Try this counterexample: heroin synthesis. Someone like a graduate student in chemistry could do that indefinitely, and it's unlikely they'd ever be busted. They could do it at school, where they've already got 5 experiments going at once (who's gonna notice another flask set up?), or take some glassware to their tiny rooms nobody ever visits. As the chemist they could separate themselves 5 or 10 levels deep from anyone on the street, and since the heroin would be excellent, pure stuff, with the added bonus of no transportation costs from the Golden Triangle, it's unlikely they'd ever be offed by the people under them in the chain. That's paying well, indefinitely, and by any reasonable standard a crime.
Right, but by "sets... apart" I was referring to the trait that makes them "shunned, scorned, and made fun of" - it's not the fact that they can operate computers, it's the fact that they're boring, unpredictable, inappropriate, awkward, or any of a thousand other social flaws. I wasn't referring to the traits that make people think they're nerds, those don't really matter.
Nice try on the turnabout though. It almost works.
I want you to read this following line very carefully:
SHUT UP.
You're fighting a battle which was stupid even before it was lost, 10 years ago. To the general population, when Joey Pimpleface finds some code on the internet that lets him sniff out some doofus's password, that is hacking. That makes it the case, whether you like it or not. You're never, ever going to realign the definition of the term, not even if you did more than post on slashdot about it (which you won't). Do what you do with every other word in the damn language, and use it the same way everyone else does. Suddenly, magically, you'll find you can communicate with other lifeforms! Imagine that!
By the way,
Who would have thought that some day we would actually be respected, to the point that the jocks and cheerleaders would actually try to pass themselves off as us?
You're so naive I almost hate to burst your bubble on that one, but no. Leaving aside your high-school perception of the world, the thing that set nerds and geeks apart is lack of social skills. I can assure you "jocks and cheerleaders", as you so eloquently put it, do not try to imitate an inability to socialize. Geeks and nerds are respected once they learn how to socialize, to become like the "jocks and cheerleaders" in that sense.
I was responding to your claim that SomethingAwful demonstrates the lack of wisdom in crowds. It merely shows that people often prefer to discuss meaningless drivel, not necessarily that they don't know anything substantial.
As it happens, I agree with your main point. In general, when people get together in groups, their bad traits are amplified and their good traits subdued, and I don't think crowds are often wise. Wikipedia seems to have created enough of an exception for a good encyclopedia to come out of a crowd, which I find fascinating.
So, then, because crowds left to their own devices don't say wise things all the time, they have no wisdom? That would imply that wisdom (knowledge, really, in this context) causes monotonous focus on intellectual matters. Not true at all.
But you're cowards, so simply lamenting that the universities of ankara or teheran or baghdad for example preaches creationism, you just don't do. Because doing it, might get you actually hurt.
Wait, what? Do you really think anyone thinks that saying "fuck creationism, and fuck the people that teach it" is going to get them personally attacked by insane terrorist Muslims? I SERIOUSLY doubt that's why nobody mentioned it.
No one but Jimmy Page was playing guitar like that in 1969.
I like Page, but that's just wrong. Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, J. J. Cale, and a host of others played like that before and at the same time as Page. He was a good guitarist, but it wasn't because of originality.
If you can point out some novel features in Page's playing that truly set him apart from any of those three guitarists, I'd love to hear it, but I'd be surprised. He was good, certainly, but not a pioneer.
Well, we're in a small subset of people that would usually prefer our medical care that way. 99% of a doctor's life is taken by soccer moms with kids who've gotten allergies at the same time every year, bringing them in to see if they're dying. You can bet your ass they don't want to type their symptoms into a database themselves.
Besides which, few diseases have a 1:1 correlation between a set of symptoms and the disease. It's like the Dilbert lines (paraphrased) "Did you hear about the new flu virus going around? First you feel perfectly healthy, then you die!" "Wait a minute, I feel perfectly healthy!" If people were left to find their own diseases, we'd be overrun with hypochondriacs because I'm sure there are a lot of severe diseases which have mild symptoms, then death.
I think you might also be trivializing medicine a bit. In a pediatrician's or a podiatrists's office or something like that, I imagine diagnosis is retardedly simple, but I'd be surprised if it were so in an emergency room, trauma center, or the like. There are a lot of diseases in the world, and doctors have to know EVERY common disease and injury the minute they get to work, symptoms, causes, severity, and outlook. If all it took were a WebMD search they wouldn't have to go to school for 8 years.
Doctors aren't researchers. They're doctors, they're supposed to do exactly what you describe. They use the existing knowledge of medicine and apply it to people's illnesses to make them feel better.
There's a pretty interesting article about synthesis of brevotoxin and similar structures in Science from a month or so ago. Volume 317 (31 August 2007), pp. 1189-1192, "Water near pH 7 facilitates a series of ring-opening reactions that yield a complex toxin produced in red tides, a reaction that has proven elusive in organic solvents." I'd urge chemically-minded/.ers to read it. There's also a more layman-oriented summary in Nature's News & Views section in the most recent issue.
Well, yeah, it's certainly an example of orderly linguistic evolution, but there are 10 billion other examples too. It's like demonstrating the physical applications of math by putting a rock next to another rock to make 2 rocks. It's true, but a massive understatement.
You do know the entire field of historical linguistics is based around trends in linguistic evolution? A wikipedia link about Grimm's Law is hardly the best way to demonstrate your point.
It isn't the CIO's job to worry about security, though, he's got IT people for that. He's got other people's money to burn, and he doesn't want ninjas attacking his datacenter. I don't really see a problem with blowing a bit of the money on cool shit. It's not like a few extra thousand dollars would make all the stockholders trillionaires.
I mean, honestly, is it just me or are all these "exotic" data centers just a way to boost your CIOs ego at gatherings?
You say that like it's a bad thing. Really, is making the CIO feel cool all that much worse than whatever the datacenter is doing anyway? It's probably calculating stock prices, keeping track of financial information, caching web pages, or whatever. It's all just the mental masturbation of modern society anyway. Might as well feel cool doing it, then some concrete good will come of it.
Now how in the blue, bloody hell do you think technology helps teachers and professors explain concepts? Either they can teach concepts, in which case a blackboard is fine, or they can't, in which case using iPods and laptops won't do shit.
There's a solution for that, of course. The solution is to be a member of the Grateful Dead. They often took a full minute or more to tune up in the middle of a gig. The audience was too stoned to care, the band could have given everyone a picture of a murder victim and they'd have still been entertained.
Go to a torrent site, grab a recording of the Greensboro concert from September 29, and listen to Jump. You'll hear his guitar is out of tune, especially when he's playing rhythm. The synthesizer track was loud, which ameliorated it a lot, but it's there.
Didn't matter at the show, of course, it was too completely awesome to let a bit of dissonance get it down.
Eddie Van Halen could have used one of these in Greensboro the other night. Do they still self-tune if you bang the headstock against the stage a few times?
It's a tribute to the greatness of the band that even with an out-of-tune guitar for the last few songs, it was still the best concert any band has ever put on, ever.
All right, sorry for making bad assumptions about your musical tastes, but I stand by what I said. If you like music because of the production values, you're listening to the music wrong. It's nice to hear everything in startling clarity and balance, of course, but the beauty of music lies in the melodies and harmonies, the rhythms, and the interplay of instruments. Music of almost any quality should be enjoyable if you can hear all the instruments.
That's why you're a pretentious twat. You don't care that the music is good, you only care if there's an ever-so-slight difference in sound quality between the album and your imagined ideal. Shut up and enjoy the music, won't you? You're the problem with music today, you're the reason modern non-pop music is made up of groups like Radiohead and The Mars Volta and Animal Collective instead of the Who and the Beatles and Van Halen and Black Sabbath and a thousand other bands that are better than Radiohead that not enough people listen to anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Try this counterexample: heroin synthesis. Someone like a graduate student in chemistry could do that indefinitely, and it's unlikely they'd ever be busted. They could do it at school, where they've already got 5 experiments going at once (who's gonna notice another flask set up?), or take some glassware to their tiny rooms nobody ever visits. As the chemist they could separate themselves 5 or 10 levels deep from anyone on the street, and since the heroin would be excellent, pure stuff, with the added bonus of no transportation costs from the Golden Triangle, it's unlikely they'd ever be offed by the people under them in the chain. That's paying well, indefinitely, and by any reasonable standard a crime.
Yes. Pong was a literal 1-bit game. There were 2 instructions, and they each performed a different operation on the bit.
Right, but by "sets ... apart" I was referring to the trait that makes them "shunned, scorned, and made fun of" - it's not the fact that they can operate computers, it's the fact that they're boring, unpredictable, inappropriate, awkward, or any of a thousand other social flaws. I wasn't referring to the traits that make people think they're nerds, those don't really matter.
Nice try on the turnabout though. It almost works.
SHUT UP.
You're fighting a battle which was stupid even before it was lost, 10 years ago. To the general population, when Joey Pimpleface finds some code on the internet that lets him sniff out some doofus's password, that is hacking. That makes it the case, whether you like it or not. You're never, ever going to realign the definition of the term, not even if you did more than post on slashdot about it (which you won't). Do what you do with every other word in the damn language, and use it the same way everyone else does. Suddenly, magically, you'll find you can communicate with other lifeforms! Imagine that!
By the way, You're so naive I almost hate to burst your bubble on that one, but no. Leaving aside your high-school perception of the world, the thing that set nerds and geeks apart is lack of social skills. I can assure you "jocks and cheerleaders", as you so eloquently put it, do not try to imitate an inability to socialize. Geeks and nerds are respected once they learn how to socialize, to become like the "jocks and cheerleaders" in that sense.
I was responding to your claim that SomethingAwful demonstrates the lack of wisdom in crowds. It merely shows that people often prefer to discuss meaningless drivel, not necessarily that they don't know anything substantial.
As it happens, I agree with your main point. In general, when people get together in groups, their bad traits are amplified and their good traits subdued, and I don't think crowds are often wise. Wikipedia seems to have created enough of an exception for a good encyclopedia to come out of a crowd, which I find fascinating.
So, then, because crowds left to their own devices don't say wise things all the time, they have no wisdom? That would imply that wisdom (knowledge, really, in this context) causes monotonous focus on intellectual matters. Not true at all.
Tell you what, I'm bored, so I'll upload a few tracks for comparison:
Cream - Tales of Brave Ulysses, date unknown (October or November 1967)
The Who - Young Man Blues, 10/22/1969
Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child (Slight Return), 05/03/1969
If you can point out some novel features in Page's playing that truly set him apart from any of those three guitarists, I'd love to hear it, but I'd be surprised. He was good, certainly, but not a pioneer.
Well, we're in a small subset of people that would usually prefer our medical care that way. 99% of a doctor's life is taken by soccer moms with kids who've gotten allergies at the same time every year, bringing them in to see if they're dying. You can bet your ass they don't want to type their symptoms into a database themselves.
Besides which, few diseases have a 1:1 correlation between a set of symptoms and the disease. It's like the Dilbert lines (paraphrased) "Did you hear about the new flu virus going around? First you feel perfectly healthy, then you die!" "Wait a minute, I feel perfectly healthy!" If people were left to find their own diseases, we'd be overrun with hypochondriacs because I'm sure there are a lot of severe diseases which have mild symptoms, then death.
I think you might also be trivializing medicine a bit. In a pediatrician's or a podiatrists's office or something like that, I imagine diagnosis is retardedly simple, but I'd be surprised if it were so in an emergency room, trauma center, or the like. There are a lot of diseases in the world, and doctors have to know EVERY common disease and injury the minute they get to work, symptoms, causes, severity, and outlook. If all it took were a WebMD search they wouldn't have to go to school for 8 years.
Doctors aren't researchers. They're doctors, they're supposed to do exactly what you describe. They use the existing knowledge of medicine and apply it to people's illnesses to make them feel better.
There's a pretty interesting article about synthesis of brevotoxin and similar structures in Science from a month or so ago. Volume 317 (31 August 2007), pp. 1189-1192, "Water near pH 7 facilitates a series of ring-opening reactions that yield a complex toxin produced in red tides, a reaction that has proven elusive in organic solvents." I'd urge chemically-minded /.ers to read it. There's also a more layman-oriented summary in Nature's News & Views section in the most recent issue.
Well, yeah, it's certainly an example of orderly linguistic evolution, but there are 10 billion other examples too. It's like demonstrating the physical applications of math by putting a rock next to another rock to make 2 rocks. It's true, but a massive understatement.
You do know the entire field of historical linguistics is based around trends in linguistic evolution? A wikipedia link about Grimm's Law is hardly the best way to demonstrate your point.
Wait a minute, I know the most wonderful girl you could possibly imagine! You bastard, I was gonna ask her out! Dammit, I'll get you for this...
It isn't the CIO's job to worry about security, though, he's got IT people for that. He's got other people's money to burn, and he doesn't want ninjas attacking his datacenter. I don't really see a problem with blowing a bit of the money on cool shit. It's not like a few extra thousand dollars would make all the stockholders trillionaires.
Now how in the blue, bloody hell do you think technology helps teachers and professors explain concepts? Either they can teach concepts, in which case a blackboard is fine, or they can't, in which case using iPods and laptops won't do shit.
You honestly have no curiosity about the theoretical underpinnings of the mathematics you learn?
There's a solution for that, of course. The solution is to be a member of the Grateful Dead. They often took a full minute or more to tune up in the middle of a gig. The audience was too stoned to care, the band could have given everyone a picture of a murder victim and they'd have still been entertained.
O RLY? I totally didn't know that! Thanks bro!
Go to a torrent site, grab a recording of the Greensboro concert from September 29, and listen to Jump. You'll hear his guitar is out of tune, especially when he's playing rhythm. The synthesizer track was loud, which ameliorated it a lot, but it's there.
Didn't matter at the show, of course, it was too completely awesome to let a bit of dissonance get it down.
That's what he said.
Heathens, all of them!
Eddie Van Halen could have used one of these in Greensboro the other night. Do they still self-tune if you bang the headstock against the stage a few times?
It's a tribute to the greatness of the band that even with an out-of-tune guitar for the last few songs, it was still the best concert any band has ever put on, ever.
All right, sorry for making bad assumptions about your musical tastes, but I stand by what I said. If you like music because of the production values, you're listening to the music wrong. It's nice to hear everything in startling clarity and balance, of course, but the beauty of music lies in the melodies and harmonies, the rhythms, and the interplay of instruments. Music of almost any quality should be enjoyable if you can hear all the instruments.
That's why you're a pretentious twat. You don't care that the music is good, you only care if there's an ever-so-slight difference in sound quality between the album and your imagined ideal. Shut up and enjoy the music, won't you? You're the problem with music today, you're the reason modern non-pop music is made up of groups like Radiohead and The Mars Volta and Animal Collective instead of the Who and the Beatles and Van Halen and Black Sabbath and a thousand other bands that are better than Radiohead that not enough people listen to anymore.