One point I tried hammering home indirectly in my other posts was that the Chinese are going to adopt western-style scientific research and engineering whether they want to or not. Whether *we* want them to or not. The Japanese and Koreans went through the same growing pains. To expect the Chinese to be somehow oblivious/stupid is hubris on our part. They are just people, after all, just like us.
"'What one monkey can do, another can' - Ancient Simian Proverb" - Calculus Made Easy by Sylvanus P. Thompson, page 1.
Western scientists and engineers are already moving to the Chinese metropolitan areas as part of their jobs. Some move permanently. The rubbing of shoulders with Chinese scientists and engineers is sure to change things. You cannot simultaneously wall off your society while engaging in business, science, and engineering with another culture and expect things to be the same. Even pure osmosis is at work here.
Why do scientists and engineers move to Shanghai and such for work?
Because the fact is, as an engineer or scientist working on GE's dime, for example, you can live like royalty in China at the price of having to learn another language.
I fell into the pit of using the loaded language (false as it is) of "sharia courts"
You are indeed correct.
What the idiots in this thread do not understand that efforts to ban religious arbitration in the US are illegal on their face. What would they say if Baptist congregations could no longer have their own church governance? Oh the hue and cry.
It's nice to be in the religious majority and have the amount of political pull to bully minority religions, isn't it?
The dust of Roger Williams spins in the grave fast enough to create its own intense magnetic field.
Put it this way, unless you have people who can afford your products, your products are not going to get bought. And captains of industry in the US have been ignoring this obvious fact stated in plain terms by Henry Ford himself. Manufacturing isn't always the largest part of the economy, but it drives a lot of other industries in parallel with it.
Germany has always had a decent manufacturing base, and at this last downturn, they are still the strongest economy in Europe. Funny how that works.
The whole "outsourcing to cheaper labor countries" is only temporary,
This is wrong and stupid. It causes a cascade of talent loss that is not easily replaced. It is more likely to be permanent than anything else.
1. Not everyone can be an engineer. 2. An engineer who does not how to manufacture is a pretty fuckin' poor engineer and makes it painful for everyone else who has to deal with his shit downstream.
Even Christian fanatics don't advocate subjecting non-Christians to Biblical laws,
This is the biggest load of horse shit in the entire thread and you have wilfully pulled the blinders over your eyes to not see this shit.
I got wind of Dominionism back in the *1980s* by listening to preachers on shortwave radio. Dominionism is *all about* subjugating everyone who doesn't buy into Dominion Gospel to the worst sorts of oppression.
Again. Both are a threat. I acknowledge that. I think most people would. It's you who is refusing to acknowledge Islam as any threat to western society despite the over 18,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11.
1. You are inflating statistics as if those happened here in the US.
2. You have not proven that all those are Islamist
3. That is a number you pulled from your ass
It's you who refuse to acknowledge Islam is even "bad" in any way shape of form,
I fucking *dine* at a restaurant where it's Family Night every fucking Saturday and they are *all* Muslim.
It's you who fails to differentiate between "hey, I was born Muslim" with terrorists. Protip: they came here to get away from the idiocy "over there"
Yes, Shariah legislation is mostly redundant because of the first amendment, but there is nothing wrong with redundancy.
Yes, yes there is something wrong with redundancy. Any law that isn't really needed is prima-facie bad. Any RON PAUL libertarian should see this.
Also, there is a difference between wearing religion on your sleeve, which is a protected first amendment right, and seeking to establish it as a system of government,
You haven't been paying attention to the Dominionists like Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, and The Family.
Would you have a problem with your local government passing a law guaranteeing there would never be "dominionist" courts running things, if only it were as a symbolic effort?
We don't need such a law. A Dominionist Court endorsed by, say, the State of North Carolina, would be illegal. Period. Full stop. No extra legislation needed.
You really need to read up on this shit. You really do.
>putting Dominionist in quotes as if Dominionism doesn't exist
You know those megachurches that preach Prosperity Gospel?
This is the best summation of Dominionism and Prosperity Gospel:
We are, unless things drastically change in politics and the boards of corporations. This is a matter of facts on the ground. It's not open to debate. It's happening.
we should all lay down and slowly starve.
We won't have any choice if things don't change.
We have been handing technology, as a society, to the Chinese for decades now, with the delusional belief that all the high-end stuff will still happen here. I believe it started with Voc-Ed being a place to dump the "dummy" students. This is how I believe we lost the skills to make anything here - that we systematically decided that making anything = sweatshop and if you were smart, you didn't go into manufacturing, ever. We denigrated actual work for decades and anyone who worked in a factory making anything was therefore just some dumb monkey. And you can replace monkeys on one side of the planet with monkeys from another side. That's the thinking that got us here.^1
But transferring the manufacturing base over to China makes it inconvenient for the engineering and software to happen here, so guess where it's going to move.
Go ahead, guess.
Engineers and scientists are already moving to Shanghai.
Unless we stop the haemorrhaging and start building up our own manufacturing base here encouraging students to go into STEM without learning Chinese is a joke and a half.
But I don't see that happening any time soon.
-- BMO
Postscript: I was looking at a Popular Mechanics from the 1950s and there was articles that went on for pages on how to use a shaper and a tip on how to turn a taper using ball bearings instead of ordinary conical centers , and it was just *there* as if machining was a skill that many people had. You don't publish an article in a popular magazine where you deliberate write over the heads over your readers or write something they don't care about. It was expected that the readers of the 1954 Popular Mechanics^2 would find this stuff applicable. Today you would *never* find such an article in a mainstream magazine such as that.
Americans who seek to establish anti-Shariah legislation are idiots.
Fixed.
The first amendment requires that the government not endorse a religion. This includes Islam too. Officially sanctioned Sharia courts would be therefore per-se illegal. We don't need more legislation, it's already done.
The only people who complain about Sharia courts in the US are politicians trying to ingratiate themselves with their "base."
All the while it's just fine with the RWNJs that Republicans wear their religion on their sleeves already.
The amount of doublethink required to hold both Islam as a threat and Christian Republican Dominionists as *not* a threat hurts my head.
I don't see why you Christfags don't get all bent out of shape about Dominionism and Prosperity Gospel and all the other shit the Evangelicals seem to keep trying to shove down everyone's throats.
Manually extracting files and putting them in/home/anonymous_coward/bin is not the same as installing software system-wide.
If you install it to your home directory, it's not available to other users unless you recursively chmod your home directory to 755. But this defeats your own privacy, and plays hell with paths for other people when they want to actually use a program you have installed into your own account. Entirely removing the ability to install software system-wide on a computer you own would only introduce chaos and pain for no reason whatsoever.
Installing software to your own directory is only useful when you, yourself, *never* have admin privileges on a machine, like on my account on a computer across town. But then I just add my own/home/bmo/bin to the path and I'm done with it. I do this for my own builds of irssi, nmap, etc., which are not otherwise available. But I don't go crawling other users' accounts for software and I don't have a crazy path statement.
-- BMO
P.S. Yes, I know nmap requires admin privs for certain modes, but I only use it for external scanning of my own systems. It's good to have a computer outside your own network that can look at what you have exposed to the public. I highly recommend doing this.
P.P.S. Whatever your "uptime" for never going sudo on an account is, I have you beat, since the account I have on entropy was created sometime last century. So long ago that entropy has been two machines so far (I have the old one, a Sun, sitting right here which I bought from Daver for nostalgia reasons).
Baseball probably has more nerd fans than any other American sport
Stephen Jay Gould has written more on baseball than any other palaeontologist alive or dead. You should read his essay on the demise of the.400 hitter.
sudo-like interface for running things that require elevated permissions
The reason for UAC was not to recreate sudo. UAC is, and was, exceptionally intrusive for one purpose only: to create negative feedback to developers who insisted on using Admin permission for everything. Even some games required Admin access under XP, for example.
Microsoft had finally given consumers a multi-user OS in XP and developers were insisting on defeating the benefits of multi-user, making limited user accounts especially painful.
Thus UAC. If your program was bringing up UAC for every stupid thing, then you were doing it wrong.
Now, most programs need to bring up Admin privs for installation and that's the last you see of UAC if you are not doing admin-specific tasks.
It annoyed the piss out of end users when UAC first showed up and everyone in the press misunderstood its purpose. UAC was considered a black mark against Vista. But you have to ask, how else was Microsoft going to force developers into obeying the practices everyone else did on other multi-user OSes?
I am a Unix and Linux guy, but I have to give credit to Microsoft for doing it right for once.
This isn't even news for nerds. Nerds have already been using the Developer and Consumer Previews and await the first beta, like me.
Flattening of window widgets is not news. It's not even a story.
And a link to the MSDN blog that discusses the entire history of Windows from 1.0 to 8 to justify the shenanigans in 8? Come the hell on. The Windows "defenders" here already do that in the comments. I can't even imagine the flood of grievances filed with the MWSU.
The story is Metro. The story is how maddening Metro is going to be to the vast majority of desktop users when you can't turn it off. The story is about how Microsoft thinks they've found the holy grail of a "one interface for all devices" when it's self-delusion, again. The story is how you and I and every other nerd on the planet is going to have to answer dumb questions about Metro just to be polite. Repeatedly. Until Windows 9.
Your first post in this thread was reminiscent of Sarah Palin ranting about fruit fly studies. In fact, the post you made is typical of the ignorati that infest American politics and rather dumb individuals everywhere.
Your trying to cover up for it by saying it's a joke doesn't take away from the fact it wasn't funny in the first place, or from the fact that it reeked of deliberate ignorance as seen every goddamned day on Fox and other Rupert Murdoch properties.
Hendersj, realising he said something really dumb, tries to pull his fat out of the fire but burns his fingers, sets the sleeve of his Neanderthal rabbit-fur-coat alight, starts screaming, and then rolls around on the ground trying to put out the signs that he indeed did do something dumb.
I'd have to say that if this criteria is for a "supernova candidate", the nearest supernova candidate to us would be THE SUN. Because it's bound to go supernova one day,
And you would be completely wrong in all respects.
The size of the Sun makes it impossible to become a supernova. It will grow to a red giant, throw off gas, and shrink to a white dwarf. There will be no supernova.
The next nearest supernova candidate would be proxima centauri.
No, you would be wrong *again* since none of the Centauri stars are large enough to become supernovae and none show any sign in the distant future of either colliding or accreting matter from one other to make a type 1a supernova.
Damn, I should've been an astronomer - if this is all it takes to "make news".
Slashdot Mirror
One point I tried hammering home indirectly in my other posts was that the Chinese are going to adopt western-style scientific research and engineering whether they want to or not. Whether *we* want them to or not. The Japanese and Koreans went through the same growing pains. To expect the Chinese to be somehow oblivious/stupid is hubris on our part. They are just people, after all, just like us.
"'What one monkey can do, another can' - Ancient Simian Proverb" - Calculus Made Easy by Sylvanus P. Thompson, page 1.
Western scientists and engineers are already moving to the Chinese metropolitan areas as part of their jobs. Some move permanently. The rubbing of shoulders with Chinese scientists and engineers is sure to change things. You cannot simultaneously wall off your society while engaging in business, science, and engineering with another culture and expect things to be the same. Even pure osmosis is at work here.
Why do scientists and engineers move to Shanghai and such for work?
Because the fact is, as an engineer or scientist working on GE's dime, for example, you can live like royalty in China at the price of having to learn another language.
--
BMO
I fell into the pit of using the loaded language (false as it is) of "sharia courts"
You are indeed correct.
What the idiots in this thread do not understand that efforts to ban religious arbitration in the US are illegal on their face. What would they say if Baptist congregations could no longer have their own church governance? Oh the hue and cry.
It's nice to be in the religious majority and have the amount of political pull to bully minority religions, isn't it?
The dust of Roger Williams spins in the grave fast enough to create its own intense magnetic field.
--
BMO
"Those Japanese will never make a car as good as the Americans."
---
BMO
"might" is a pretty big understatement.
Put it this way, unless you have people who can afford your products, your products are not going to get bought. And captains of industry in the US have been ignoring this obvious fact stated in plain terms by Henry Ford himself. Manufacturing isn't always the largest part of the economy, but it drives a lot of other industries in parallel with it.
Germany has always had a decent manufacturing base, and at this last downturn, they are still the strongest economy in Europe. Funny how that works.
The whole "outsourcing to cheaper labor countries" is only temporary,
This is wrong and stupid. It causes a cascade of talent loss that is not easily replaced. It is more likely to be permanent than anything else.
--
BMO
1. Not everyone can be an engineer.
2. An engineer who does not how to manufacture is a pretty fuckin' poor engineer and makes it painful for everyone else who has to deal with his shit downstream.
--
BMO
Oh, and I'm Canadian.
Then you should be aware of the Dominionsts in Canada who would subjugate your ass.
http://www.benedictionblogson.com/2011/08/30/why-dominionism-matters/
They have been influencing the Harper government a fucking whole lot more than you think.
--
BMO
Even Christian fanatics don't advocate subjecting non-Christians to Biblical laws,
This is the biggest load of horse shit in the entire thread and you have wilfully pulled the blinders over your eyes to not see this shit.
I got wind of Dominionism back in the *1980s* by listening to preachers on shortwave radio. Dominionism is *all about* subjugating everyone who doesn't buy into Dominion Gospel to the worst sorts of oppression.
--
BMO
Again. Both are a threat. I acknowledge that. I think most people would. It's you who is refusing to acknowledge Islam as any threat to western society despite the over 18,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11.
1. You are inflating statistics as if those happened here in the US.
2. You have not proven that all those are Islamist
3. That is a number you pulled from your ass
It's you who refuse to acknowledge Islam is even "bad" in any way shape of form,
I fucking *dine* at a restaurant where it's Family Night every fucking Saturday and they are *all* Muslim.
It's you who fails to differentiate between "hey, I was born Muslim" with terrorists. Protip: they came here to get away from the idiocy "over there"
Yes, Shariah legislation is mostly redundant because of the first amendment, but there is nothing wrong with redundancy.
Yes, yes there is something wrong with redundancy. Any law that isn't really needed is prima-facie bad. Any RON PAUL libertarian should see this.
Also, there is a difference between wearing religion on your sleeve, which is a protected first amendment right, and seeking to establish it as a system of government,
You haven't been paying attention to the Dominionists like Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, and The Family.
Would you have a problem with your local government passing a law guaranteeing there would never be "dominionist" courts running things, if only it were as a symbolic effort?
We don't need such a law. A Dominionist Court endorsed by, say, the State of North Carolina, would be illegal. Period. Full stop. No extra legislation needed.
You really need to read up on this shit. You really do.
>putting Dominionist in quotes as if Dominionism doesn't exist
You know those megachurches that preach Prosperity Gospel?
This is the best summation of Dominionism and Prosperity Gospel:
http://www.discernment-ministries.org/ChristianImperialism.htm
--
BMO
And the United States is doomed
We are, unless things drastically change in politics and the boards of corporations. This is a matter of facts on the ground. It's not open to debate. It's happening.
we should all lay down and slowly starve.
We won't have any choice if things don't change.
We have been handing technology, as a society, to the Chinese for decades now, with the delusional belief that all the high-end stuff will still happen here. I believe it started with Voc-Ed being a place to dump the "dummy" students. This is how I believe we lost the skills to make anything here - that we systematically decided that making anything = sweatshop and if you were smart, you didn't go into manufacturing, ever. We denigrated actual work for decades and anyone who worked in a factory making anything was therefore just some dumb monkey. And you can replace monkeys on one side of the planet with monkeys from another side. That's the thinking that got us here.^1
But transferring the manufacturing base over to China makes it inconvenient for the engineering and software to happen here, so guess where it's going to move.
Go ahead, guess.
Engineers and scientists are already moving to Shanghai.
Unless we stop the haemorrhaging and start building up our own manufacturing base here encouraging students to go into STEM without learning Chinese is a joke and a half.
But I don't see that happening any time soon.
--
BMO
Postscript: I was looking at a Popular Mechanics from the 1950s and there was articles that went on for pages on how to use a shaper and a tip on how to turn a taper using ball bearings instead of ordinary conical centers , and it was just *there* as if machining was a skill that many people had. You don't publish an article in a popular magazine where you deliberate write over the heads over your readers or write something they don't care about. It was expected that the readers of the 1954 Popular Mechanics^2 would find this stuff applicable. Today you would *never* find such an article in a mainstream magazine such as that.
Footnotes:
1. The war on work: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
The first half goes on about castrating sheep. But that's the set-up for the second half, so watch the whole thing.
2. http://books.google.com/books?id=Nt8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA126&dq=1954%20Popular%20Mechanics&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=true
Just because the hardware's made in China (we'll see how long that lasts, but that's another issue) doesn't mean the software won't be
Fixed.
Manufacturing has headed to China. And engineering has been moving with it. Somehow the software won't?
You're delusional and whistling by the graveyard.
--
BMO
Americans who seek to establish anti-Shariah legislation are idiots.
Fixed.
The first amendment requires that the government not endorse a religion. This includes Islam too. Officially sanctioned Sharia courts would be therefore per-se illegal. We don't need more legislation, it's already done.
The only people who complain about Sharia courts in the US are politicians trying to ingratiate themselves with their "base."
All the while it's just fine with the RWNJs that Republicans wear their religion on their sleeves already.
The amount of doublethink required to hold both Islam as a threat and Christian Republican Dominionists as *not* a threat hurts my head.
--
BMO
Sharia law outside of the US is not a threat to freedom inside the US.
Politicians inside the US buying into the Christian equivalent of Sharia (Santorum, et al), however, *are* a threat to freedom inside the US.
Priorities.
Get some, asshole.
--
BMO
>upset about Sharia and consider it a threat
I don't see why you Christfags don't get all bent out of shape about Dominionism and Prosperity Gospel and all the other shit the Evangelicals seem to keep trying to shove down everyone's throats.
Fuckhead.
--
BMO
Manually extracting files and putting them in /home/anonymous_coward/bin is not the same as installing software system-wide.
If you install it to your home directory, it's not available to other users unless you recursively chmod your home directory to 755. But this defeats your own privacy, and plays hell with paths for other people when they want to actually use a program you have installed into your own account. Entirely removing the ability to install software system-wide on a computer you own would only introduce chaos and pain for no reason whatsoever.
Installing software to your own directory is only useful when you, yourself, *never* have admin privileges on a machine, like on my account on a computer across town. But then I just add my own /home/bmo/bin to the path and I'm done with it. I do this for my own builds of irssi, nmap, etc., which are not otherwise available. But I don't go crawling other users' accounts for software and I don't have a crazy path statement.
--
BMO
P.S. Yes, I know nmap requires admin privs for certain modes, but I only use it for external scanning of my own systems. It's good to have a computer outside your own network that can look at what you have exposed to the public. I highly recommend doing this.
P.P.S. Whatever your "uptime" for never going sudo on an account is, I have you beat, since the account I have on entropy was created sometime last century. So long ago that entropy has been two machines so far (I have the old one, a Sun, sitting right here which I bought from Daver for nostalgia reasons).
Baseball probably has more nerd fans than any other American sport
Stephen Jay Gould has written more on baseball than any other palaeontologist alive or dead. You should read his essay on the demise of the .400 hitter.
--
BMO
You don't understand sudo.
--
BMO
This, after the US has slapped a 31 percent import tariff on photovoltaic cells from China, which happened just the other day.
The protests from the PRC came in yesterday.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303360504577411693605403040.html
My take on it is that China has been dumping and this protesting is pro-forma but it sucks if you're an end-user of pv cells.
--
BMO
sudo-like interface for running things that require elevated permissions
The reason for UAC was not to recreate sudo. UAC is, and was, exceptionally intrusive for one purpose only: to create negative feedback to developers who insisted on using Admin permission for everything. Even some games required Admin access under XP, for example.
Microsoft had finally given consumers a multi-user OS in XP and developers were insisting on defeating the benefits of multi-user, making limited user accounts especially painful.
Thus UAC. If your program was bringing up UAC for every stupid thing, then you were doing it wrong.
Now, most programs need to bring up Admin privs for installation and that's the last you see of UAC if you are not doing admin-specific tasks.
It annoyed the piss out of end users when UAC first showed up and everyone in the press misunderstood its purpose. UAC was considered a black mark against Vista. But you have to ask, how else was Microsoft going to force developers into obeying the practices everyone else did on other multi-user OSes?
I am a Unix and Linux guy, but I have to give credit to Microsoft for doing it right for once.
--
BMO
>modded offtopic
Explain this, motherfuckers.
I see the Windows Shills have started using their mod points.
Mod this one down too, guys.
--
BMO
gesturing in front of it
In whatever case, there will be rude gesticulation.
--
BMO
This isn't even news for nerds. Nerds have already been using the Developer and Consumer Previews and await the first beta, like me.
Flattening of window widgets is not news. It's not even a story.
And a link to the MSDN blog that discusses the entire history of Windows from 1.0 to 8 to justify the shenanigans in 8? Come the hell on. The Windows "defenders" here already do that in the comments. I can't even imagine the flood of grievances filed with the MWSU.
The story is Metro. The story is how maddening Metro is going to be to the vast majority of desktop users when you can't turn it off. The story is about how Microsoft thinks they've found the holy grail of a "one interface for all devices" when it's self-delusion, again. The story is how you and I and every other nerd on the planet is going to have to answer dumb questions about Metro just to be polite. Repeatedly. Until Windows 9.
--
BMO
The thing about satire is that if you are too close to what you are satirizing, you may run afoul of Poe's Law.
What you did was true to the Nathan Poe's original version of his law.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law
--
BMO
Your first post in this thread was reminiscent of Sarah Palin ranting about fruit fly studies. In fact, the post you made is typical of the ignorati that infest American politics and rather dumb individuals everywhere.
Your trying to cover up for it by saying it's a joke doesn't take away from the fact it wasn't funny in the first place, or from the fact that it reeked of deliberate ignorance as seen every goddamned day on Fox and other Rupert Murdoch properties.
--
BMO
Hendersj, realising he said something really dumb, tries to pull his fat out of the fire but burns his fingers, sets the sleeve of his Neanderthal rabbit-fur-coat alight, starts screaming, and then rolls around on the ground trying to put out the signs that he indeed did do something dumb.
And then says "I meant to do that."
--
BMO
I'd have to say that if this criteria is for a "supernova candidate", the nearest supernova candidate to us would be THE SUN. Because it's bound to go supernova one day,
And you would be completely wrong in all respects.
The size of the Sun makes it impossible to become a supernova. It will grow to a red giant, throw off gas, and shrink to a white dwarf. There will be no supernova.
The next nearest supernova candidate would be proxima centauri.
No, you would be wrong *again* since none of the Centauri stars are large enough to become supernovae and none show any sign in the distant future of either colliding or accreting matter from one other to make a type 1a supernova.
Damn, I should've been an astronomer - if this is all it takes to "make news".
The dumbth. You have it.
--
BMO