These days, the term "feminist" has come correlated with this sort of thinking and actions that everyone considers deplorable-
Is this like how the term "liberal" became correlated with latte drinkers?
Admittedly, feminism has lost much of impetus in recent years. The most flagrant examples of discriminations against women have more or less ended in the developed world. Women are more educated, prosperous, independent and politically active than at any time in history. The movement has entered an era of diminishing returns.
But that doesn't mean that feminism has become an outdated concept, like suffragism or abolitionism. There are still many issues and problems that women face in our society and feminists are still helping women help themselves. These issues may not be as urgent as voting rights or working rights, but they do exist and are in need of attention.
There seems to be an American stereotype of the angry feminist; caustic, man-hating and anti-sex. This creature is as much a product of the media as of reality, if she exists at all. And moreover, she accomplished little and less. The feminists who organised, marched, campaigned and petitioned for change are the ones who actually managed to make a real difference, though they never got as much airtime. People like Mary Robinson, who fought for Irish women's rights for years, and went on to become the President of the whole country, and probably the best President it ever had.
Unfortunately, like the term "liberal", the modern, predominantly American, media has made the term "feminist" synonymous with this radical image. Check out this LA Times article from 1991 in which Robinson is described as a "radical feminist". I cannot muster the words to begin to describe just how asinine this description was. That was almost 20 years ago. I imagine perceptions have become even more warped since then.
Or is it that you do not understand what 0.1% means?
It means 1 in every 1000 comments. That's actually pretty high. Frankly, I'm surprised that the amount is so high. Where are you getting that figure?
Do things like kernel networking code get that much discussion time? Display or interface code? If you're meeting sexist comments more often than you come across discussion of heaps, there's something wrong with your kernel mailing list.
So if only 1.5% of developers are women... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist... what is the real "problem" that exists?
Allow me to answer your question, with a question.
If only 1.5% of your cake consisted of strawberries.... but fewer than 0.1% of your cake consisted of feces, what is the real problem with your cake?
What would stop someone carrying out a man in the middle attack on a web browser or distribution download that provided a different Firefox that contains different CA keys.
You have touched upon what for mean is the biggest argument against disallowing or downgrading self signed certs.
If someone has the resources to implement a man in the middle attack, what's to stop them doing so with your connection to the certification authority?
Personally, I believe that man in the middle attacks are little more than thought experiments, elaborate "what-if" scenarios, essentially no less fantastic than your nation state hijack theory. Has there ever been a single concrete instance of a man in the middle attack on a general purpose website, targeting the wider internet population? If an attacker has the means to intercept such traffic from general users, then what good would SSL be anyway?
The man, or Myth in the Middle, is not something most web users or browsers need to concern themselves with by default. By all means, add security exceptions for important or sensitive sites at the users request. But please, stop telling us that self signed certificates are somehow worse than no certificate at all.
Firefox warnings are geting worse in each version and, for the user perspective, it seems that encrypting with a non official certificate is much worse than not encrypting at all..... I suspect there is money involved in getting into that list though.
The only sane reason I can come up with for the continuing insanity of the Firefox self signed cert warnings is direct kickbacks to the Mozilla foundation from Verisign and the like. I have little doubt that at the very least, "consultation" with Verisign and the like lead to that ridiculous yellow policeman and his preference for plaintext or paid certificates.
Self signed certs serve a purpose. They offer an encrypted connection, which is a solid and concrete improvement over a plain text transmission. Sure they are not signed by proper "authorities". Sure, there is the risk of a man in the middle attack. But you tell me which is more likely. Your encrypted login being intercepted by a man in the middle, or your unencrypted login being intercepted by a traffic sniffer?
The current hysterical warning Firefox throws up about self signed certs, which force users to run a gauntlet before they can use an encrypted channel are the sign of developers too concerned with internet commerce and cold war game theory to see the practical benefit of mass, cheap, encryption in this day and age. But given their tone and severe implementation, I find it difficult to believe that an open source development teams came to that decision on their own.
Firefox has single handedly set the secure web back five years. Instead of allowing the web and technology to evolve beyond its specifications, they stuck rigidly to RFC outlines made thirty years ago, and we are all suffering because of it.
But journalism is not a bullshit job. There are some bad ones out there, but the very idea of journalism is reporting, not interpreting, and that is an extremely valuable service.
If the vast majority of journalists are bad, produce poor work and actively damage serious discourse in our society, why should we care if there are a few diamonds in the rough?
Journalism is a bullshit job. They deal in bullshit, write bullshit, reprint bullshit, make up bullshit, bullshit about bullshit, and generally do an awful job at what they ostensibly claim to be doing. The reality is that most bloggers are at least on par with journalistic mainstream because what most journalists produce a) isn't very difficult to write and b) isn't of a very high standard.
This is nothing like programmers or actors or teachers or even lawyers. Each of these professions produces something of quantifiable worth; computer code, a performance, educated students, a legal representation. What do journalists produce? Reports? I can have PR men do that? Opinion? I can ask people on a park bench for more insight and expect to get it. Investigative journalism? Don't make me laugh.
The journalist is a jack of all trades and a master of none. Even the best their profession can produce can do little better investigation or writing than can be had from high school students and bloggers. What do good journalists go on to become? Editors. Writers. PR men. Wine reviewers. There is no journalistic gold standard, no technical training, no solid scale of merit. Journalists need no qualifications, and gain none over the course of their careers. Their skills are as nebulous as their results.
Journalism is the quintessential bullshit profession.
Now I'm sympathetic to the idea of professional and valuable journalists. But they are essentially a myth, or are so diluted that they may as well be. Journalists are not the fourth estate so lauded in political discourse. Where they are not removed from politics entirely, they can be found in intimate familiarity with those in power. In both cases, they wield significant power in an of themselves, and are frequently found abusing it. Lives, industries and indeed free countries have all been destroyed under the pen of journalists. Few have ever been created by them. That job lies with the pamphleteer, the writer, the philosopher and perhaps now the blogger.
There is a theory of journalism. But there is the practice of journalism. We are better off without the latter.
Surprisingly, fake product names break the illusion too
Fake products never brea the illusion. They are usually satirical and exaggerated parodies of real world products, not unlike the game itself, and putting them in, even in serious games is always good for a chuckle and for more deeply immersing the player in the setting. A real world ad by contrast, cheapens and profanes the entire game. Seeing one instantly tells you that the company making the game values a quick profit over the integrity of its product and its relationship with its users. Instead of selling you a game, they're now selling you to advertisers.
That didn't work out so well for newspapers, and it sure as hell won't work for video games. I don't want to be so crassly reminded of real world bullshit while I'm trying to get away from it all.
In Ireland of old, possibly still today, one of the great insults was to be called an "informer". This derived from the old rule under the English where informants were very real and the information they passed on to authorities was a very central element of British rule over the country. When discovered, actual informers could face very serious repercussions from the local population, and there was really no worse sin, particularly in the days before independence. Even during the Troubles in the north well into the 90's, informers, and even suspected informers faced summary execution at the hands of the IRA.
While the English have long gone in the Republic, the taboo lingers on in a fashion. As in most former colonies, people tend to report crimes less, and respect for those that do is not very forthcoming.
Looking on the bright side, perhaps after they have been subjected to this system, the British may finally get an idea of why the government (or anyone else), knowing too much is actually a bad thing. Recent developments in their country suggests that they haven't yet grasped this, but may actually be capable of doing so. Americans on the other hand... .
I don't know, maybe we're talking past each other here. You seem to agree with me that management is chronically inept at running certain enterprises, but then we disagree on the problem being that engineers aren't able to communicate their ideas. In my view, these points are at odds in the context of this story. My argument is that the 500 word essay and requirements like it do not aid engineers in doing their job, including communication skills, but do aid managements types from gaining merit where they do not deserve it. Ultimately you end up with the Nasa management board who literally need to have information hammered into their heads for it to be transferred.
The problem as I see it is the makeup and skillset of management. If you look at the Manhatten project or the Apollo program, you find people like Oppenheimer or von Braun at the senior management level. Not only were they trained scientists, they were also among the very top men in their field. Modern Nasa appoints people like George Deutsch, who don't even hold a college degree, to senior management. Deutsch is only an obvious symptom of an underlying pathology in Nasa's organisation. A pathology brought about in no small part in reliance on metrics such as the 500 word essay to determine a persons fitness for their position.
This is a direct call for engineers and scientists to inform management of technological problems, and that role requires the ability to write far more than a 500 word essay.
This isn't about word count. Read the linked essay. If a prerequisite for informing management is being able to write a calamity such as that, then what kind of information is expected to be given to management. The answer; false information. Information twisted and massaged to give management what they want to hear. That is in fact worse than no information being passed because an engineer lacks the skills.
Someone who wasn't too great at making graphs designed some slides talking about the problems with O-rings and temperatures. That means an Engineer felt strongly enough about the problem that they raised it as an issue. Are you telling me that management's failure to grasp the simple point he was making, colder temperatures break O-rings, was his fault? The title on his slides is "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints", but his poor graphical presentation meant that the misfortune but competent managers couldn't understand his basic point? Then you declare that all that was required was a curve fitted using statistical modelling techniques far outside the scope of most engineering courses. Are you so sure they wouldn't have required some 3D coloured graphs with sound and a soundtrack or an animated Chuck Jones short in order to get the point across to a group of people so unmercifully stupid.
Technical ability isn't worth a damn if you can't convince anyone your ideas are worth listening to.
So what you are saying is that if you cannot convince someone who 1) doesn't understand, 2) doesn't really care and 3) who actively seeks to implement bad ideas, then your idea's and recommendations aren't worth a danm? Is this how our industry and economy are to be run? People with no real expertise running enterprises that they do not understand, even at a basic level? Nasa management should have consisted, largely, of engineers, rocket scientists and astronauts. Instead it consisted of MBAs, financiers, political appointees, and other such "leaders" whose only real skills were in writing 500 word essays designed to impress similarly unqualified persons, and who could only grasp a point when it was presented in the form of a dazzling powerpoint presentation.
The problem is not with the engineers who know how to perform their jobs. The problem is with people who know how to write 500 word canards that get them into jobs they don't know how to do.
Edward Tufte makes a convincing argument that if they had been better able to present and communicate their ideas they would have been able to make their engineering point in an understandable way and saved lives.
Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies.
The space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its crew, not because engineers had failed to communicate the dangers, but in spite of their warnings. NASA management simply refused to listen to what the engineers were telling them. Read Feynman's lucid assesment of exactly what went wrong at NASA. Here's a relevant excerpt
Finally, if we are to replace standard numerical probability usage with engineering judgment, why do we find such an enormous disparity between the management estimate and the judgment of the engineers? It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.
And this report is coming from a scientist.
Modern managers and executive peddle in lies, exaggeration and general bullshit. It is the hallmark of their profession. Engineers and scientists by contrast deal in precisely the opposite commodity; they seek the truth. Assessments like the MIT application essay allow bullshitters to shine bright under the floodlights of meaningless prose, while shunning the real technical ability and merit of people who actually understand and can do things.
If there were less such opportunities for charlatans to shine, and more testing of real skills, there would be a lot less Challenger disasters and accidents like them.
As for the essay itself, meh. It's not all that bad,...
The essay, which I suspect is like most application essays, is largely meaningless tripe interspersed with vapid platitudes. No doubt the applications board was heartily sick of wading through such unctuous, sophistic drivel and had finally realised the pointlessness of the exercise.
These essays serve only one purpose; They allow people to present bullshitting as meritable skill. Now, given the prevalence and preeminence of this trait in modern life, perhaps the university was not entirely incorrect in selecting for it in admissions. However, I'm glad they finally decided that more weight should be given to more beneficial skills.
I play games to zone out too, but even I would have to admit that the strong environmental message of Final Fantasy VII or the anti-nuclear message of Metal Gear Solid did come across clearly to me at the time and I still remember them over ten years later. I have play many games since which contained a variety of messages on a wide array of topics, philosophical, contemporary and otherwise. Video games were essentially the only mass medium that ever seriously discussed the growing influence of PMCs and corporate militias during the 2004-2008 period. Even a bubble-gum entertainment game like GTA4 carried biting political satire on its radio stations.
Lots of people love to sneer at video games and dismiss them as children's toys, devoid of artistic or intellectual content. Most of those same people will happily regard a Hollywood bubblegum blockbuster as the apex of human entertainment and will trawl over it endlessly for months. I for one do not see how the worlds, setting and characters created in video games differ so greatly from those seen in other forms of fiction, nor why they should be dismissed so easily as intellectually void.
I play video games as a pasttime to escape from the world. But I inevitably find myself exposed to philosophies and dilemmas of interest and of some relevance to the real world. I happen to think that playing video games is a far more broadening experience than many give it credit for.
This is a classic anti-fact. What you say is completely factually correct, but a naive reading of it would lead one to conclude a total falsehood, namely that grapes were only grown in England long ago by the Romans because the climate was hot at that time. This is demonstrably false. In fact, wine has been grown in england since the time of the Romans. In fact, from that every same link
"The period from the end of the First World War to shortly after the end of the Second World War may well be the only time in two millennia that vines to make wine on a substantial scale were not grown in England or Wales."
Those are the real facts. The real truth is that wine has always been grown in England irrespective of climate cycles, and it is only in the modern era that this growth has declined. As to the Vikings, Greenland is still inhabitable and the failure of their colonies had a lot more to do with deforestation and overgrazing than a cooling period.
Factual contextomies such as yours typify modern discussion of science and indeed topics in general. It's unfortunate that posts such as yours can mislead so many unwary minds, but that's simply reflective of the lack of critical thinking in our society, even among many who consider themselves educated and savvy. It takes more than unthinking digestion of facts to discover the truth.
Actually all the evidence points to Bligh being the very opposite of a despot.
Perhaps, but his overall career points towards the type of man to inspire mutinies. He even managed to get the Australians to rebel during his stint as governor. You don't have to flay people alive to get them to rebel, but you generally do have to be a fairly incompetent leader.
Football plays and players clearly show that simple bodies can form spontaneous order. This result was found to be in direct opposition to the prevailing dogma of the second law of teenodynamics; That the disorder of a teenagers life, property, and living space will always increase over time. This breakthrough is thought to have bearing on the great problem of "Teenage dysfunction death" which asks why when teenagers continuously degenerate over the course of their teen years, so they eventually mature into productive and stable adults.
Scientists urge caution in relation to these findings. "Current teenage theory leaves many questions unanswered", said Professor Alex Tweed of the national institute for Juvenile Entropy studies, "However, one result does not explain all the data on its own. For example, we know that there are quite a few adults who never become stable or mature. For example, many can be found making tasteless jokes about peoples' daughters on web forums, and other can be found modding up those same comments. This field will require more research before a definitive understanding of human maturity is achieved."
I guess you're hoping that the PS3 doesn't have XBox360 like failure rates. I know a few people who would have already lost access to their downloaded content under this scheme.
I know people who have, and in fact have myself, suffered from a PS3 failure in the form of the "Yellow light of Death (YLOD)". While save files are indeed lost to encrypted oblivion, your downloadable content is tied to your PSN account and can be re-downloaded for free from the PSN store when you receive your replacement console. I thus conclude that you either don't know anyone who has lost access or you know a lot of liars.
I stress that Sony's policy with regard to save files leaves a lot to be desired. These indeed are fully encrypted, tied to the console and will be lost forever in the event of failure. However, your purchased content is available for download at any time.
Actually, they allowed to use content you've purchased on devices you don't own. They also allow you use content you haven't purchased as long as it had been installed on one user account on your machine. I would personally prefer to simply have the game on a portable disc, but in lieu of that, the current system on the PS3 (excepting game saves) is something I can live with.
I'm aware that digital distribution essentially means that we are moving from concrete ownership of games to effectively licensing them. That's something I'd regret to see happening for most titles. However, when it comes to downloadable games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Fat princess, World of Goo or Shadow Complex that could never be released as physical media, I'm willing to accept the licensing model particularly if it is as liberal as the one currently seen on the PS3. The alternatives on other consoles are not altogether as palatable at the present time.
I would ideally like to have a small DS sized cartridge for every downloadable game I own. Something I could carry with me, put into any console and play when, where and how I chose to. That's not going to happen, especially if we also want the convenience and lower cost of downloadable games. What's the alternative? What kind of DRM regime would you like to see for downloadable games? None at all? Then you'd prefer to have no downloadable games; a genre I might add that has been the source of the most original and highest quality games of this generation.
Downloadable games are fun, engaging and frankly, cheap. Depending on your supplier, their licences are more or less agreeable. Sony's current policies are probably the most agreeable of any. Yes, we'd all like to own the content we buy instead of just buying a licence. But that's just not going to happen. If the PSP Go's licensing is as flexible as the PS3s I may even consider buying one and paying for and downloading all the PSP games I've wanted to play, and as long as Sony keeps honouring my account, I'll still be able to play them the same as if I had them on UMD discs. That's an important qualifier, but given Sony's track record on downloadable content so far, I think its safe to say that there is less risk Sony locking down my games than me losing their disks.
Perhaps this is indeed evidence of my "indoctrination". Or perhaps it's simply evidence that I'm someone who knows a fair deal when they see one, and is willing to spend money so they can sit back and play the games they want to with no hassle and in peace. You decide.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this like how the term "liberal" became correlated with latte drinkers?
Admittedly, feminism has lost much of impetus in recent years. The most flagrant examples of discriminations against women have more or less ended in the developed world. Women are more educated, prosperous, independent and politically active than at any time in history. The movement has entered an era of diminishing returns.
But that doesn't mean that feminism has become an outdated concept, like suffragism or abolitionism. There are still many issues and problems that women face in our society and feminists are still helping women help themselves. These issues may not be as urgent as voting rights or working rights, but they do exist and are in need of attention.
There seems to be an American stereotype of the angry feminist; caustic, man-hating and anti-sex. This creature is as much a product of the media as of reality, if she exists at all. And moreover, she accomplished little and less. The feminists who organised, marched, campaigned and petitioned for change are the ones who actually managed to make a real difference, though they never got as much airtime. People like Mary Robinson, who fought for Irish women's rights for years, and went on to become the President of the whole country, and probably the best President it ever had.
Unfortunately, like the term "liberal", the modern, predominantly American, media has made the term "feminist" synonymous with this radical image. Check out this LA Times article from 1991 in which Robinson is described as a "radical feminist". I cannot muster the words to begin to describe just how asinine this description was. That was almost 20 years ago. I imagine perceptions have become even more warped since then.
It means 1 in every 1000 comments. That's actually pretty high. Frankly, I'm surprised that the amount is so high. Where are you getting that figure?
Do things like kernel networking code get that much discussion time? Display or interface code? If you're meeting sexist comments more often than you come across discussion of heaps, there's something wrong with your kernel mailing list.
Allow me to answer your question, with a question.
If only 1.5% of your cake consisted of strawberries .... but fewer than 0.1% of your cake consisted of feces, what is the real problem with your cake?
You have touched upon what for mean is the biggest argument against disallowing or downgrading self signed certs.
If someone has the resources to implement a man in the middle attack, what's to stop them doing so with your connection to the certification authority?
Personally, I believe that man in the middle attacks are little more than thought experiments, elaborate "what-if" scenarios, essentially no less fantastic than your nation state hijack theory. Has there ever been a single concrete instance of a man in the middle attack on a general purpose website, targeting the wider internet population? If an attacker has the means to intercept such traffic from general users, then what good would SSL be anyway?
The man, or Myth in the Middle, is not something most web users or browsers need to concern themselves with by default. By all means, add security exceptions for important or sensitive sites at the users request. But please, stop telling us that self signed certificates are somehow worse than no certificate at all.
The only sane reason I can come up with for the continuing insanity of the Firefox self signed cert warnings is direct kickbacks to the Mozilla foundation from Verisign and the like. I have little doubt that at the very least, "consultation" with Verisign and the like lead to that ridiculous yellow policeman and his preference for plaintext or paid certificates.
Self signed certs serve a purpose. They offer an encrypted connection, which is a solid and concrete improvement over a plain text transmission. Sure they are not signed by proper "authorities". Sure, there is the risk of a man in the middle attack. But you tell me which is more likely. Your encrypted login being intercepted by a man in the middle, or your unencrypted login being intercepted by a traffic sniffer?
The current hysterical warning Firefox throws up about self signed certs, which force users to run a gauntlet before they can use an encrypted channel are the sign of developers too concerned with internet commerce and cold war game theory to see the practical benefit of mass, cheap, encryption in this day and age. But given their tone and severe implementation, I find it difficult to believe that an open source development teams came to that decision on their own.
Firefox has single handedly set the secure web back five years. Instead of allowing the web and technology to evolve beyond its specifications, they stuck rigidly to RFC outlines made thirty years ago, and we are all suffering because of it.
If the vast majority of journalists are bad, produce poor work and actively damage serious discourse in our society, why should we care if there are a few diamonds in the rough?
Journalism is a bullshit job. They deal in bullshit, write bullshit, reprint bullshit, make up bullshit, bullshit about bullshit, and generally do an awful job at what they ostensibly claim to be doing. The reality is that most bloggers are at least on par with journalistic mainstream because what most journalists produce a) isn't very difficult to write and b) isn't of a very high standard.
This is nothing like programmers or actors or teachers or even lawyers. Each of these professions produces something of quantifiable worth; computer code, a performance, educated students, a legal representation. What do journalists produce? Reports? I can have PR men do that? Opinion? I can ask people on a park bench for more insight and expect to get it. Investigative journalism? Don't make me laugh.
The journalist is a jack of all trades and a master of none. Even the best their profession can produce can do little better investigation or writing than can be had from high school students and bloggers. What do good journalists go on to become? Editors. Writers. PR men. Wine reviewers. There is no journalistic gold standard, no technical training, no solid scale of merit. Journalists need no qualifications, and gain none over the course of their careers. Their skills are as nebulous as their results.
Journalism is the quintessential bullshit profession.
Now I'm sympathetic to the idea of professional and valuable journalists. But they are essentially a myth, or are so diluted that they may as well be. Journalists are not the fourth estate so lauded in political discourse. Where they are not removed from politics entirely, they can be found in intimate familiarity with those in power. In both cases, they wield significant power in an of themselves, and are frequently found abusing it. Lives, industries and indeed free countries have all been destroyed under the pen of journalists. Few have ever been created by them. That job lies with the pamphleteer, the writer, the philosopher and perhaps now the blogger.
There is a theory of journalism. But there is the practice of journalism. We are better off without the latter.
Wow, that movie really was devoid of redeeming content.
Or they could, you know, put it in a dialog box on system install. Whatever.
Fake products never brea the illusion. They are usually satirical and exaggerated parodies of real world products, not unlike the game itself, and putting them in, even in serious games is always good for a chuckle and for more deeply immersing the player in the setting. A real world ad by contrast, cheapens and profanes the entire game. Seeing one instantly tells you that the company making the game values a quick profit over the integrity of its product and its relationship with its users. Instead of selling you a game, they're now selling you to advertisers.
That didn't work out so well for newspapers, and it sure as hell won't work for video games. I don't want to be so crassly reminded of real world bullshit while I'm trying to get away from it all.
No, no. You were right the first time. We pretty much hated your guts. The Anti-american symposium was all the rage there for a while.
In Ireland of old, possibly still today, one of the great insults was to be called an "informer". This derived from the old rule under the English where informants were very real and the information they passed on to authorities was a very central element of British rule over the country. When discovered, actual informers could face very serious repercussions from the local population, and there was really no worse sin, particularly in the days before independence. Even during the Troubles in the north well into the 90's, informers, and even suspected informers faced summary execution at the hands of the IRA.
While the English have long gone in the Republic, the taboo lingers on in a fashion. As in most former colonies, people tend to report crimes less, and respect for those that do is not very forthcoming.
Looking on the bright side, perhaps after they have been subjected to this system, the British may finally get an idea of why the government (or anyone else), knowing too much is actually a bad thing. Recent developments in their country suggests that they haven't yet grasped this, but may actually be capable of doing so. Americans on the other hand... .
Your fixed, has been fixed.
He could be homosexual.
I don't know, maybe we're talking past each other here. You seem to agree with me that management is chronically inept at running certain enterprises, but then we disagree on the problem being that engineers aren't able to communicate their ideas. In my view, these points are at odds in the context of this story. My argument is that the 500 word essay and requirements like it do not aid engineers in doing their job, including communication skills, but do aid managements types from gaining merit where they do not deserve it. Ultimately you end up with the Nasa management board who literally need to have information hammered into their heads for it to be transferred.
The problem as I see it is the makeup and skillset of management. If you look at the Manhatten project or the Apollo program, you find people like Oppenheimer or von Braun at the senior management level. Not only were they trained scientists, they were also among the very top men in their field. Modern Nasa appoints people like George Deutsch, who don't even hold a college degree, to senior management. Deutsch is only an obvious symptom of an underlying pathology in Nasa's organisation. A pathology brought about in no small part in reliance on metrics such as the 500 word essay to determine a persons fitness for their position.
This isn't about word count. Read the linked essay. If a prerequisite for informing management is being able to write a calamity such as that, then what kind of information is expected to be given to management. The answer; false information. Information twisted and massaged to give management what they want to hear. That is in fact worse than no information being passed because an engineer lacks the skills.
Someone who wasn't too great at making graphs designed some slides talking about the problems with O-rings and temperatures. That means an Engineer felt strongly enough about the problem that they raised it as an issue. Are you telling me that management's failure to grasp the simple point he was making, colder temperatures break O-rings, was his fault? The title on his slides is "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints", but his poor graphical presentation meant that the misfortune but competent managers couldn't understand his basic point? Then you declare that all that was required was a curve fitted using statistical modelling techniques far outside the scope of most engineering courses. Are you so sure they wouldn't have required some 3D coloured graphs with sound and a soundtrack or an animated Chuck Jones short in order to get the point across to a group of people so unmercifully stupid.
So what you are saying is that if you cannot convince someone who 1) doesn't understand, 2) doesn't really care and 3) who actively seeks to implement bad ideas, then your idea's and recommendations aren't worth a danm? Is this how our industry and economy are to be run? People with no real expertise running enterprises that they do not understand, even at a basic level? Nasa management should have consisted, largely, of engineers, rocket scientists and astronauts. Instead it consisted of MBAs, financiers, political appointees, and other such "leaders" whose only real skills were in writing 500 word essays designed to impress similarly unqualified persons, and who could only grasp a point when it was presented in the form of a dazzling powerpoint presentation.
The problem is not with the engineers who know how to perform their jobs. The problem is with people who know how to write 500 word canards that get them into jobs they don't know how to do.
Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies.
The space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its crew, not because engineers had failed to communicate the dangers, but in spite of their warnings. NASA management simply refused to listen to what the engineers were telling them. Read Feynman's lucid assesment of exactly what went wrong at NASA. Here's a relevant excerpt
And this report is coming from a scientist.
Modern managers and executive peddle in lies, exaggeration and general bullshit. It is the hallmark of their profession. Engineers and scientists by contrast deal in precisely the opposite commodity; they seek the truth. Assessments like the MIT application essay allow bullshitters to shine bright under the floodlights of meaningless prose, while shunning the real technical ability and merit of people who actually understand and can do things.
If there were less such opportunities for charlatans to shine, and more testing of real skills, there would be a lot less Challenger disasters and accidents like them.
The essay, which I suspect is like most application essays, is largely meaningless tripe interspersed with vapid platitudes. No doubt the applications board was heartily sick of wading through such unctuous, sophistic drivel and had finally realised the pointlessness of the exercise.
These essays serve only one purpose; They allow people to present bullshitting as meritable skill. Now, given the prevalence and preeminence of this trait in modern life, perhaps the university was not entirely incorrect in selecting for it in admissions. However, I'm glad they finally decided that more weight should be given to more beneficial skills.
What has someones writing ability got to do with their ability to gain obtain a given degree?
I play games to zone out too, but even I would have to admit that the strong environmental message of Final Fantasy VII or the anti-nuclear message of Metal Gear Solid did come across clearly to me at the time and I still remember them over ten years later. I have play many games since which contained a variety of messages on a wide array of topics, philosophical, contemporary and otherwise. Video games were essentially the only mass medium that ever seriously discussed the growing influence of PMCs and corporate militias during the 2004-2008 period. Even a bubble-gum entertainment game like GTA4 carried biting political satire on its radio stations.
Lots of people love to sneer at video games and dismiss them as children's toys, devoid of artistic or intellectual content. Most of those same people will happily regard a Hollywood bubblegum blockbuster as the apex of human entertainment and will trawl over it endlessly for months. I for one do not see how the worlds, setting and characters created in video games differ so greatly from those seen in other forms of fiction, nor why they should be dismissed so easily as intellectually void.
I play video games as a pasttime to escape from the world. But I inevitably find myself exposed to philosophies and dilemmas of interest and of some relevance to the real world. I happen to think that playing video games is a far more broadening experience than many give it credit for.
This is a classic anti-fact. What you say is completely factually correct, but a naive reading of it would lead one to conclude a total falsehood, namely that grapes were only grown in England long ago by the Romans because the climate was hot at that time. This is demonstrably false. In fact, wine has been grown in england since the time of the Romans. In fact, from that every same link
Those are the real facts. The real truth is that wine has always been grown in England irrespective of climate cycles, and it is only in the modern era that this growth has declined. As to the Vikings, Greenland is still inhabitable and the failure of their colonies had a lot more to do with deforestation and overgrazing than a cooling period.
Factual contextomies such as yours typify modern discussion of science and indeed topics in general. It's unfortunate that posts such as yours can mislead so many unwary minds, but that's simply reflective of the lack of critical thinking in our society, even among many who consider themselves educated and savvy. It takes more than unthinking digestion of facts to discover the truth.
All scientific evidence is carefully selected. There is a very high level of scrutiny and honesty in science, unseen in most other walks of life.
Perhaps, but his overall career points towards the type of man to inspire mutinies. He even managed to get the Australians to rebel during his stint as governor. You don't have to flay people alive to get them to rebel, but you generally do have to be a fairly incompetent leader.
Football plays and players clearly show that simple bodies can form spontaneous order. This result was found to be in direct opposition to the prevailing dogma of the second law of teenodynamics; That the disorder of a teenagers life, property, and living space will always increase over time. This breakthrough is thought to have bearing on the great problem of "Teenage dysfunction death" which asks why when teenagers continuously degenerate over the course of their teen years, so they eventually mature into productive and stable adults.
Scientists urge caution in relation to these findings. "Current teenage theory leaves many questions unanswered", said Professor Alex Tweed of the national institute for Juvenile Entropy studies, "However, one result does not explain all the data on its own. For example, we know that there are quite a few adults who never become stable or mature. For example, many can be found making tasteless jokes about peoples' daughters on web forums, and other can be found modding up those same comments. This field will require more research before a definitive understanding of human maturity is achieved."
I know people who have, and in fact have myself, suffered from a PS3 failure in the form of the "Yellow light of Death (YLOD)". While save files are indeed lost to encrypted oblivion, your downloadable content is tied to your PSN account and can be re-downloaded for free from the PSN store when you receive your replacement console. I thus conclude that you either don't know anyone who has lost access or you know a lot of liars.
I stress that Sony's policy with regard to save files leaves a lot to be desired. These indeed are fully encrypted, tied to the console and will be lost forever in the event of failure. However, your purchased content is available for download at any time.
Actually, they allowed to use content you've purchased on devices you don't own. They also allow you use content you haven't purchased as long as it had been installed on one user account on your machine. I would personally prefer to simply have the game on a portable disc, but in lieu of that, the current system on the PS3 (excepting game saves) is something I can live with.
I'm aware that digital distribution essentially means that we are moving from concrete ownership of games to effectively licensing them. That's something I'd regret to see happening for most titles. However, when it comes to downloadable games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Fat princess, World of Goo or Shadow Complex that could never be released as physical media, I'm willing to accept the licensing model particularly if it is as liberal as the one currently seen on the PS3. The alternatives on other consoles are not altogether as palatable at the present time.
I would ideally like to have a small DS sized cartridge for every downloadable game I own. Something I could carry with me, put into any console and play when, where and how I chose to. That's not going to happen, especially if we also want the convenience and lower cost of downloadable games. What's the alternative? What kind of DRM regime would you like to see for downloadable games? None at all? Then you'd prefer to have no downloadable games; a genre I might add that has been the source of the most original and highest quality games of this generation.
Downloadable games are fun, engaging and frankly, cheap. Depending on your supplier, their licences are more or less agreeable. Sony's current policies are probably the most agreeable of any. Yes, we'd all like to own the content we buy instead of just buying a licence. But that's just not going to happen. If the PSP Go's licensing is as flexible as the PS3s I may even consider buying one and paying for and downloading all the PSP games I've wanted to play, and as long as Sony keeps honouring my account, I'll still be able to play them the same as if I had them on UMD discs. That's an important qualifier, but given Sony's track record on downloadable content so far, I think its safe to say that there is less risk Sony locking down my games than me losing their disks.
Perhaps this is indeed evidence of my "indoctrination". Or perhaps it's simply evidence that I'm someone who knows a fair deal when they see one, and is willing to spend money so they can sit back and play the games they want to with no hassle and in peace. You decide.