grant just gives the people who have to evaluate grant applications way more work having to evaluate more frivilous grant requests.
Suppose the government says that anyone applying for a grant must not have had sex for the past month. This has the same effect, of making it more difficult to submit grant applications for many - but not all - researchers.
But do you really want sexually-deprived people taking your tax money in preference to sexually-active people? No, mainly because this has nothing to do with what research they're doing and what the usefulness is.
Same with Windows. What does using Windows have to do with getting a grant?
So if you MUST RUN WINDOWS, put it in a sandbox where it belongs. IMO.
Um, dude, a $200 PC is a sandbox. It has no access to any of your files, and even the most rampant buffer overflow won't affect your real system.
(And if you say "Windows worm", I'd like to remind you that the rest of your network isn't Windows.)
He's the head of the organization and he's "infallible".
Only when he speaks with official authority (ex cathedra, etc.) regarding points of doctrine. If you see him on the street and he says "It's going to be a nice day today," that doesn't mean he had a revelation from God to that effect.
What he says goes, or he can boot you from the church.
Yeah right. Then why were there up to three "popes" at once in the early 1300s? Simple, because the Pope decided to boot people from the church, but the people said no and booted the Pope instead.
Either way, this means that all these bad people are operating with his implicit approval.
How does that follow from infalliblity? You're saying that every bad person who's been baptized Catholic has the implicit approval of the Pope.
Based on your logic, no leader should ever be held accountable for the actions of his subordinates, unless specifcally ordered by him. I don't see how a person with any sort of decent moral compass can subscribe to such a view. Even if he can't stop something from happening, he's still responsible for taking adequate steps to enure it doesn't happen again.
Not if the leader isn't responsible for the appointment of the subordinates and has no real power to get rid of them or replace them. To take an extreme analogy, it's like saying "It's your fault you have a cold; you're the one with lungs." I didn't choose my lungs and I have no alternative. More to the point, it's like blaming the editor-in-chief of the New York Times for Jayson Blair's misreporting. How dare he not thoroughly fact-check every single article published? How dare he let a single person be hired without personally conducting a background check?
And as far as the "cover-up" charge, the quotes read more to me like the Vatican saying, "We've handled crime in our own ranks for over a thousand years, when there was no government strong enough to handle it. We've fought for the 'benefit of the clergy' for centuries so that we could try priests in canon courts, not civil. We can punish corrupt priests ourselves. And, being Christian, we know that they'll get a hell of a lot of punishment [sorry] sooner or later, so we might as well excommunicate them quietly and, without raising a scene, work with local authorities to move the corrupt priests away from children. Because the Catholic church is greatly falling in influence right now, and it's worth not rendering these criminals to the civil authorities, in exchange for ensuring that people don't think that this corruption is symptomatic of the Church, and by extension Christianity, and therefore turn away from the faith. It would be giving Satan an even greater foothold if he not only corrupts priests but also makes the Church repulsive for a large number of souls."
I don't agree with all of it, but it's defensible.
I, and MANY individuals who are not Christians, aren't convinced that it's a man made problem that is fixable by cutting down on fossil fuel consumption in the US (although I'm also very interested in looking for cleaner safer fuel sources).
And I, and MANY individuals who are Christians, are convinced that we have done a lot to upset the earth's balance over the last century or so, and that we could have avoided most if not all of this problem if we didn't burn so many fossil fuels.
So yeah, your belief in Christ has absolutely nothing to do with your belief in global warming.
I'm too lazy to make an account, but do you see how that works?
No. Because you, who don't have Mr. McLachlan's e-mail address (name's not important), defame him, this is equivalent to the guy defaming himself?
You may have lost the job because you failed to ask what kind of code the manager wanted, not because you failed to read his mind or guess his intent.
Indeed. I read the GP's two questions as more devious versions of "Design Bill Gates' bathroom", where the correct answer is "What does Bill Gates want in his bathroom?" followed by making it even cooler than what he wants.
If you're asked to code something that has more than a trivial amount of design in it, you should ask how it needs to be designed. Not having a proper design is a larger failure than having a bug in your code, because a bug normally takes a one-line fix but a design problem takes an entire rewrite.
And if you're too arrogant to ask about the design requirements (or, alternately, too weak to accept a reasonably accurate answer and then start coding) then you don't deserve the job.
He emailed us and asked why he hadn't gotten the position. We made the mistake of politely explaining what our issues with him were. He used that explanation to kick off some sort of lawsuit against our company.
I wonder if you could've nicely asked him to sign a simple right-to-sue waiver or something? Analogous to an NDA?
The Pope?
I mean, there are valid reasons to hate the Roman Catholic Church (I don't subscribe to them -- I attend Catholic services -- but I can certainly understand them and I certainly think the Catholic Church is still doing quite a few things wrong). But the Pope personally? Do you really think he has that much power? There's a culture of powerful subordinates that are going to respect him as their spiritual father but not as their boss, and I'd blame them for the misdoings of the Vatican, not Mr. Ratzinger as a person.
I'm at MIT, and we have reasonably good (and free, of course) WiFi coverage essentially everywhere indoors on campus. So it's reasonable to use Skype, after overclocking the phone from 200 to 240 MHz (otherwise the de/compression runs too slowly and the audio gets choppy). In fact, there are spots in buildings where the cell phone signal is almost too weak to even connect, but Skype works fine.
Certainly, you can get Skype running on it.
But it'll be about as cool as wiping a Mac disk and installing Linux: a little more customization at the expense of quite a bit of coolness.
I'm running Skype, as well as a lot of other apps, on a Windows Mobile smartphone with WiFi that cost about $150. It works pretty well. I can't see the motivation to switch to the iPhone unless I switch to Cingular and get the entire benefit of the device.
So I'm assuming you got these files from an old hard drive.
Can you not boot up off that hard drive, launch iTunes, click "log in", and see what the default username is?
And seriously, how many e-mail addresses does she have that she can't try them all in the recovery field? (I've done this more than once for my Apple ID, because I only use it for the Apple Store, and I've only bought things maybe three times in the last 6 years.)
I contend that the correct response to this statement would have been involuntary entry to an organ donation programme.
I contend that you are as immoral as the radio hosts. Or worse, since they were countering terrorists (who kill people) and you were only countering a consumer (who aids capitalism).
Appeal to authority fallacy.
Nope. The appeal to authority fallacy is when you say "This is from a well-known source, so it must be true," or "This is from an unknown source, so it must be false." Saying "This is from a crap source, so it's crap" is not a fallacy.
More precisely, what he's saying is "This is from an unreviewed and biased source, whereas the other is from a peer-reviewed and unbiased source, so we should not give them anywhere near equal weight." atheism.about.com is about as valid a website for these discussions as www.jackchick.com. Both have agendas, both are unreviewed, and both are going to ignore evidence when it's convenient.
The course was taught by Keith Winstein, the same guy who as senior editor of The Tech interviewed Jack Valenti and showed him his DeCSS Perl script.
OK, I can agree with that. I didn't see that you were suggesting that pay raises should come out of the budget.
But perhaps your town should vote to decrease school budgets, then, and at the voter level decide that the money should go solely to teacher salaries. The voters should pay for it - the voters are paying for all the money the school has, anyway, and if the school's mishandling the money, the voters should cease to trust the school system with their money, and make the budgeting decisions themselves.
Oh, come on. Surely you can implement a terminal in JavaScript?