Remind me please, what branch of the millitary is working on a cure for cancer or heart disease?
More accurate rifles go to hunters...
Lord knows, the only problem in our society is those inaccurate guns. If we could only kill animals and each other more efficiently...we could eventually find a cure for cancer.. right?
I _might_ accept the "trickle-down effect" argument when it come to economy in general, as that is the big arugment of 'let the companies get rich as hell, we'll get a share of the pie eventually' crowd. But I am not buying the same when applied to the military sector.
In fact, the funding for NIH has been cut and the funding for federal student load aids have been cut, all as a result of funneling the money into the military industrial machine. And, if you are not aware of it, NIH is the agency that distributes grants to researchers to find the proverbial "cure for cancer". So it seems that the defense spending actually set us back.
The damage is the rampant stupidy. Plain and simple. Back in the day, it was thought that if everyone is educated, they would be able to vote with their 'heads' and be accountable, intelligent citizens of a democratic country.
Now we are a mob, rulled by those who exploit our fears to their benefit. They yell 'TeH TerroRistZ!' and we give them all our freedom and run for cover, or attack randomly some country for a desperate show of force.
What we are is a bunch of lazy, fat, stupid but strong bullies with tons of nukes and high tech killing machines. The world despises us, but we plow through. Eventually we'll stop though. We can only run so high of a deficit and our IQ can get only get so low before others (EU, Russia, China) will start to laugh at us.
Yes, I still believe there is a future, just a different future, not the kind that we are headed to if we stay on this present 'course'.
Ever want to launch a satellite from US soil again? Great, we'll talk then.
Well, your first assumption seems to be that the government is actually organized and keeps track of things. Going by the recent experience with the terrorist attacks that wasn't the case.
You have an office in $random_country_we_are_invading, right next to the Chinese embassy, and want our Marines to help get your people out? How about that?
"Oh, company x from country y didn't gray out our reactor z. Then 10 years later, their civilians are being killed, we can help them but we'll let them die, ha, ha!". Is that you view of our government? -- That's pretty sad. Or, is that how you act, you bully everyone because if they don't listen, you'll let them die?
The point is that there are other countries, besides US, that can launch satellites, that will not necessarily dance to the US music. Eventually those nuclear site images will appear some place on the internet, and we all know how easy it is to censor information on the web (09:F9:1...)...
public has basically no need for this sort of information
Are you sure about that? Just by you saying that, out of curiosity I want to fire up Google Earth and find such sites, just to see if they are grayed out or how they look. In fact, does the general public 'need' to look at their house on the satellite map? Do they 'need' to see how Disnay World looks from space? - No they don't. Except for some specific applications people don't 'need' to use satellite maps, Their lives were fine before the Google Earth came about and they would probably been alrigh if Google Earth would have never been released.
The point is that people 'want' to look at those sites. Not because they will go there, or attack them or do anything evil, but just out of curiosity or because 'they can'. As the grandparent put it, the govt. can tell the US business not to map certain areas, but then Chinese, Japanese and European satellites will map it and, surprise, make it available on the net. Besides if the layout of some nuclear plant is the only thing that keeps that plant secure from 'teh terrorists' then we might as well blow it up ourselves because it is close to not having any security at all then.
The attacker has less time to study your nuclear site security offline (at least, as long as photographing it is illegal)
Of course, except for blowing themsevles up and wanting to kill thousands of innocent civilians, such an attacker would _never_ break law and take pictures, right?
The secrecy of location / layout will not and should not be considered as a 'defence'. Because the govt. is reacting this way, means that they do rely, at least partially, on 'security-by-obscurity'. Instead of forcing the US business to gray out maps, they should adapt and accept the fact everything will be visible from space. The did that during the Cold War, I don't know why they can't hold the same assumption now.
but let's make them at least risk exposure to do their reconnaissance, OK?
Performing reconessance is not that difficult and I don't remember any terrorist plots being foiled recently because someone was caught doing reconessance. I do recall many photographers being harrassed for taking pictures of bridges, building and other such things, you know... the same stuff they have been taking pictures of the last 200 years or so...
I am a researcher, I work in a lab and I write software in the lab to control our machinery. But I don't mind sharing it with the world, so I GPL it and put it on Sourceforge so somebody else might use/improve it. I get a monthly check for my work from the company and I write OSS. So that's how I feed myself.
Now, wouldn't it be grand if you could acquire said money by developing OSS
That's exactly what's happening...
I have to write proprietary software for a living because that's where the money is
There is nothing wrong with, that's what most people do. Now imagine that you could share what you wrote with others... Oh, but the competition will snatch it and use it -- Yes, but so will many of the users. The point is that your manager would never take that step regardless if it would work or not because releasing something for free creates a SEGFAULT in their brain.
Some companies are in between, they release some code for free, or use/write OSS for a living (I think MySQL is doing very well).
See what Dunc Tank has done to Etch.
Good point. I think that is typified by a parable by Jose' Armas called something like "El Tonto del Barrio" -- the village dummy. It's about this guy who wasn't quite smart but he was kind hearted. He took it upon himself to sweep the streets of his village because he wanted to help out. Some people thought that he migh as well get payed and started paying him for it. Pretty soon he stopped sweeping the streets because it became something that was "job" and not something he "enjoyed doing". That is why just paying a volunteer doesn't work, because you create a disconnect -- they are a volunteer but they get paid. They have to be either one. So perhaps there is a another way of doing it, say the comany will pledge X ammount of money to be donated to a charity of choice for each bug fix or something like that to appeal to the altruistic element.
You mean like Google using Linux and MySQL, and supporting thousands of OSS projects through their Summer Of Code program...
Yes, for the old companies with the old entrenched mindset OSS looks like silly communism and, lord knows, they can't base their business on commie/hippie/free software.
The difference is in who runs the business. Is it the greedy stupid-ex-fratboys from business school, or ex-programmers who actually know what free software is and have written and used it themselves.
The company has the code (it's free after all), they seem to have the money. -- Time to hire a couple of geeks full time that will be motivated by the $$$. Yes, some people will code for $$$$ (a lot will actually - this is the IT grunt force), some will code only for fun. Some will code for both either at the same time or at different stages in their life. The point is, that company can fork the OSS, mentain it and so on if they want to. Or they can just rely on other fickle hippy visionaries to come onboard.
With a closed source, if a company decides that the old version is not making money for them and they need a new version, and to make everyone get the new version they stop fixing bugs in the old and force everyone to upgrade. There can potentially be a large cost associated with that move for the customers. In the first case, it seems to me, the company using the software is more in control. And what do those sociopathing, greedy managers want more of -- control!
These are corporate managers who only have dollar signs in their eyes. They don't see how anyone would possibly develop or create anything without wanting to make MORE money. Sure, some developers end up making money but some don't off of their OSS, yet the fact that someone would just want to volunteer their time and create something completely escapes these individuals. This goes actually says quite a bit about _them_.
Alright, so if you don't fast on Ramadan, should US extradite you to Iran so you can get beaten to death? The point is that the person was in Australia. Australia can at least protect its citizens agains other countries just requesting extradition because they broke some law some place in the world. Oh, I forgot, US is 'God's country' so our laws are more just and more special than any other laws...
It would have been an easy clear cut case if he was on US soil while he commited the crime (just like the US tourists in Indonesia how get caught even with small amounts of drugs can get to spend their lives in a prison there), but this guy was on Australian soil. It does seem like the Australians are US puppets...
I corrected you post the way you should have written it.
Read the post. That journal MIGHT HAVE BEEN one of the best journals in the World - looking at the previous contributors mentioned in the post I CAN tell you that it MIGHT HAVE BEEN one of the best journals. Just because it's German and the ONLY THING IT HAS TO SHOW IS THAT EINSTEIN published in it 80 years ago, it DOES mean it is "sub-par". Your post should be modded down for trolling, but unfortunately I expect it'll bubble up as "INTERESTING".
Let's see, US Navy does some supposedly "amazing" research: tabletop fusion. (Tell me that is not an amazing discovery). What's the firs thing they do? They say: "let's publish it in a German/Chilean/Chinese/Algerian/etc. journal that nobody has heard of", right? -- Wrong! They submit their stuff to journals like Nature and such. They probably got rejected. Then they start searching for _a_ journal that will publish their stuff.
You have obviously never published anything an have no idea how this works. Yet because you throw around words like xenophobia and racism ( do you even know what they mean?) you get modded as "Interesting" -- Yes, interesting indeed.
Ok, by this logic only drugs that aren't terribly important should be profitable. Therefore, companies will only bother to do R&D on non-life-saving medications.
And that is what happens. There are drugs that will cure some diseases but they have a known non-patentable formula so no drug company wants to pay for clinical trials and FDA red tape so anyone else who follows could just make it and profit. Welcome to the world of Big Pharma!
Besides, you seem to think on the 'business' side of things, why would a company want to make a drug that will permanently cure a disease? The individual takes the dose and they are well. In fact drug companies love chronic non-fatal diseases. They are like a virus if you will, they want the host (customer) to be bring them profit so if they either kill them or cure them, they won't get a profit.
The government could have just paid a little more for each pill and nobody would have died
And where would the government take that money from? Or you are one of those people who thinks that governments can just print money...
Everybody seems like they're just interested in killing the goose that layed the golden egg...
Yes, some (you) are worried about golden geese and some (me) are worried about sick, dying people, it's kind of (but not really) the same.
Oh they will recoup their profits, AIDS won't go away. Yes, the Merk CEO will probably have to buy a smaller yacht next year, but on the other hand there are people who are sick and will die soon if no treatment is available. So in fact they have to chose between letting these people die or making a profit, seems like a clear cut issue. If it was a pill to cure "athlete's foot" it would be unacceptable to override the patents but in this case it makes sense.
In fact there are drugs that are known to be good cures for many diseases but because the formula is known and cannot be patented, the drug companies don't want to produce it. It isn't just R&D costs, a major part of the costs is going for testing and approval with FDA.
As a presumed KDE user you should be the one naming them and listing why would every single user need to have that particular option. I on the other hand, don't use KDE anymore, I forgot all the options as I don't have to worry about remembering them .
the more that the distros push GNOME, they more that they shoot themselves in the foot
Ubuntu's Gnome foot (Gnome logo pun intended) looks pretty good so far.
I was an avid KDE user, used it exclusively on Redhat, Mandriva then SuSE. When I switched to Ubuntu, I promptly added the Kubuntu metapackage to get my KDE back. But then, after playing with a 1001 configuration preferences in KDE I wanted to revert back some settings, it took me a very long time to find them.
Eventually I came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that "more configuration choices for a desktop" does not always equal to a good thing. (By the way, Apple has known that for a very long time, and I think they invested more into UI design and research more than any other company ). I wanted good fixed defaults and applications that just worked. I found myself logging into GNOME more and more and eventually I just stopped using KDE altogether. I find GNOME simpler, cleaner and more consistent. As a programmer I would rather develop in KDE and Qt but as an end user I like the GNOME Desktop better hands down....
If Newton would have been a criminal we might have not known about him, at this point it is a 'what if' thing and we can argue ad infinitum about it.
By the way, just as a "heads-up", this is year 2007 and we did drop Newtonian physics quite a "few" years back. See the memo here and here . Pass the the memo along to others as well...
Honestly, whatever he has done on a social level... has NOTHING to do with the technical merit/achievements
Are you really beliving that "Whatever the person does in X part of his life has NOTHING to do with what they do in the Y part of their life?" idea. Would you hire a repeat child molester as your lead developer. How about someone who abuses their spouse, would you hire them? Your post suggests that you would, after all because they molest children or abuse others has NOTHING to do with their technical merit / achievements...right?
whatever he has done on a social level (killing could be considered social interaction)
Wow, how delighfully cruel and sociopathic! The man allegedly murdered his wife. To trivialize it as a "social interaction" as if it were a hand shake, to me shows a sociopathic kind of cruelty and coldness.
If you eat McDonalds and then get sick and throw up, in the future, just driving by and seeing the golden arches will make you gag. So, I can put rotten meat in your burger and 'wow' you'll stop eating at McDonalds -- I am so powerful, I made you do/not do something!
My point was that it was an emotional thing, it is irrational and I know it. It is just as irrational as my preference for say cucumbers instead of tomatoes, it doesn't make sense they are both good for me but I am just "so crazy" that I like one over the other and I will aovid one and buy the other even though it is more expensive.
They did a pilot in my comp sci class for my university. They gave us laptops and loaded it up with some software. The only thing the laptops did that kind of helped was to allow for instant tests. The professor would start a test, the questions would appear on the screen and we would click A,B,c or D. He would have the results instantly and we would discuss the most difficult questions. Also, we could see the powerpoint presentation better when there was a complicated diagram or chart. Oh, and the most important thing, we could browse the web, and IM each other when we'd get bored. Of course, that would also mean cheating on the pop quizes...
All and all, as you said, the laptop didn't solve any unsolvable problem and it was heavy to haul around. The idea that the schools would make students get laptops and then their grades would automatically go up is just one of those great management blunders that only our Universities are capable of. If the student is lazy, unmotivated, unprepared, no amount of laptops, iPods, graphing calculators or specal software is going to fix that. The Chinese kids from the math graduate deptartment didn't have any laptops growing up, just paper and pencils and they are way, way ahead of the American students who grew up with fancy tech gadgets.
But I understand that it is easier for us to just throw some laptops at studnets, pay x amount of money, as opposed to revise from ground up the priorities of our education system.
You are right, if Reiser did it and then this other guy confessed to murders, then all 3 of them were a 'happy' bunch. It sounds like the wife had a taste for murderous psychopaths. Do murderers have something in common, say a lack of compassion or uncontrollable anger, that makes them attractive for certain (equally) deranged individuals...who knows...?
It is funny, after this case case I went and reformated my ReiserFS partitions to use ext3. Every time my machine booted I saw Reiser's last name and thought..."this guy probably killed his wife". I don't hate him, I don't even know if he is guilty, I just didn't want to think about that every time I saw the f.s. name.
Exactly. All those international sanctions didn't work in the past and if other countries stop importing their goods, it will hurt other countries just us much. We need their pink glasses with the Hello Kitty logo on them just as much as they need our money. If we looked around us, we'll find that the majority of appliances, tools, clothes and even car parts are made in China.
The problem is that we are simply not used to not being in control when it comes to such issues. We tend to think of other countries as a being our subjects and here is this huge behimoth of a country and we simply cannot order it around like we are used to.
On the other side, I think most people missed my (sarcastic) remark at the end of the post, the one about finding the cure for cancer. Here is Disney worrying about Chinese children playing with a fake Mickey, so what? Those children will probably never be able to actually fly to the US and go to the real Disney, or the American children probably wouldn't want to go to China just to see a "fake" Mickey. Sure Disney will lose some potential profits but there are other more important issues that need to be dealt with such as diseases, famine and poverty....
So what can we do? I know! Complain to the Chinese govt,...hmm...wait, the Chinese govt. owns the park. Oh, crap, I guess, we'll just have to suck it up and watch little Chinese kids play and get rides in the faux Disney park and take their pictures with faux Mickey. I am so sad, Disney CEO/CFO..CxO's won't be able to afford another yaht:-(
But.. it's because US is God's country. What we do God blesses and then it's ok! It's simple!
So when we start wars, they are "just wars" when others do it they are "evil aggressors". When we kidnap individuals overseas and send them on flights to Egypt, we are just "protecting our the freedom" when others kidnap Americans, they are "blood sucking, fetus eating terrorists".
The minute we start throwing nukes at China because they stopped making our pink sunglasses with hello kitty on them, we will get nukes coming from Russia and forget about any support from Europe. By the way, China has nukes as well and can zap our satellites with lasers. Do you really think they will be a winner when it all ends?
Or you actually meant that we are quite "sane" and it is only the Chinese who __think__ we are crazy... It seems you underestimate them too much. We are on the piedestal in front of the whole world, everyone can see exactly how crazy or not crazy we are.
Number 5 is my intellectual property, I created it by dividing 6000 by 1000 and then subtracting 1, therefore I request that your post be modded down to 4 as not to infringe on my intellectual property.
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Remind me please, what branch of the millitary is working on a cure for cancer or heart disease?
More accurate rifles go to hunters...
Lord knows, the only problem in our society is those inaccurate guns. If we could only kill animals and each other more efficiently...we could eventually find a cure for cancer.. right?
I _might_ accept the "trickle-down effect" argument when it come to economy in general, as that is the big arugment of 'let the companies get rich as hell, we'll get a share of the pie eventually' crowd. But I am not buying the same when applied to the military sector.
In fact, the funding for NIH has been cut and the funding for federal student load aids have been cut, all as a result of funneling the money into the military industrial machine. And, if you are not aware of it, NIH is the agency that distributes grants to researchers to find the proverbial "cure for cancer". So it seems that the defense spending actually set us back.
Now we are a mob, rulled by those who exploit our fears to their benefit. They yell 'TeH TerroRistZ!' and we give them all our freedom and run for cover, or attack randomly some country for a desperate show of force.
What we are is a bunch of lazy, fat, stupid but strong bullies with tons of nukes and high tech killing machines. The world despises us, but we plow through. Eventually we'll stop though. We can only run so high of a deficit and our IQ can get only get so low before others (EU, Russia, China) will start to laugh at us.
Yes, I still believe there is a future, just a different future, not the kind that we are headed to if we stay on this present 'course'.
Well, your first assumption seems to be that the government is actually organized and keeps track of things. Going by the recent experience with the terrorist attacks that wasn't the case.
You have an office in $random_country_we_are_invading, right next to the Chinese embassy, and want our Marines to help get your people out? How about that?
"Oh, company x from country y didn't gray out our reactor z. Then 10 years later, their civilians are being killed, we can help them but we'll let them die, ha, ha!". Is that you view of our government? -- That's pretty sad. Or, is that how you act, you bully everyone because if they don't listen, you'll let them die?
The point is that there are other countries, besides US, that can launch satellites, that will not necessarily dance to the US music. Eventually those nuclear site images will appear some place on the internet, and we all know how easy it is to censor information on the web (09:F9:1...)...
Are you sure about that? Just by you saying that, out of curiosity I want to fire up Google Earth and find such sites, just to see if they are grayed out or how they look. In fact, does the general public 'need' to look at their house on the satellite map? Do they 'need' to see how Disnay World looks from space? - No they don't. Except for some specific applications people don't 'need' to use satellite maps, Their lives were fine before the Google Earth came about and they would probably been alrigh if Google Earth would have never been released.
The point is that people 'want' to look at those sites. Not because they will go there, or attack them or do anything evil, but just out of curiosity or because 'they can'. As the grandparent put it, the govt. can tell the US business not to map certain areas, but then Chinese, Japanese and European satellites will map it and, surprise, make it available on the net. Besides if the layout of some nuclear plant is the only thing that keeps that plant secure from 'teh terrorists' then we might as well blow it up ourselves because it is close to not having any security at all then.
The attacker has less time to study your nuclear site security offline (at least, as long as photographing it is illegal)
Of course, except for blowing themsevles up and wanting to kill thousands of innocent civilians, such an attacker would _never_ break law and take pictures, right?
The secrecy of location / layout will not and should not be considered as a 'defence'. Because the govt. is reacting this way, means that they do rely, at least partially, on 'security-by-obscurity'. Instead of forcing the US business to gray out maps, they should adapt and accept the fact everything will be visible from space. The did that during the Cold War, I don't know why they can't hold the same assumption now.
but let's make them at least risk exposure to do their reconnaissance, OK?
Performing reconessance is not that difficult and I don't remember any terrorist plots being foiled recently because someone was caught doing reconessance. I do recall many photographers being harrassed for taking pictures of bridges, building and other such things, you know... the same stuff they have been taking pictures of the last 200 years or so...
Now, wouldn't it be grand if you could acquire said money by developing OSS
That's exactly what's happening...
I have to write proprietary software for a living because that's where the money is
There is nothing wrong with, that's what most people do. Now imagine that you could share what you wrote with others... Oh, but the competition will snatch it and use it -- Yes, but so will many of the users. The point is that your manager would never take that step regardless if it would work or not because releasing something for free creates a SEGFAULT in their brain.
Some companies are in between, they release some code for free, or use/write OSS for a living (I think MySQL is doing very well).
See what Dunc Tank has done to Etch.
Good point. I think that is typified by a parable by Jose' Armas called something like "El Tonto del Barrio" -- the village dummy. It's about this guy who wasn't quite smart but he was kind hearted. He took it upon himself to sweep the streets of his village because he wanted to help out. Some people thought that he migh as well get payed and started paying him for it. Pretty soon he stopped sweeping the streets because it became something that was "job" and not something he "enjoyed doing". That is why just paying a volunteer doesn't work, because you create a disconnect -- they are a volunteer but they get paid. They have to be either one. So perhaps there is a another way of doing it, say the comany will pledge X ammount of money to be donated to a charity of choice for each bug fix or something like that to appeal to the altruistic element.
Yes, for the old companies with the old entrenched mindset OSS looks like silly communism and, lord knows, they can't base their business on commie/hippie/free software.
The difference is in who runs the business. Is it the greedy stupid-ex-fratboys from business school, or ex-programmers who actually know what free software is and have written and used it themselves.
With a closed source, if a company decides that the old version is not making money for them and they need a new version, and to make everyone get the new version they stop fixing bugs in the old and force everyone to upgrade. There can potentially be a large cost associated with that move for the customers. In the first case, it seems to me, the company using the software is more in control. And what do those sociopathing, greedy managers want more of -- control!
It would have been an easy clear cut case if he was on US soil while he commited the crime (just like the US tourists in Indonesia how get caught even with small amounts of drugs can get to spend their lives in a prison there), but this guy was on Australian soil. It does seem like the Australians are US puppets...
I corrected you post the way you should have written it.
Read the post. That journal MIGHT HAVE BEEN one of the best journals in the World - looking at the previous contributors mentioned in the post I CAN tell you that it MIGHT HAVE BEEN one of the best journals. Just because it's German and the ONLY THING IT HAS TO SHOW IS THAT EINSTEIN published in it 80 years ago, it DOES mean it is "sub-par". Your post should be modded down for trolling, but unfortunately I expect it'll bubble up as "INTERESTING".
Let's see, US Navy does some supposedly "amazing" research: tabletop fusion. (Tell me that is not an amazing discovery). What's the firs thing they do? They say: "let's publish it in a German/Chilean/Chinese/Algerian/etc. journal that nobody has heard of", right? -- Wrong! They submit their stuff to journals like Nature and such. They probably got rejected. Then they start searching for _a_ journal that will publish their stuff.
You have obviously never published anything an have no idea how this works. Yet because you throw around words like xenophobia and racism ( do you even know what they mean?) you get modded as "Interesting" -- Yes, interesting indeed.
I suspect so...
And that is what happens. There are drugs that will cure some diseases but they have a known non-patentable formula so no drug company wants to pay for clinical trials and FDA red tape so anyone else who follows could just make it and profit. Welcome to the world of Big Pharma!
Besides, you seem to think on the 'business' side of things, why would a company want to make a drug that will permanently cure a disease? The individual takes the dose and they are well. In fact drug companies love chronic non-fatal diseases. They are like a virus if you will, they want the host (customer) to be bring them profit so if they either kill them or cure them, they won't get a profit.
The government could have just paid a little more for each pill and nobody would have died
And where would the government take that money from? Or you are one of those people who thinks that governments can just print money...
Everybody seems like they're just interested in killing the goose that layed the golden egg...
Yes, some (you) are worried about golden geese and some (me) are worried about sick, dying people, it's kind of (but not really) the same.
In fact there are drugs that are known to be good cures for many diseases but because the formula is known and cannot be patented, the drug companies don't want to produce it. It isn't just R&D costs, a major part of the costs is going for testing and approval with FDA.
As a presumed KDE user you should be the one naming them and listing why would every single user need to have that particular option. I on the other hand, don't use KDE anymore, I forgot all the options as I don't have to worry about remembering them .
Ubuntu's Gnome foot (Gnome logo pun intended) looks pretty good so far.
I was an avid KDE user, used it exclusively on Redhat, Mandriva then SuSE. When I switched to Ubuntu, I promptly added the Kubuntu metapackage to get my KDE back. But then, after playing with a 1001 configuration preferences in KDE I wanted to revert back some settings, it took me a very long time to find them.
Eventually I came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that "more configuration choices for a desktop" does not always equal to a good thing. (By the way, Apple has known that for a very long time, and I think they invested more into UI design and research more than any other company ). I wanted good fixed defaults and applications that just worked. I found myself logging into GNOME more and more and eventually I just stopped using KDE altogether. I find GNOME simpler, cleaner and more consistent. As a programmer I would rather develop in KDE and Qt but as an end user I like the GNOME Desktop better hands down....
By the way, just as a "heads-up", this is year 2007 and we did drop Newtonian physics quite a "few" years back. See the memo here and here . Pass the the memo along to others as well...
Honestly, whatever he has done on a social level ... has NOTHING to do with the technical merit/achievements
Are you really beliving that "Whatever the person does in X part of his life has NOTHING to do with what they do in the Y part of their life?" idea. Would you hire a repeat child molester as your lead developer. How about someone who abuses their spouse, would you hire them? Your post suggests that you would, after all because they molest children or abuse others has NOTHING to do with their technical merit / achievements...right?
whatever he has done on a social level (killing could be considered social interaction)
Wow, how delighfully cruel and sociopathic! The man allegedly murdered his wife. To trivialize it as a "social interaction" as if it were a hand shake, to me shows a sociopathic kind of cruelty and coldness.
If you eat McDonalds and then get sick and throw up, in the future, just driving by and seeing the golden arches will make you gag. So, I can put rotten meat in your burger and 'wow' you'll stop eating at McDonalds -- I am so powerful, I made you do/not do something!
My point was that it was an emotional thing, it is irrational and I know it. It is just as irrational as my preference for say cucumbers instead of tomatoes, it doesn't make sense they are both good for me but I am just "so crazy" that I like one over the other and I will aovid one and buy the other even though it is more expensive.
All and all, as you said, the laptop didn't solve any unsolvable problem and it was heavy to haul around. The idea that the schools would make students get laptops and then their grades would automatically go up is just one of those great management blunders that only our Universities are capable of. If the student is lazy, unmotivated, unprepared, no amount of laptops, iPods, graphing calculators or specal software is going to fix that. The Chinese kids from the math graduate deptartment didn't have any laptops growing up, just paper and pencils and they are way, way ahead of the American students who grew up with fancy tech gadgets.
But I understand that it is easier for us to just throw some laptops at studnets, pay x amount of money, as opposed to revise from ground up the priorities of our education system.
It is funny, after this case case I went and reformated my ReiserFS partitions to use ext3. Every time my machine booted I saw Reiser's last name and thought
The problem is that we are simply not used to not being in control when it comes to such issues. We tend to think of other countries as a being our subjects and here is this huge behimoth of a country and we simply cannot order it around like we are used to.
On the other side, I think most people missed my (sarcastic) remark at the end of the post, the one about finding the cure for cancer. Here is Disney worrying about Chinese children playing with a fake Mickey, so what? Those children will probably never be able to actually fly to the US and go to the real Disney, or the American children probably wouldn't want to go to China just to see a "fake" Mickey. Sure Disney will lose some potential profits but there are other more important issues that need to be dealt with such as diseases, famine and poverty....
So,anyway, how's that cure for cancer coming?
So when we start wars, they are "just wars" when others do it they are "evil aggressors". When we kidnap individuals overseas and send them on flights to Egypt, we are just "protecting our the freedom" when others kidnap Americans, they are "blood sucking, fetus eating terrorists".
Or you actually meant that we are quite "sane" and it is only the Chinese who __think__ we are crazy... It seems you underestimate them too much. We are on the piedestal in front of the whole world, everyone can see exactly how crazy or not crazy we are.
Number 5 is my intellectual property, I created it by dividing 6000 by 1000 and then subtracting 1, therefore I request that your post be modded down to 4 as not to infringe on my intellectual property.
Besides, I personally don't use CLF and don't plan using them. I use regular incandescent bulbs.