I don't know when you worked at MIT, but every class I took was taught by a professor, except the recitation sessions and tutorials, which were done mostly by TA's, which was not a bad thing, because by and large professors aren't very skilled at teaching. Classes that everybody has to take are going to be big, unless they TEALize it. What does that give them? A shift from a large, productive lecture setting with tutorials and recitations to make sure everybody is fine with the material, to one where people honestly want to bash their skulls in every day that they have to go to kindergarten-esque 8.02T (that's E&M, folks).
As for research, some people do really boring stuff, some people do really fun stuff. YMMV, but I was often extremely envious of other students who were doing cool stuff at their UROPs (undergrad research opportunity). Then again, some people were stuck being sysadmins and lab goons, or writing stupid java applets at theirs.
A stupid competition is nothing. You want real failure? After taking the damned required signals and systems class (6.003), I decided I'd take a stab at a speach recognition system, and discovered that they had not taught me squat. Cepstrum? WTF is that???
You want real success? Just like any other decent university, Operating Systems(6.828) and Compilers (6.035) are top notch, practical, and fun.
I'll be the first person you find to agree that there are serious problems in teaching at MIT, but they're not the ones you've mentioned. They still have people learning scheme in their first CS course, claiming that people are learning about OOP, data structures, and programming. That's like saying that the Bible is an accurate historical reference. The second and third header courses you take don't teach you things that can be used for purposes beyond the prosaic. Most of the time you spend working in the AI class is spent debugging incomprehensible scheme for online homeworks instead of learning that math behind things and applying the stuff. Graders for the Systems class wouldn't know a good , writable design if it bit them in the ass, and choose to grade up 'cool' designs that are demonstrably bad over ones which actually perform the specified task as close to optimally as possible on projects. THESE are serious problems. You only have students for four years, for the most part, and when you teach them nothing useful, or worse, instruct them in BAD design, you've robbed them of the education they think they're getting.
I envy you for your interaction with your professors, but I also suspect that you're selling yourself short. Had your instruction been worse, you would most likely have made up for shortcomings by studying or by struggling.
On the contrary, you picked up something useful from a book. Would that folks behind the PRS (the POS model I was stuck with and one of the models shown in the article) had too...
This is a terrible idea. I had to sit through a class at MIT rife with stupid ideas like this. Instead of a normal classroom/lecture setting, where you simply learn at your own pace outside of class or pay attention as suits you, you just sit there and *seethe* and this goddamned clicker thing. You don't really feel the need to concentrate or pay attention because no normal person can come up with 5 legitimate sounding answers for you to choose from.
Maybe this is GREAT for some settings, but this robs students of real interaction with their teachers and replaces it with bullshit polls every 5 minutes. Not appropriate for high school or college, IMHO.
If you want to do this kind of nonsense, the old show-of-hands technique, in my experience, works wonders, provided that instead of assaulting people who get it wrong, you work towards the right answer.
Evolution is the natural consequence of animals being selective about their mates, crossover, mutation, geographic isolation, genetically determined fitness interacting with environment and breeding, and other factors. Several of these independantly can bring about speciation, which is pretty much the basis for the whole thing. That it can be verified by observing differences in proteins from taxonomical classification to classification generally in line with expectations and by slightly more fuzzy observation of the fossil record as well is the argument for it. The argument against would be to show several of these factors being false, and then producing mathematical models showing that speciation is not a natural consequence of the above stated phenomena.
Evolution is an important concept to understand not because it tells us about the future of the world we live in, or even neccessarily about the past, or what it tells us about His Noodly Appendage, but because it is a broad umbrella under which many practical, important disciplines can flourish. An idiot with a taxonomical chart could tell you that an ugly ass pig is a better bet for harvesting insulin than a lizard. And that taxonomical chart - which is corrected from time to time - is one of the early fruits of understanding evolution. Pre-gene-splicing, that was the only thing keeping many diabetics alive. And while we now have the capability of producing excellent tools in all those discliplines under the umbrella of evolution, it is important to remember no only on whose shoulders we stand - whether it be a botanist monk who is fond of breeding flowers or some patent clerk - it is also important to remember what made the ground fertile, so that when science runs contrary to religion or philosophy, we remember that radical, verifiable thought that can be tested DOES have a practical benefit. That benefit is progress.
Creationism produces no fruit that will yield man anything other than another dark age. Understandably, some religious folk would prefer a dark age to things that challenge their blind and narrow faith. These people should relocate to Antarctica.
Evolution is convenient to teach in the biology setting, but perhaps it should really be taught in history. They can take out the bit about how the Bible presents an accurate account of history or the part in elementary school where kids learn about a Thanksgiving dinner that never happened.
pckeyboard.com has some sweet buckling-spring keyboards. You remember the nice ones from late 80's early 90's? the ones that broke and then you could fix without too much trouble?
They're still sold. So if Das Keyboard is up your alley, I'd say look at these keyboards too. I own 2 myself.^^
My experience with setting up CUPS is the exact opposite. I agree that it has not improved over the past year, but it *IS* remarkably simple to set up a printer with CUPS. I got it on my second try, back a bit over a year ago, and have reconfigured cups maybe 10 times since then, without any trouble.
What's so hard about clicking on "Manage Printers" and then "Add Printer"?
Among my recent linux converts, they described CUPS as being relatively hastle free, and superior to the oft-broken process under Windows.
Say that these guys found an additional weakness in MD5 over the one we heard about recently.
They have to tool with some data now to fool the hash algorithm. So they do, and BANG, congrats, two different files with same MD5 hash. There could be any number of files with this characteristic.
But only a very small subset of those also share a (hash algorithm of choice) hash with the source file. Even if there are known weaknesses in THAT algorithm, it still remains a search problem with a reasonably nasty search space.
Use more information to 'uniquely' identify files. Two different hashes might do the trick.
Even with weaknesses in hashing algorithms, it can't be that easy to find a collision in TWO systems at once, can it? That'd make the technology useless.
With regards to health, I think my original argument made allowances for that; if you are worried about your kids' health, you won't let them sti around on their asses all day. Brianrot and attention span have little to do with parental concerns at that point.
With regards to the fast paced, check up on/., email, CNN, my favorite 15 different websites 3 times a day, we're all the same way in this respect.
All I'm saying is that it is no less productive than playing around outside or throwing a wild party. It's a waste of time, true, but everyone wastes time. Physical activity is a copout answer; who feels mentally challenged playing baseball? Online, you are stimulating yourself at least, picking up new information and learning. Two sides of the same coin.
In all of the arguments that I've made with my parents over my 24 years of life, this is the only one that I really won. There are too many parallels, and they don't think they wasted their youth in a particularly bad way. The same way that if 20 years from now, I have a kid who thinks that GravSkating is the way of his generation, and I'm always telling him he should be stimulating his brain, he can criticize me for sitting on my ass all day and not getting anything accomplished, while at least he gets his blood pumping.
Every generation lives differently. We just need to accept that and try to steer them in their trends to be less wasteful. If my kid likes GravSkating, then so be it. But I'll do my damnedest to force him to appreciate the nuances of the game and make it a real investment of energy. The same way I wish my parents had taken an interest in my interests. My sisters play soccer, my parents can understand that.
Hence the Bridge example. My dad spent his college years playing Bridge. I wound up learning Bridge from friends, but he missed out on a real opportunity to interact with his kid by never passing it on. Playing bridge online would have been a lot of fun for me, and he at least would have felt better about my timesuck of choice, seeing some of his passtimes were being passed on.
I've started playing Go recently, and I think that's given me a new perspective on the generational gap. We can't force our kids to have our same interests, but we can find common interests that allow us to see that they are developing, despite our fears. Acceptance of that is probably the best thing we could ever do for them. I look at my Korean friends and see that most of them have parents who play Baduk (Go) and are in fact, very strong at it. Of those friends, the ones who learned the game from their parents seem to have a decent relationship with their parents, while those who didn't seem very distant. Granted, this is a small sample and doesn't reflect on Korean-American culture as a whole, and of course, only an parent interested in their children's development would bother teaching their kid a time-consuming game like that, but I think this is one of those examples that while not proving my point at least illustrates that it may be valid.
Our parents were always heading outside to play baseball, while we stay inside and play Quake, leran about obscure topics, or program something we thought about earlier in the day.
Their parents were always criticizing them for having wild parties and never doing their studies because they're always playing X or Y.
In turn, they criticize our generation for the different lifestyle that we lead.
Simple fact of the matter is that these are different times. If you are a parent worried about your kids' attention spans, find them something to do online that won't 'rot their brains' or 'decrease their attention span'. Teach them to play Bridge or Go or something that is genuinely fun but requires a bit of study and practice. They're very rewarding and at least you won't have to worry that your kid is getting dumber. It's hard to think of someone as less intelligent than they used to be when they can kick your ass at a game like that.
Parents, find a healthier outlet for your anachronisms.
That having been said, I haven't read TFA. They may well be right that attention spans are decreased. All I'm saying is that's not the end of the world.
where I'm from does this from time to time. They haven't grown, they haven't worn out the old clothes, they don't need new ones... but...
Those shoes, that dress, that new style blah blah blah. The new purse that looks exactly like the 5 dollar knockoffs but costs $150.
Why is it socially acceptable for women to do this in order to keep up with fashion trends but not socially acceptable for someone to do the same thing for video game 'fashion' reasons?
Also, why is it acceptable to blow money on gifts during Christmas or Channukah, but not on impulse?
The point I'm trying to get at is "yes, it must be nice to be able to spend $300 on a console and a video game on impulse". But that's no reason to be uncivilized about somebody else's good fortune. That's like cursing the guy with the coin collection, or shouting at someone with a Gucky purse, or crticizing someone for buying a pair of crosstrainers or a bike on the impulse to "get in shape."
Just be glad he spent the money instead of hoarding it up. More money in the economy for everyone else, right?
Apparantly this Lumines game is pretty hot - anyone actually played it?
I hope it runs linux in the near future. Even if it's only got 32 Megs of storage space, that's still enough room for a few libraries an emulator and a couple of roms, right?
I mean, the market got tapped a bit by Nintendo's lame ass dual display thing a few months ago. I think (and hope) it's successful.
Hell, I know I'm getting one soon, since my parents actually ordered the Nintendo DS for me and my brother before Christmas, until I told her that the PSP was coming out in a few months and was going to be much less lame, and she canceled it with a promise to hook us up in a few months.
It's like the guy didn't even read Theo's email, just chopped it up and repeated portions of previous emails in response.
I really don't get this... it's win/win for adaptec unless they have something huge to hide. OpenBSD has been around for a while and has a good reputation for getting stuff done. If they would just forward Theo and his buddies to some guy on the back end of things, they'd generate some sales and also make the OpenBSD people shut up for a while.
Wierdest thing is you KNOW the guy they're emailing speaks excellent English because of the typos he makes. He really must be deliberately misunderstanding the request.
I have visited a few of those sites in the past, actually.
I do not think that all Australians are racist.
But I do think that a good number of people in power are racist. And I think they often say one thing while doing another. For example "Let's have less discriminatory immigration policy! Yay everyone, we now have nondiscriminatory policies! Rejoice!", all the while making it harder and harder for people from non-English speaking countries to immigrate, effectively selecting against them.
I am actually amazed and envious at the level of zeal with which some Australians are critical of government policies. At the same time, I don't think there are enough of you, or, at least, if there are, the media does everything it can to make it seem smaller than it is.
Also, I'd like to point out that if I didn't hold so much optimism for Australia, I wouldn't be bitching about it. With time, either ideas will change or the youth will grow up and displace the old windbags who grew up under 'White Australia.'
Incorrect. I in fact think the opposite, Australias immigration policies are not open enough. Why would I hate Asians? I wish I were one.
Historically (until 30 years ago), there's that whole 'White Australia' policy.
I don't know much about the interim, but more recently, they've tightened restrictions on immigrants who aren't exceptionally skilled with English, while touting it as a plan to have an open and nondiscriminatory immigration policy. More like whitewash it.
If anything, I would characterize Australia's immigration policies as anti-Asian, relative to levels in the past.
I think the real reason they tightened language restrictions was not out of public interest in the ability of newly settled people to communicate, but a targetted attempt to decrease immigration from countries where skill in English is not all that common.
I know there is a big hubub over the "Hey, our immigration law no longer separates by race!" thing - do a google search for Australia, immigration, and discrimination, and you'll see that hubub for yourself. But that PR blitz is just that. So that white Australians can live in their happy little worlds and believe that they don't have immigration policies specifically designed to keep non-skilled Indians, Chinese, and other peoples out of their predominantly white nation.
If you can find any immigration data from circa 1985 or so to today, broken down by country of origin, please post a link and I will retract my "Australia has racist immigration policies" statement.
I am an American, but a bad one. I don't ever plan on owning a gun, I hate white people as a matter of principle, even though I am one.
That having been said, perhaps my generalized criticism of white people should not be an international one.
What I meant to say is that I have an equal amount of hostile feeling toward people in positions of power in Australia as the poster above this comment, despite not being an Australian. Their immigration policies have often made my teeth grate, and I am quite displeased with Australian telecommunications industries. The Australian entertainment industry enrages me only slightly less than the US equivalents, but that's only because I hear much less about them.
Also, people have noted that no, Australia is NOT full.
I will thus restate my statement to say the following:
Every time I see the word Australia in a paragraph about something I cared about and was originally optimistic about, I cry inside because I know that Australia is not a fertile ground for ideas that I like.
Also, I should be clear about that 'racist bastards' remark. I am of the potentially wrong opinion that whities from Australia are about as racist as whities from Montana. I have nothing against bastards, and understand that the majority of Australians aren't bastards. One of my good friends is a bastard. I don't hold it against him.
Then again, he IS white. And I do hold THAT against him.
Slashdot Mirror
liability, foo
You couldn't beat Ikari Warriors? A B B A fool!
Is the thing that's keeping me from putting on in my car (manual transmission)
I don't know when you worked at MIT, but every class I took was taught by a professor, except the recitation sessions and tutorials, which were done mostly by TA's, which was not a bad thing, because by and large professors aren't very skilled at teaching.
Classes that everybody has to take are going to be big, unless they TEALize it. What does that give them? A shift from a large, productive lecture setting with tutorials and recitations to make sure everybody is fine with the material, to one where people honestly want to bash their skulls in every day that they have to go to kindergarten-esque 8.02T (that's E&M, folks).
As for research, some people do really boring stuff, some people do really fun stuff. YMMV, but I was often extremely envious of other students who were doing cool stuff at their UROPs (undergrad research opportunity). Then again, some people were stuck being sysadmins and lab goons, or writing stupid java applets at theirs.
A stupid competition is nothing. You want real failure? After taking the damned required signals and systems class (6.003), I decided I'd take a stab at a speach recognition system, and discovered that they had not taught me squat. Cepstrum? WTF is that???
You want real success? Just like any other decent university, Operating Systems(6.828) and Compilers (6.035) are top notch, practical, and fun.
I'll be the first person you find to agree that there are serious problems in teaching at MIT, but they're not the ones you've mentioned. They still have people learning scheme in their first CS course, claiming that people are learning about OOP, data structures, and programming. That's like saying that the Bible is an accurate historical reference. The second and third header courses you take don't teach you things that can be used for purposes beyond the prosaic. Most of the time you spend working in the AI class is spent debugging incomprehensible scheme for online homeworks instead of learning that math behind things and applying the stuff.
Graders for the Systems class wouldn't know a good , writable design if it bit them in the ass, and choose to grade up 'cool' designs that are demonstrably bad over ones which actually perform the specified task as close to optimally as possible on projects.
THESE are serious problems. You only have students for four years, for the most part, and when you teach them nothing useful, or worse, instruct them in BAD design, you've robbed them of the education they think they're getting.
I envy you for your interaction with your professors, but I also suspect that you're selling yourself short. Had your instruction been worse, you would most likely have made up for shortcomings by studying or by struggling.
On the contrary, you picked up something useful from a book. Would that folks behind the PRS (the POS model I was stuck with and one of the models shown in the article) had too...
This is a terrible idea. I had to sit through a class at MIT rife with stupid ideas like this. Instead of a normal classroom/lecture setting, where you simply learn at your own pace outside of class or pay attention as suits you, you just sit there and *seethe* and this goddamned clicker thing. You don't really feel the need to concentrate or pay attention because no normal person can come up with 5 legitimate sounding answers for you to choose from.
Maybe this is GREAT for some settings, but this robs students of real interaction with their teachers and replaces it with bullshit polls every 5 minutes. Not appropriate for high school or college, IMHO.
If you want to do this kind of nonsense, the old show-of-hands technique, in my experience, works wonders, provided that instead of assaulting people who get it wrong, you work towards the right answer.
And no, I didn't RTFA.
Evolution is the natural consequence of animals being selective about their mates, crossover, mutation, geographic isolation, genetically determined fitness interacting with environment and breeding, and other factors. Several of these independantly can bring about speciation, which is pretty much the basis for the whole thing. That it can be verified by observing differences in proteins from taxonomical classification to classification generally in line with expectations and by slightly more fuzzy observation of the fossil record as well is the argument for it. The argument against would be to show several of these factors being false, and then producing mathematical models showing that speciation is not a natural consequence of the above stated phenomena.
Evolution is an important concept to understand not because it tells us about the future of the world we live in, or even neccessarily about the past, or what it tells us about His Noodly Appendage, but because it is a broad umbrella under which many practical, important disciplines can flourish. An idiot with a taxonomical chart could tell you that an ugly ass pig is a better bet for harvesting insulin than a lizard. And that taxonomical chart - which is corrected from time to time - is one of the early fruits of understanding evolution. Pre-gene-splicing, that was the only thing keeping many diabetics alive. And while we now have the capability of producing excellent tools in all those discliplines under the umbrella of evolution, it is important to remember no only on whose shoulders we stand - whether it be a botanist monk who is fond of breeding flowers or some patent clerk - it is also important to remember what made the ground fertile, so that when science runs contrary to religion or philosophy, we remember that radical, verifiable thought that can be tested DOES have a practical benefit. That benefit is progress.
Creationism produces no fruit that will yield man anything other than another dark age. Understandably, some religious folk would prefer a dark age to things that challenge their blind and narrow faith. These people should relocate to Antarctica.
Evolution is convenient to teach in the biology setting, but perhaps it should really be taught in history. They can take out the bit about how the Bible presents an accurate account of history or the part in elementary school where kids learn about a Thanksgiving dinner that never happened.
You people make me sick.
pckeyboard.com has some sweet buckling-spring keyboards. You remember the nice ones from late 80's early 90's? the ones that broke and then you could fix without too much trouble?
They're still sold. So if Das Keyboard is up your alley, I'd say look at these keyboards too. I own 2 myself.^^
I can't help but wonder if adaptec ever got their act together and sent the reference materials the OpenBSD guys wanted.
Anyone know what the outcome of that fiasco was?
Here's a better question:
What legitimate interest is it for the state to say that a woman and another woman or a man and a man cannot marry?
It's discrimination against gays in an odd way. Pairwise, as opposed to individual discrimination. In my book, that's still a problem.
I support the grandparent's view that the government should recognize unions and get out of the marriage industry.
Or Sussman's advisor, as is told in The Jargon File.
My experience with setting up CUPS is the exact opposite. I agree that it has not improved over the past year, but it *IS* remarkably simple to set up a printer with CUPS. I got it on my second try, back a bit over a year ago, and have reconfigured cups maybe 10 times since then, without any trouble.
What's so hard about clicking on "Manage Printers" and then "Add Printer"?
Among my recent linux converts, they described CUPS as being relatively hastle free, and superior to the oft-broken process under Windows.
I'd disagree with this statement.
Say that these guys found an additional weakness in MD5 over the one we heard about recently.
They have to tool with some data now to fool the hash algorithm. So they do, and BANG, congrats, two different files with same MD5 hash. There could be any number of files with this characteristic.
But only a very small subset of those also share a (hash algorithm of choice) hash with the source file. Even if there are known weaknesses in THAT algorithm, it still remains a search problem with a reasonably nasty search space.
At least, that's the hope.
Use more information to 'uniquely' identify files. Two different hashes might do the trick.
Even with weaknesses in hashing algorithms, it can't be that easy to find a collision in TWO systems at once, can it? That'd make the technology useless.
I'm the same way.
/., email, CNN, my favorite 15 different websites 3 times a day, we're all the same way in this respect.
With regards to health, I think my original argument made allowances for that; if you are worried about your kids' health, you won't let them sti around on their asses all day. Brianrot and attention span have little to do with parental concerns at that point.
With regards to the fast paced, check up on
All I'm saying is that it is no less productive than playing around outside or throwing a wild party. It's a waste of time, true, but everyone wastes time. Physical activity is a copout answer; who feels mentally challenged playing baseball? Online, you are stimulating yourself at least, picking up new information and learning. Two sides of the same coin.
In all of the arguments that I've made with my parents over my 24 years of life, this is the only one that I really won. There are too many parallels, and they don't think they wasted their youth in a particularly bad way. The same way that if 20 years from now, I have a kid who thinks that GravSkating is the way of his generation, and I'm always telling him he should be stimulating his brain, he can criticize me for sitting on my ass all day and not getting anything accomplished, while at least he gets his blood pumping.
Every generation lives differently. We just need to accept that and try to steer them in their trends to be less wasteful. If my kid likes GravSkating, then so be it. But I'll do my damnedest to force him to appreciate the nuances of the game and make it a real investment of energy. The same way I wish my parents had taken an interest in my interests. My sisters play soccer, my parents can understand that.
Hence the Bridge example. My dad spent his college years playing Bridge. I wound up learning Bridge from friends, but he missed out on a real opportunity to interact with his kid by never passing it on. Playing bridge online would have been a lot of fun for me, and he at least would have felt better about my timesuck of choice, seeing some of his passtimes were being passed on.
I've started playing Go recently, and I think that's given me a new perspective on the generational gap. We can't force our kids to have our same interests, but we can find common interests that allow us to see that they are developing, despite our fears. Acceptance of that is probably the best thing we could ever do for them. I look at my Korean friends and see that most of them have parents who play Baduk (Go) and are in fact, very strong at it. Of those friends, the ones who learned the game from their parents seem to have a decent relationship with their parents, while those who didn't seem very distant. Granted, this is a small sample and doesn't reflect on Korean-American culture as a whole, and of course, only an parent interested in their children's development would bother teaching their kid a time-consuming game like that, but I think this is one of those examples that while not proving my point at least illustrates that it may be valid.
Our parents were always heading outside to play baseball, while we stay inside and play Quake, leran about obscure topics, or program something we thought about earlier in the day.
Their parents were always criticizing them for having wild parties and never doing their studies because they're always playing X or Y.
In turn, they criticize our generation for the different lifestyle that we lead.
Simple fact of the matter is that these are different times. If you are a parent worried about your kids' attention spans, find them something to do online that won't 'rot their brains' or 'decrease their attention span'. Teach them to play Bridge or Go or something that is genuinely fun but requires a bit of study and practice. They're very rewarding and at least you won't have to worry that your kid is getting dumber. It's hard to think of someone as less intelligent than they used to be when they can kick your ass at a game like that.
Parents, find a healthier outlet for your anachronisms.
That having been said, I haven't read TFA. They may well be right that attention spans are decreased. All I'm saying is that's not the end of the world.
> Wasn't there already teledildontics at that point?
Yes. It is called the "Fufme"
Google, you'll find it. Site seems to be down but there are some mirrors.
where I'm from does this from time to time. They haven't grown, they haven't worn out the old clothes, they don't need new ones... but...
Those shoes, that dress, that new style blah blah blah. The new purse that looks exactly like the 5 dollar knockoffs but costs $150.
Why is it socially acceptable for women to do this in order to keep up with fashion trends but not socially acceptable for someone to do the same thing for video game 'fashion' reasons?
Also, why is it acceptable to blow money on gifts during Christmas or Channukah, but not on impulse?
The point I'm trying to get at is "yes, it must be nice to be able to spend $300 on a console and a video game on impulse". But that's no reason to be uncivilized about somebody else's good fortune. That's like cursing the guy with the coin collection, or shouting at someone with a Gucky purse, or crticizing someone for buying a pair of crosstrainers or a bike on the impulse to "get in shape."
Just be glad he spent the money instead of hoarding it up. More money in the economy for everyone else, right?
Apparantly this Lumines game is pretty hot - anyone actually played it?
I hope it runs linux in the near future. Even if it's only got 32 Megs of storage space, that's still enough room for a few libraries an emulator and a couple of roms, right?
I mean, the market got tapped a bit by Nintendo's lame ass dual display thing a few months ago. I think (and hope) it's successful.
Hell, I know I'm getting one soon, since my parents actually ordered the Nintendo DS for me and my brother before Christmas, until I told her that the PSP was coming out in a few months and was going to be much less lame, and she canceled it with a promise to hook us up in a few months.
I dunno. Anyone else planning on buying?
It's like the guy didn't even read Theo's email, just chopped it up and repeated portions of previous emails in response.
I really don't get this... it's win/win for adaptec unless they have something huge to hide. OpenBSD has been around for a while and has a good reputation for getting stuff done. If they would just forward Theo and his buddies to some guy on the back end of things, they'd generate some sales and also make the OpenBSD people shut up for a while.
Wierdest thing is you KNOW the guy they're emailing speaks excellent English because of the typos he makes. He really must be deliberately misunderstanding the request.
Nope, because that wasn't my game.
If you'd prefer to continue arguing strawmen, be my guest.
I have visited a few of those sites in the past, actually.
I do not think that all Australians are racist.
But I do think that a good number of people in power are racist. And I think they often say one thing while doing another. For example "Let's have less discriminatory immigration policy! Yay everyone, we now have nondiscriminatory policies! Rejoice!", all the while making it harder and harder for people from non-English speaking countries to immigrate, effectively selecting against them.
I am actually amazed and envious at the level of zeal with which some Australians are critical of government policies. At the same time, I don't think there are enough of you, or, at least, if there are, the media does everything it can to make it seem smaller than it is.
Also, I'd like to point out that if I didn't hold so much optimism for Australia, I wouldn't be bitching about it. With time, either ideas will change or the youth will grow up and displace the old windbags who grew up under 'White Australia.'
Incorrect. I in fact think the opposite, Australias immigration policies are not open enough. Why would I hate Asians? I wish I were one.
j 26 .shtml
Historically (until 30 years ago), there's that whole 'White Australia' policy.
I don't know much about the interim, but more recently, they've tightened restrictions on immigrants who aren't exceptionally skilled with English, while touting it as a plan to have an open and nondiscriminatory immigration policy. More like whitewash it.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jan1999/imm3-
If anything, I would characterize Australia's immigration policies as anti-Asian, relative to levels in the past.
I think the real reason they tightened language restrictions was not out of public interest in the ability of newly settled people to communicate, but a targetted attempt to decrease immigration from countries where skill in English is not all that common.
I know there is a big hubub over the "Hey, our immigration law no longer separates by race!" thing - do a google search for Australia, immigration, and discrimination, and you'll see that hubub for yourself.
But that PR blitz is just that. So that white Australians can live in their happy little worlds and believe that they don't have immigration policies specifically designed to keep non-skilled Indians, Chinese, and other peoples out of their predominantly white nation.
If you can find any immigration data from circa 1985 or so to today, broken down by country of origin, please post a link and I will retract my "Australia has racist immigration policies" statement.
Alright, to be less brief.
I am an American, but a bad one. I don't ever plan on owning a gun, I hate white people as a matter of principle, even though I am one.
That having been said, perhaps my generalized criticism of white people should not be an international one.
What I meant to say is that I have an equal amount of hostile feeling toward people in positions of power in Australia as the poster above this comment, despite not being an Australian. Their immigration policies have often made my teeth grate, and I am quite displeased with Australian telecommunications industries. The Australian entertainment industry enrages me only slightly less than the US equivalents, but that's only because I hear much less about them.
Also, people have noted that no, Australia is NOT full.
I will thus restate my statement to say the following:
Every time I see the word Australia in a paragraph about something I cared about and was originally optimistic about, I cry inside because I know that Australia is not a fertile ground for ideas that I like.
Also, I should be clear about that 'racist bastards' remark. I am of the potentially wrong opinion that whities from Australia are about as racist as whities from Montana. I have nothing against bastards, and understand that the majority of Australians aren't bastards. One of my good friends is a bastard. I don't hold it against him.
Then again, he IS white. And I do hold THAT against him.